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A team on the slide with a glorious football past visits a city with a glorious maritime past whose club are on the up – at least until the 77th minute, as Cameron Carter describes

The six stages of grief following a home defeat are well known: shock, disbelief, anger, homicidal anger, blame, and resignation while watching Cas­ualty. Plymouth fans should never have had to go through these on this weekend, but in the last 20 min­utes Wolves snatched this game from them like the Childcatcher figure they had come to represent during the course of 90 minutes.

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Dear WSC
I’m sure this is very old hat and we’re just being ignorant, but in a recent pub conversation I asked a Brighton fan which team Charlie Oatway was named after. He had no idea. Oatway does indeed have 11 first names. It’s presumably a 1970s outfit, but we couldn’t get past the goalie, Ant­hony. The rest is Philip David Terry Frank Donald Stanley Gerry Gordon Stephen James Oatway. Can anyone help?
Jeff Moffat, London NW6

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Sunday 1 Mark Palios resigns, saying: “My action is essential to enable the Football Association to begin to return to normality.” Sven gossip-broker Colin Gibson is also reported to have offered to quit. At this rate Tord Grip will soon be answering the phones.

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With Atlético Madrid plumbing new depths of design disaster, David Wangerin traces the history of kit advertising from Kettering Tyres to Spiderman 2 and wonders if club identity has been lost along the way

Look at any football photograph from the mid-Seventies. The glue-pot pitch, the plain white ball and the wild sideburns of some of the players certainly call to mind an almost primitive era, as does the enor­mous terrace of fans crammed into the background. Yet one anachronism in particular reveals just how the visual elements of British football have changed: the remarkable austerity of the playing strips. There are no manufacturer trademarks and no league logos or appeals for fair play on the sleeves. Most conspicuously of all, nothing is displayed across the chest. It’s undeniably an outdated image, yet one that happily draws the eye closer to the tiny club crest, instead of toward some gargantuan commercial mes­sage. An age of marketing innocence, some will bewail, but one certainly to be admired for its aesthetic appeal, to say nothing of its integrity.

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Dear WSC
In his article Mind the Gap (WSC 209), which celebrated a rise in attendances in what used to be Division Two, Ed Park­inson did confess that as a fan of promoted Hartlepool he might be viewing the league with rose-tinted spectacles. Having read the article, I feel he must have gone the whole hog and had a full rose-tinted laser eye operation. Having witnessed many games in this division last season and having seen all the teams play at least once, I can honestly say that the standard of football nev­er exceeded mediocre. Plymouth were the only good footballing side and they didn’t look anywhere near as good once Paul Sturrock swapped addresses on the south coast. As well as attributing the rise in attendances to what he considered to be “fine football”, Ed also noted that the struggles of “a few self-styled big clubs” such as Sheffield Wednesday provided pleasure for many. However, average attendances in Division Two were only up 6.5 per cent on the previous year and, with an average home attendance of 22,000 (almost twice that of any other team in the Div­ision and four times more than Hart­lepool), is it not more likely that it was  the presence of “self-styled big club” Sheffield Wednesday that caused the upsurge in attendances rather than the alleged quality of the football?
Stuart Thorpe, via email 

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