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The internet has its critics, but after using it to spend his money on football games to make up for his deprived childhood, Harry Pearson  certainly isn’t one of them

My childhood contact with football board games was confined to gazing wistfully at the adverts in Jimmy Hill’s Football Weekly. They promised so much delight. Wembley was based on “The English Football Association Challenge Cup Competition” and boasted “the most gripping features and exciting uncertainties” recreated “with vivid and amazing fidelity”. Soc­cerama, meanwhile was thrillingly endorsed by Eng­land World Cup star Alan Ball.

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Ian Plenderleith finds artists from Norway and Switzerland exploring the meaning and limits of the game (and the language), while Englishmen past and present have captured the game’s historic vistas

The history of football and art is littered with badly proportioned pencil drawings, misty-edged portraits and, on the pitch, mostly miscued overhead kicks that end up leaving their artists flat on the canvas. Once in a while, though, those overhead shots hit the target and we celebrate the beauty, just as the occasional non-playing artist captures some­thing of the game’s elusive but undeniable aesthetic side.

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Somehow football and rap have rarely hit it off, in spite of some peciliar parallels in the fashion stakes. Al Needham works hard to find what references there are to the game

First, a word of reassurance: just because footballers seem to be getting into hip-hop a good 15 years after everyone else did does not compromise in any way the well loved cliche about footballers having bland and rubbishy musical taste. Ever since hip-hop overtook country and rock to become the most lucrative genre of music in America, it has been successfully defanged of its subversive elements, until what Chuck D of Public Enemy called “the Black CNN” is now some bloke prattling on about what he bought the other day, who he’d like to shoot and generally how ace he is. Again. For 50 Cent, Eminem and Jay-Z, read “George Benson, Shakatak and Steak and Chips”.

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The eternally controversial former Rangers goalkeeper took the high road to Elgin in the autumn – but, as Dan Brennan relates, the low road would have led, amazingly, to Brazil

For all its merits, Elgin is not Rio. Ask Andy Goram. This summer, the 39-year-old former Rangers goal­keeper appeared close to an improbable move to Brazilian top-flight side Botafogo, after a chance encounter with the club’s representatives in Selkirk, where he was organising a six-a-side tournament.

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Footballers’ autographs are big business these days. Al Needham went to an exhibition at the NEC to snub Jimmy Greaves and see what an old Tony Woodcock would be worth

The first autograph I ever got was a signed photo of Tony Woodcock kneeling behind the League Cup, in exchange for my Dad moving house for him. I would dig it out now, but I chucked it away when he was transferred to Cologne. I filled up assorted notebooks with autographs purloined at the Nottingham Forest training ground and outside dressing rooms after matches. Brian Clough always wrote “Be good” after his name, Martin O’Neill always had a face like a smacked arse when he did his and John Robertson always said: “Jesus, not you again.”

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