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Chaos and farce reign in Scotland, where the Premier League's anti-groundsharing stance has been underminded from within. Chris Fyfe makes some sense of it all

That Partick Thistle are bottom of the Scottish Premier League this season is primarily due to having a very poor manager for the first 14 games. By the time Gerry Collins was shown the door the struggling Glasgow club had two points and were destined for bottom spot. But life in the SPL is never simple. Thistle will not know if they are relegated until May 30. This is the deadline set by the SPL to the two aspiring First Division clubs (Clyde and Inverness Caledonian Thistle) and also Falkirk to find a ground to share that has the 10,000 seats required for promotion.

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Is ITV's former pundit an idiot, a racist, or both? Al Needham wonders whether that is what matters most about a pundit's fall from grace, or whether his fate tells us how far we have come and how far we have to go

In the end, after all the finger-pointing, hair-shirt wearing, editorials and think-pieces, the only truly shocking thing about what Ron Atkinson said was that, for pretty much the first time in his public life, he came out with a phrase that came frighteningly close to plain English. He didn’t describe Marcel Desailly as “totally nigmatic with his workrate, to be enocular”. He refrained from mentioning that the Chelsea defender had been “giving it big lips all game”. He didn’t even advocate giving minorities the full gun, or bunging them in the mixer.

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The recent racism row between Millwall and Burnley overlooked the work both clubs do to improve community relations. Glen Poole reports from the Lancashire town on their current equality projects

What are Burnley doing to tackle racism? Alastair Camp­bell sparked a major incident in March when he accused Millwall fans of racism towards Burnley players in his Times column. Stan Ternent, Theo Paphitis and even former Radio Four bad-boy Rod Liddle waded into the fight. But Campbell – a lifelong Burnley fan – had raised an important point that was lost amid the sound of handbags clashing. It isn’t just clubs that have to take responsibility for the problem, but also fans and communities. The issue of racism beyond the terraces is particularly pertinent in Burnley, where the disturbances of 2001 and the subsequent BNP electoral gains have placed the town in the media spotlight. 

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When two rivals come together to build a new stadium, the potential for disaster is huge – as Bayern Munich and Munich 1860 are finding out, as Mathias Kowoll reports

On March 9, 2004, more than 50 men in suits and uniforms entered TSV 1860 Munich’s headquarters. “I first thought they were from a fan club and wanted some autographs,” said the receptionist. The fan club turned out to be a delegation from the prosecutor and the police, who had come to confiscate files and arrest club president Karl-Heinz Wildmoser and his son.

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The once vibrant area of football comic publishing was at death's door through failing to keep up with the times, until Stuart Green's Glory Glory began to rival the long-serving Roy of the Rovers in the early Nineties. Frank Plowright discovers a new title in the football comic  world

I once helped produce a football comic. It was the early 1990s and, as co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Kevin Eastman’s income was stratospheric. A lifelong comic fan, he set up Tundra Publishing to finance and publish projects comic writers and artists had always wanted to produce, but which no established company would take on. It would later turn out that, in most cases, there were very good reasons.

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