Search: ' Club World Cup'

Rob Bradley recently made an alarming discovery – he no longer hates referees and even admires one in particular

Life is all about change. You go to school, then you work, you have kids, you get old. You have different hair styles and then you go bald. As the years go by you lose enthusiasm for things that you used to enjoy. Like Frank Skinner or keeping fit. But some things never ever change. At least you think they don’t. I’ve always hated referees. When I played Sunday League football I got sent off by them. I even got sent off for ranting at one and I was running the line. You hate them when you go to watch the club you support. It’s traditional.

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In an effort to control crowd trouble the Argentine authorities have embarked on a unique experiment. Sam Kelly explains

At this summer’s World Cup, police forces in Johannesburg and Polokwane will be more sorely tested than most should Argentine plans to mobilise supporters behind the national team go ahead. In other countries, fan groups find out which tickets they’ve secured and governments sift databases to ensure those with records of violence can’t travel. In Argentina, meanwhile, a non-governmental organisation has been talking to some of the country’s most prominent barra bravas in a bid to eliminate violence from domestic football. Their masterplan? In essence, to help the best-behaved hooligans secure funding to travel to South Africa.

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Jonathan Wilson revisits a former footballing preoccupation and laments the loss of a once unique part of any ground

Reading fans’ accounts of their first visit to a stadium, it seems most are struck by two things: the pure greenness of the pitch (which seems odd given how ungrassy most pitches of two or more decades ago look by comparison with modern football) and the intensity of the noise.

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A home game against the reigning champions is often a foregone conclusion. On this occasion things went very differently as Neil Hurden saw the hosts comfortably dominate their out of form visitors

It’s the Saturday before Christmas, it’s uncharitably cold and my mind is dis­orientated by mixed signals. Only three days before, Fulham performed heroics in the St Jakob stadium in Basel, hanging on to win 3-2 and to secure a last 32 draw against UEFA Cup holders Shakhtar Donetsk in the Europa League, the financially poor but spiritually enriched man’s Champions League.

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For Notts County fans the last few months have been like no other. Julian McDougall tries to keep up with things

In the second half of 2009 ordinary long-standing Notts County fans were subjected to a series of psycho-political experiments. Novelists from Charles Dickens to Margaret Atwood have stretched social reality to develop extreme scenarios which allow readers to explore their anxieties about the world – blending utopia and dystopia to produce complexity which reflects the ambiguous nature of human thought. But if a writer had made up events at Meadow Lane this season, their publisher would likely reject it as “too far-fetched”. Sven-Göran Eriksson arrives, Kasper Schmeichel signs, Sol Campbell comes, rumours link us to David Beckham, Roberto Carlos, Roberto Mancini and Kevin Keegan. Sol goes. The Guardian print allegations of corruption on a daily basis. Bust before bloody Christmas.

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