Once upon a time, the PFA Awards were the undisputed measure of a season’s most valuable players. Voted for by the Professionals themselves, the response to their announcement was one of awed hush and consent – how could mere onlookers presume to know better than those involved in the rough and tumble of the actual sport? But the saccharin, sentimental and simply silly award of the 2009 Players’ Player award to Ryan Giggs changed all that. In one fell swoop, footballers were shown to be as susceptible to a bit of old fashioned press lobbying as the rest of us….
All posts tagged Sheffield Wednesday
Loyalty in Short Supply at Hillsborough
Ahead of journeying up to Spotland, Wednesday supporter John Leigh tries to come to terms with Gary Megson’s extraordinary sacking at Hillsborough. Not since Christmas Eve, 1973, the day on which former goalscoring legend Derek Dooley received the sack, can there have been a more ill-timed expulsion from Hillsborough. Gary Megson, like Dooley and, subsequently, Howard Wilkinson, John Eustace and Chris Turner, was a Wednesday player. And if neither of his two stints at the club marked him out as a folk hero like Dooley, he was, unlike Wilkinson, a highly effective, respected footballer. Moreover, his father, Don, captained the…
The Monday Profile: Ben Marshall
Flash back to the 31st of January 2010 – shot shy Carlisle United are desperate for an experienced front man to come in to help out the earnest pairing of Scott Dobie and Joe Anyinsah, the then still errant, gangling giraffe Gary Madine and the bunged-up blunderbuss Richard Offiong. By mid-morning the signing of a striker had been announced, in the form of 18 year old Stoke City man Ben Marshall, a youngster who’d had earlier spells with a pair of League Two Towns – Northampton and Cheltenham. To say the Cumbrian faithful were unimpressed would be to understate it….
Hopeless Football League Teams 4: Sheffield Wednesday, 2002-3
Given the uncanny coincidence that artworks with the same title scooped the NME Album of the Year and Palme d’Or Awards in 2003, it’s appropriate that one of the blogosphere’s finest polymath’s should contribute the fourth in our fledgling series of hopeless teams. For Chris Ledger is none other than the brains behind Obscure Music and Football, a site with a sometimes unhealthy predilection for Salad (the band that is), the musical career of one Paul ‘Gazza’ Gascoigne and the witticisms of everyone’s favourite xenophobe, Steve Claridge. Here, Chris looks back on one particularly rotten Sheffield Wednesday shower and Lord knows he had…
Book Review: Confessions of a Football Reporter
Confessions of a Football Reporter …another Biggs at Large By Alan Biggs, Published by Vertical Editions, August 2011, £12.99, ISBN: 9781904091516 In the second of three book reviews we should be publishing this week, we welcome back Ian Rands of A United View on Football. Ian was lucky enough recently to secure an interview with football journalist Alan Biggs – the BBC’s go-to guy for South Yorkshire football for many years. From my perspective, Biggs is comparable with the likes of Jimmy Armfield as a purveyor of a brand of warm spirited, genuinely interested reportage – a tradition that seems to be slowly in decline in the…
James: Are the wealthy middle classes really the ones to back a football team...
Lanterne Rouge: Garath McCleary on signing for Reading today:
"It's amazing to be a...
Lloyd: On the Oxford / Reading thing, Lanterne, you write that "there is no c...
Ben: Yes, it does loom a bit, doesn't it? Moxey's comments on the ground re...
