There are smaller counties which support league football – so what has gone wrong in Worcestershire? Frank Heaven explains. It is a dubious honour. After Kidderminster Harriers narrowly missed out on the Conference play-offs this season, Worcestershire remains the largest county in England without a Football League club. Shropshire and Cumbria both have smaller populations, but they are obviously doing something right that Worcestershire is not. Harriers did enjoy a brief spell in the then Third Division from 2000 to 2005, and look the likeliest team in the county to win promotion to the league in the near future. But…
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Book Review: Where’s your Caravan?
Where’s your Caravan? By Chris Hargreaves, Published by The Friday Project, August 2011, £8.99, ISBN: 9780007364145 What next for a lower league footballer upon retirement? A simple enough premise, but too few biographies have tackled the theme with any distinction, so Chris Hargreaves’ recent release, which engages throughout with the realities and emotions of signing off from one’s playing days, is a welcome addition. An unravelling set of new challenges, the ennui and the odd bout of despair rub shoulders with feelings of regret and nostalgia here, and Hargreaves does well to convey all of this with relative precision. As one might expect…
Hopeless Football League Teams 1: West Bromwich Albion, 1990-91
Regular readers will know our Great Teams series, which recently clocked up a quarter-century of posts with this piece on Swansea’s 1978-79 vintage. Here, our Baggies correspondent Frank Heaven takes a slightly different tack, picking at an old wound in the shape of Albion’s Division Three bound plonk from 1990-91. The first in a new “Hopeless” series, we’ll look to follow this up with similar contributions in the very near future. Buzaglo, Bath, and Bobby Gould. Three names that still send a shiver down the spine of West Bromwich Albion fans – two decades after the most traumatic season in…
Prat falls to rise
It’s always curious when a player once apparently utterly integral to a team becomes dispensable, particularly when it seems to happen almost overnight.Take the case of former Swansea star Darren Pratley. For the full duration of the season my club spent in the Championship, 2009/10, Pratley was magnificent – a driving, dynamic force knitting midfield to attack and carrying considerable goal threat thanks to a knack for bursting beyond his forwards into the box. His importance to Swansea was all the greater because of their preference for lining up with a lone striker. We may have reaped the rewards of…
Great Football League Teams 17: West Bromwich Albion, 2001-02
They may not have been a team for the purists. But the West Bromwich Albion of 2001/02 knew how to do drama. With only eight games of the season left, they stood 11 points behind bitter local rivals Wolverhampton Wanderers, who occupied the second automatic promotion spot – but turned things around in a barnstorming finish to the campaign. It was a wet dream for Albion fans, a nightmare for the old gold. And it was all the sweeter for being so unexpected. Context Albion at the start of the new millennium were emerging from the most traumatic decade in…
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