This week’s Video Of The Week takes us back to the race for the Second Division title from the 1978/79 season and features three matches from an episode of London Weekend Television’s “The Big Match”, presented as ever by Brian Moore. The first match is between from Selhurst Park and is between Crystal Palace and Notts County, the second match is from The Goldstone Ground and is between Brighton & Hove Albion and Blackburn Rovers (about whom Moore says, “they’ve already been relegated to the Third Division, so at least they’ll be relaxed) and the final match is from Roker Park, and is between Sunderland and Cardiff City.

Look out also for interviews with an extravagantly coiffured Terry Venables and with Alan Mullery, who looks as if he has stepped straight from the set of “The Sweeney” and, as if that isn’t enough to satiate you, the show also features LWT’s “Golden Goal of 1979″ competition, in which viewers are asked to put six of the best goals of the season in the correct order, with the prize for the winner being a trip to Munich for the European Cup final between Nottingham Forest and Malmo. Thrilling stuff.

Whilst it is normal for one or two Football League clubs to be given a bloody nose by a non-league club at some point during the early rounds of the FA Cup, predicting where this will happen is a slightly trickier business. Yesterday, ITV went with the “romance of the cup” and saw Norwich put seven goals past a Paulton Rovers side whose defence’s pre-match training didn’t appear to contain any extra “hap” sessions. In the evening, they went for Stourbridge against Walsall, only to see Walsall nick a scantly-deserved win and Oxford United against Yeovil Town, which saw Oxford win, but against the curiously unsatisfying backdrop of an impressive, all-seater stadium. One suspects that Oxford will play Yeovil in the league within two or three years, which somewhat detracted from the feeling of surprise at the result in that particular match.

The things about surprises is that, well, they are surprises. Bath City’s win away to a steadily declining Grimsby Town might have been an eyebrow-raiser, but the fact that it was taking place at Blundell Park was enough to keep the Outside Broadcast Unit away. Staines Town’s win at Shrewsbury Town was an even bigger surprise – not least because, mercifully, the travelling Staines supporters elected not to dress en masse like Ali G (although the winning goal was scored by someone called Ali C) – and these were the two matches that were pushed to the top of the bill on ITV’s (vastly improved) late night highlights show last night. This afternoon brings the second of their live matches. Northwich Victoria versus Charlton Athletic. Will Northwich do a Paulton or will they do a Staines?

Much of the answer to this question comes down to the state of the opposition, and Charlton Athletic supporters have cause to be concerned. Their team has won just one of its last six matches in League One and, while they remain in second place in the table, they are going at best sideways at the moment. Northwich, meanwhile, are deceptively placed in the the Blue Square North – without the points deduction that they suffered during the summer, they would be there or thereabouts in the promotion race, and they’re unbeaten in the league in two months. Moreover, last season they were a Blue Square Premier who, with relegation a certainty, won their last six matches in a row at the end of last season. The optimism that their supporters might have fel at the tail end of the summer has slipped away as the evenings have lengthened.

In the first half, Charlton Athletic are completely outplayed and it is somewhere between a mystery and an outrage that they are not a couple of goals behind, to the point that it is apt that ITV’s man at the match is the perennially breathless sounding Peter Drury. Northwich start agriculturally, throwing the goal forward towards their strikers, who buzz around the Charlton central defenders like hyperactive greenfly. This direct approach seems to unsettle Charlton, and Northwich start to control the game. If they have spotted a weakness in the Charlton defensive line, it may be goalkeeper Darren Randolph, who is their third choice and is making his debut for the club, but Randolph ends up being their first half saviour, making two brilliant saves. The nearest that they come, however, is a goalmouth scramble that ends up looking like a pinball game designed by an inhabitant from a lunatic asylum and requires Christian Dailly to block the ball on the line three or four times before Randolph falls on the ball like a soldier smothering a bomb.

The second half begins much as the first half ended, with Charlton continually fighting off a constant stream of  aerial bombardment. By now, Randolph is getting better protection from his defenders and there are slim pickings for the Northwich strikers, but it is so constant that Charlton can, for the first twenty minutes of the half, barely get the ball out of their own third of the pitch, but then the balance of power slowly starts to shift as Charlton’s superior fitness levels start to manifest themselves. An outstanding dedensive block on the edge of the penalty area prevents thm from taking the lead. It’s as close as they have managed all match, though, which says a lot about the way that Northwich have managed to tame their opponents. When Northwich do get into possession they frequently find themselves running down blind alleys and losing possession. Still, though, that long ball into the penalty area looks dangerous.

Then, with nine minutes to play, the breakthrough. A looping header through from the halfway line catches the Charlton defence cold. Randolph, so assertive in the first half, hesitates as Wayne Riley bears down on him and the eighteen year old striker (who has only been on the pitch for six minutes) toe pokes the ball under him. The ball rolls over the line agonisingly over the line, but it makes it in the end and Northwich have the lead. Three minutes later, any thoughts of running down the clock are put momentarily on hold as Bailey’s header loops over Randolph and is cleared off the line by Sam Sodje. Charlton’s response is utterly toothless. They switch tactics out of desperation and start throwing the ball forward but Northwich tidy it up with ease every time. Deep into injury time, there are a tense thirty seconds as Charlton with a free-kick on the edge of the penalty area, but the ball is charged down by the wall and with that the match is over. Northwich Victoria have beaten Charlton Athletic.

The better team on the day won. Of that, there is no question. The issue of how and why Charlton have fallen so far and so quickly is one for another day, but there is an important point to be made about this result which was only lightly touched upon by ITV. Last season, Northwich were locked out of their stadium by a vindictive owner, who referred to the ground as his “pension fund”, locked the gates and stripped it of the fixtures and fittings. They came perilously close to being expelled from the Football Conference then, and they did again in the summer when the Football Conference’s Dennis Strudwick expelled them from the league after their relegation from the BSP, only for them to be reinstated upon appeal. They are still here, and they will play Lincoln City in Second Round of the competition. They deserve nothing less.

It seems as if there’s been an exponential increase in clubs heading for the courts over unpaid tax or VAT bills this season. The answer to the question, “Accrington Stanleee, ‘oo are dey?” was “the League Two club that owe £308,000 to HMRC” until they found salvation the other week. And it feels like every other lower league Scottish club has been up before the tax beak in recent weeks. Judging by the attitudes of some well-indebted clubs, though, you’d think their tax bill was a badge of honour, although some accountants offer a simpler explanation. “Clubs fund working capital by not paying PAYE, NI and VAT. “It’s a way of managing a club’s cash flow“ said one, when it was reported this time last year that Football League clubs owed “£50m in unpaid taxes.” One lower league club owner revealed that his accountants had said: “HMRC were effectively the club’s ‘bank’”.

Southend United have owed hundreds of thousands of pounds to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs for quite some time. And, at the time of writing, they still do. Their tax bill, back in the good old days of a couple of weeks ago when it was TWO…THIRDS…OF…A…MILLION…POUNDS, was “no cause for alarm” according to chairman Ron Martin, because “a similar situation arose this time last year, necessitating a payment of £660,000 in July 2008”. Well, outside the mind of Ron Martin, it is a cause for alarm, not least since the tax debt is now a reported TWO…POINT…ONE….THREE…FIVE…MILLION…POUNDS. The Shrimpers are due in court on November 9th to confirm that the money was paid by November 6th. Southend had promised to pay it by then, five minutes before a court hearing on November 4th. This hearing had been delayed a week from HMRC’s original 28th October deadline for the payment of £690,000 – 91 days on from June 12th, when HMRC issued a winding-up petition against the club.

The origins of the tale go back further, of course. The panacea for their ills has for a decade been a move to a new stadium at ‘Fossetts Farm’ in North Southend. Martin, and his property development company Martin Dawn PLC, have been at the forefront of a wearying battle for planning permission, which was a complex matter even before Labour minister John Prescott was asked to voice his opinion in his famously destructive syntax. An accurate assessment of the Shrimpers’ problems might be: “…riddled with debt (some say in the region of £8m)… it was hoped that a new stadium at Fossetts Farm would have meant cash injections would not be required by now… however, Fossetts Farm has dragged on so long”. This was written on the ‘Clubs in Crisis’ website – in 2003.

Yet while Martin has continually punted the “no need for alarm” line – plus many other strange lines in his regular statements to the club’s web-site, from a parallel universe. These seem to have met with a collective “oh, that’s alright then” from Shrimpers’ fans right up until the proverbial last minute, when £690,000 became £2.135m. June 12th, the day of HMRC’s original winding-up petition, was the day the Football League amended their rules to allow clubs certain leeway over tax debts. These rules effectively gave Southend their 91 days to pay. Martin said this was “HMRC’s right hand not knowing what its left hand was doing…its timing could not have been more perverse.” But the real perversity was Martin’s failure to explain why the club were so lax with their tax in the first place.

He also cited HMRC’s “sudden change of attitude to Southend.” It was as if the matter was somehow HMRC’s fault, Martin neglecting to mention that HMRC’s previous “attitude” had failed to get Southend to cough up. By the time the season started, fans’ attention was centred on more team-related affairs. But financial issues began to infiltrate these too. In August popular striker Andy Revell was shipped out on-loan to Swindon “with a view to a permanent move in January”.  Revell’s spell at Southend was interrupted by a broken leg and only produced four goals in 28 games. Yet he was valued highly by fans who were outraged by Chief Executive Geoffrey King’s terse comments: “He was signed to deliver. But he hasn’t. That is why he is moving on”. Revell had a different perspective: “I was told I had to leave for financial reasons. People can read into that what they like.” People did. And people read “financial crisis.”

While Southend claimed they were telling Revell he was to be loaned out for matchday experience after his injury, Revell was telling the Southend Echo that he was looking forward to “more appearances” in a Southend shirt. What had Martin said about left and right hands? Then came revelations that former Shrimpers’ stalwart Spencer Prior was awaiting contractually agreed benefit payments from the club, including receipts from his May benefit match, a portion of which was due to a local children’s hospice. Prior told the Echo, “It’s upsetting that I’ve had to speak out…but this is money that is owed and it’s worrying that they haven’t been able to pay it yet.” This also pointed to “financial crisis.” But Martin pointed to “media conspiracy.” He accused the Echo of: “Selected quotes – nearly always out of context – to sell more papers…(they) seem intent on destruction…glorifying everything into bad news…living off the club, while insidiously undermining everything about it…I am told (editor) Martin McNeil is a Colchester fan…” and so on…and on, and he criticised their “low moral tactics” over the hospice. “Suggesting it is the club’s responsibility to pay (them) is outrageous,” he concluded.

However, his outrage manifested itself in the form of a £10,000 cheque to the hospice, an admission of that responsibility which Martin tried to disguise as maintaining the club’s fantastic name for community and charity work”. He labelled Prior’s “duet” with the Echo as “a calamity in misrepresentation.” But Prior was right. The club was contractually obliged to pay him, and they hadn’t – or couldn’t. When asked by Echo journalist Chris Phillips why Prior hadn’t been paid, King replied: “Spencer turned up not even dressed for the match, five minutes before kick-off.” “But that doesn’t explain why he hasn’t been paid,” noted Phillips, correctly.

This forced King to admit that payment was a contractual obligation – contradicting Martin, who claimed the contract had expired and the match only happened “because we are honest, morally correct individuals”. At the club’s AGM in early September, Martin was asked directly whether the funds to pay HMRC were in place, and replied “no” but he was confident that they would be. By the time the payment was due, only the wording had changed. “The building blocks are in place to enable the indebtedness to be met” he said, in another club web-site statement from the outer limits. On October 26th, two days before their deadline, HMRC decided that they’d have a better chance of getting their money by forcing Southend into administration, and this court hearing was set for November 4th.

Rather than view this as an extra week to find the cash, Martin lambasted HMRC’s “Machiavellian” strategy and blamed the banking crisis, stopping only just short of citing the postal strike as well. HMRC’s “hostile” action was “unwelcome and destructive” and “done with deliberate intent to burden the club still further.” Southend’s “lawyers and barristers” said that “the steps taken by HMRC have never been seen before”. What Martin somehow overlooked was that HMRC were now after £2.135m, not £690,000. And with “building blocks” not enough, a consortium of ten local businessmen, reportedly worth £150m between them, offered to buy the club, take on the debt and replace Martin as chairman.

This shot at salvation, which emerged two days before the new hearing, was rejected by Southend’s directors because “such a transaction could not be structured in the time available (and) our information is that the proposed structure would still result in a ten-point deduction” for entering administration. They added “the club (should) be 100% focused on the other alternatives already being pursued.” The “building blocks,” presumably. Five minutes before the delayed High Court hearing, the club said they’d have the money by Friday 6th. HMRC accepted this and the hearing was adjourned until Monday 9th, “by which time it would be known if the sum had been paid in full”.

And so we wait. Martin seems determined to hang on to the club at almost all costs. The “beneficial owners of the Fossett Farm development are me and my family,” he had said, and he isn’t about to give up those benefits, but after months of misinformation or no information at all, fans are left frustrated. And probably by the time you read this, Southend will be in administration, or under new ownership…or Martin will have finally paid the club’s taxes. Whatever the outcome, Southend are yet another example of the financial mismanagement infesting the game, and more clubs will surely have their day in court, sooner rather than later.

We’ll be back a little later on today with a report on the match between Paulton Rovers and Norwich City. In the meantime, however, The First Round of The FA Cup started yesterday evening with three matches. The remainder, of course, are to be played over the next three days. One of the traditions of The FA Cup is the press sending one of their hacks – who is probably none too happy at not being to assigned to a Premier League match – to write a few words about the smaller clubs that are taking their spot in the limelight. Obviously it is highly time-consuming to have to trawl through in search all of these articles, so we thought that it would be a good idea to bring together what everyone else is saying about it.

The Guardian and The Independent have both gone with the “Go West” option, and have reports from Paulton ahead of their match against Norwich City. The Sun has a round-up of the weekend’s matches, but leads with Paul Ince’s Franchise and their match against Macclesfield Town, the club he left for them. Ah, the romance of the cup. There’s better stuff in The Daily Mail, of all places, with a preview of AFC Wimbledon’s trip to Millwall on Monday night and a lengthy interview with their manager Terry Brown, and The Daily Star’s piece about the match between Wealdstone and Rotherham United doesn’t carry much detail, choosing to focus instead on the part-time status of the club.

The pick of a varied bunch, however, comes from The Times, who have selected the match between AFC Telford United and Lincoln City. Whilst the Wimbledon story has been told elsewhere many times before, the success of the supporters trust at Telford after the club went into liquidation in 2004 has been rather overlooked in the media, a success that is best summed up by their crowds – an average of over 1,600 in the Blue Square North last season, figures which demonstrate the solid links that the club has built with its local community. Could there be any truer statement at this point in time than the closing comment made by their chair, Lee Carter? “Our ethos is to live off what we generate. Directors are custodians of a football club. We’ve got to make sure there’s a thriving football club to pass on to the next generation”. The Times also features reports from Stourbridge (who have a derby match against Walsall) and Wealdstone, picking up on another story for our times – the club’s almost twenty year long search for a home of their own, which finally ended last year.

Elsewhere in the media, the interest is more qualified, although the ITV Football site has a well-written preview of all of the matches and the BBC’s coverage is, as one would expect, extensive, with reports from Stourbridge, Tooting & Mitcham United (who travel to play Stockport County) and Gateshead, who entertain Brentford. There are plenty of other reports on the BBC site, which will also be normally be the first port of call for most people that are unable to get to a match this afternoon but are still looking for the latest scores. The less said about the two page long Sky Sports preview, the better. Finally, the When Saturday Comes website features an impassioned eulogy to the early stages of the competition from a supporter of Walsall, one of the numerous clubs that could go from being “giants” to slain to being “minnows”, out to take a scalp in the space of just two matches.

Twice a year, Phil Gartside lays bare his most inner fears. Bolton Wanderers may some day be relegated from the Premier League, and Phil doesn’t like the idea of that. He is scared that they will relegated and that they won’t be prepared for life back in the Footbal League. He’s right to be. That Bolton haven’t been relegated since they last returned to the top table in 2001 is one of the more surprising statistics of the last ten years. Of course, Phil isn’t so stupid to turn around and say, “Let’s stop relegation from the Premier League and then we can keep it all for ourselves”. He knows that he will be shot down in flames for saying that.

So, what he does is this: he makes his plans, brings them to the Premier League and they get shot down in flames. He then goes back to the drawing board, makes minor adjustments to them, and brings them back to the Premier League again. Twice a year, as regular as clockwork. He did it in October 2008, when his idea was to have two Premier League divisions of eighteen clubs with no promotion or relegation. He returned in April 2009 with, umm, exactly the same idea except with added Old Firm sectarianism. And now, in November 2009, he’s back again with the same idea again, only this time there’s some garbage about allowing promotion and relegation through a “size and finance threshold”.

Let’s tackle the question of Celtic and Rangers first. Whatever they may or may not have done to themselves financially over the last few years is down to them to sort out, and them alone. If they wish to make the football more competitive at home (which may give them both a chance of not crashing in Europe as wretchedly as they both are at the moment), they should give back some of the enormous slice of the money that goes into Scottish football to the other clubs. If they don’t like that… well, that’s life. Quite why two clubs in England in every division that have been playing in the this system for decades (in the case of many, for over a century) should be shunted down to make way for them still hasn’t been satisfactorily answered apart from some vague nonsense about “excitement” and “glamour”.

Here’s the thing. Most English football supporters don’t give a tu’penny damn about Celtic or Rangers. If you say to them, “Wouldn’t have been pretty cool if Celtic and Rangers, with their 50,000 crowds and their big derby match, were in English football?”, they might shrug and say, “I guess so”, but there are no major protests going on down here to get them invited to join the English leagues. There hasn’t been any specific research on the subject, the it is likely that the opinion of most peopple would be to say, “Okay, if they’re desperate to, they can join, but they can start in Division Two of The Northern League and work their way up like anyone else would bloody well have to”. And that’s without taking into account the potentially perilous affect that them moving into English football for the future of seperate English, Scottish, Northern Irish and Welsh teams.

Then we come to Gartside’s fresh, new innovation. Teams should be allowed into the Premier League 2 if they meet certain criteria. The thing about this fresh, new innovation is that it has already existed for over 120 years. It’s called promotion and relegation, and it is determined on the basis of whether teams deserve it it because of their performances on the pitch. Not the size of their crowds. Not how big their turnovers are (because if that is anything to do with it, they’re going to need to relegated the likes of Hull City and Portsmouth to the regional divisions and promote, say AFC Wimbledon and FC United of Manchester straight away – not, it hardly needs to be added, that FCUM would accept such a invitation). If that’s what he wants, we may as well just do away with the football altogether, sit two accountants down in the centre circle and have them calculate an algorhythm based on annual turrnover and crowd size, and award three points to “the biggest”.

Promotion and relegation, however, aren’t really issues that bother Gartside that much because we already know that he doesn’t want them there. It’s a sweetener – a sop because he has already been told that this plan won’t fly unless it contains some sort of concession. We already know that he doesn’t want it. Gartside blames the current difficulties that smaller clubs are facing on “the huge additional revenues from the Champions League and remaining clubs” and “the gap between Premier League revenues and those of the Championship”, but this is fatuous, self-serving nonsense by anybody’s stretch of the imagination. It is only fair, however, that we should explain why this is.

Gartside seems to be blaming the financial difficulties that the lower order Premier League clubs on everybody but themselves. On the one hand, the biggest clubs take too much and, on the other hand, the clubs of the Football League turn over too little. Gartside, however, runs a business (and people like him are only too pleased to tell us that “football is just a business like any other nowadays” when it suits them). Most businesses have a projected annual turnover to which they work, and upon which they base their spending for that period of time. Football is more stable than most in this respect. They know what television money they will get, and they know how many paying customers they will get every week. If they can’t budget on this basis, then tough. They deserve to go bust if their debts become unmanageable. The clubs in the Premier League could manage their budgets better.

If they are that worried about relegation, they could give, say, £10m per year to the Football League to further cushion the blow should they be relegated. There’s nothing to stop them from doing this. They won’t though, because they are greedy, avaricious beasts that just want to throw as much as money as they feel that they “deserve” at players with no consequences. They have no understanding of the concept of finite money because they have become so tied into the belief that the Premier League is a land of milk and honey that they don’t and can’t understand anything else. “Why should we rein in our spending?”, they whine, “We’re in THE PREMIER LEAGUE”, without seeming to understand that if most businesses ran themselves in the way that they did, the British economy would be in an even worse state than it already is at the moment.

The danger with these recurring schemes is that one day they will be agreed. The drawbridge will be pulled up and that will be that. And who will stand up to them? A couple of years ago, we may have expected the FA and the Football League to but, frankly, it seems as unlikely as ever that these organisations will do anything other than make soothing noises and completely kowtow to them. As this site said in April 2009:

These plans will doubtless be dusted down, maybe slightly watered down and marketed as “football’s new revolution”. You can be almost certain that this revolution, when it comes, will be of little benefit to you and we should continue to resist it where possible.

Nothing has changed much in the last seven months, apart from the layer of gloss that Phil Gartside is now putting on this nasty, wretched, selfish scheme.

Just as the Second World War had started at the beginning of the football season, it ended – in Britain, at least – at what would have been the end of it. It took, however, many years for the country to recover from the end of the fighting, so perhaps it is unsurprising that the Football League was unable to resume fixtures for the start of the 1945/46 season. The FA Cup, however, was a different matter. In the season immediately after the after the cessation of hostilities, The FA Cup was the only show in town.

Football hadn’t completely gone away during the war. The Football League became the Wartime League with regional divisions supplemented by the Wartime Cup, and carried on with teams made up of players that weren’t away fighting from 1941 until 1945. During the 1945/46 season, it changed into two regional leagues called the Football League North and the Football League South, but clubs played a reduced number of matches and wartime competitions now tend not to count amongst the official honours of the clubs that entered them. To compensate for this, the FA expanded The FA Cup, making all ties apart from the semi-finals and the final itself two-legged matches.

Up until the Third Round of the competition, matches were played on consecutive Saturdays whilst, from the Third Round on they were played on Saturday and Wednesday afternoons (there was still no floodlit football in 1946). The competition was hugely successful, with massive crowds turning out for matches, including 76,500 for a quarter-final between Aston Villa & Derby County and over 80,000 for the semi-final match between Birmingham City & Charlton Athletic at Manchester City’s Maine Road. The 1945/46 FA Cup laid the foundations for football’s post-war boom years, a period during which crowds rose to giddying levels, the size of which will never be seen again in English football.

The competition was, however, touched by tragedy in the form of the Burnden Park disaster. The quarter-final match between Bolton Wanderers and Stoke City was always likely to attract a massive crowd, but no-one was prepared for how many people turned up. The stadium’s previous biggest crowd had been 69,912 more than a decade earlier and official sources stated that the gates had been locked with 65,000 inside some twenty minutes before kick off. Others, however, have suggested that the crowd may have been as high as 90,000 – clearly an unsafe number for a stadium the size of Burnden Park.

Just before kick-off, two barriers in one corner of the ground collapsed. The crowd surged forward, and in on itself. At first, the seriousness of what had happened was not apparent and the match started, with the teams playing for twelve minutes before the match was stopped. It restarted fifteen minutes later, with the two teams playing out a 0-0 draw, meaning that Bolton, who had won the first leg 2-0, went through to the semi-finals. This, however, was almost an afterthought. Thirty-three people were killed that day, and over four hundred more were injured. The subsequent inquiry forced clubs to reduce stadium capacities and pay closer attention to the number of people entering their grounds on match days.

Bolton lost their semi-final match to Charlton Athletic, and Charlton were paired up to meet Derby County in the final at Wembley. The appearance of Derby County in The FA Cup Final was to provide a back story that would prove to be a handy failsafe for football comic writers for decades afterwards. It was rumoured that, at the end of the nineteenth cenetury, somebody at Derby County had angered a group of local gyspies by building The Baseball Ground on the site of their camp. The gypsies had, as a result of this, put a curse on the club, promising them that they would never win The FA Cup. People in Derby remembered this well, as the club had lost FA Cup finals in 1898, 1899 and 1903. In the build-up to the match, some of the Derby players visited the gyspies and begged them to lift the curse.

With five minutes to play in the final and the score tied at 0-0, Derby’s Dally Duncan took a shot at the Charlton goal. A Charlton defender, Bert Turner, tried to clear the ball but only succeeded in deflecting it past the Charlton goalkeeper Sam Bartram to give Derby the lead. Their delight didn’t last for long. Less than a minute later, Turner fired in a free kick at the other end of the pitch, and this was also deflected past the goalkeeper to level the scores and in the process become the first player to score for both teams in an FA Cup Final. In the dying seconds of the match, though, there was further drama when Jackie Stamps took a goalbound shot for Derby. This time, Derby were denied when the ball burst, leading to an easy save for Bartram.

There were those who said that the gyspy curse was lifted when the ball burst. The truth is that this was a regular occurrence in post-war matches due to the poor quality of leather being used in their manufacture – the ball had also burst during a league match between the two clubs the week before, and would happen at the following year’s FA Cup Final between Charlton Athletic and Burnley. In extra-time, however, the Derby team finally pulled away from Chalton, with two goals from Stamps and a goal from Peter Doherty bringing them a 4-1 and The FA Cup for the first (and to date only) time in the club’s history.

The FA decided not to continue the two-legged experiment the following year. It had increased revenue for clubs, but many of the ties in the competition had effectively been won in the first matches, rendering the second legs somewhat pointless. The reintroduction of a Football League programme was, of course, the other significant contributory factor. The importance of the 1946 FA Cup has, however, become rather understated. It was a sign to a traumatised nation that normality was returning after six years during which the normal rules of life – the normal rules, one might say, of humanity – had been suspended. When The FA Cup returned, however, it was a sign that things might just be starting to get back to normal.

Swine flu fever has overtaken Heart of Clackammanshire this week but new manager Gary Burns isn’t going to let that get in the way of the club’s best winning run in years, in this week’s episode of “Shit Shot Mungo”, which also lays bare the truth of Mungo McCrackas Lemsip addiction. This week’s Mungo is brought to you by Ted “The Neck” Carter (who, if you were wondering how he got his nickname, fell through a roof and broke his neck a little over three years ago, in case you were wondering – he’s okay now, but he’s not allowed to go on rollercoasters any more), and is available in a higher resolution here.

When the story first broke that Newcastle United’s Mike Ashley had decided to sell the naming rights to St James Park, it seemed unlikely that he was doing it with the best interests of the supporters of the club at heart. However, the confirmation made this week that for the rest of this season St James Park will be known as “sportsdirect.com@St James Park” has probably hit the final nail in the coffin into the idea that he is now doing everything that he can to upset and anger them. There can be almost no other explanation for the decision.

The economic argument that clubs benefit from selling stadium naming rights doesn’t seem to apply in this case, unless Ashley is considering the £20m that he promised to put into the club to be the payment for it. What his motives could be for this other than sticking it to his critics can only be speculated. If he is doing it as a demonstration of how beneficial such a deal would be to take up an option on the deal from the start of next season, then he should probably reconsider. What benefit a company could gain from being associated with such a universally unpopular marketing move, after all, is open to question.

This may be behind the decision of Adidas, Newcastle’s kit suppliers for several years, to announce publically that they had not been approached having the stadium called “Adidas Park” and that if they were approached they would reject the offer. Newcastle’s Chief Executive, Derek Llambias, said with almost depressing predictability, “It’s adding to it, and if it brings in a good chunk of money to the club, that goes straight to the team, then do you know what, it’s a revenue we should look at”. In other words, don’t worry about the loss of your heritage and tradition – the money will spent on even more over-priced players who will probably flatter to deceive.

What is most noticeable about this decision is that it follows a trend which seems to back the now widespread whisper upon Tyneside that Ashley may be deliberately sabotaging the club. After all, he put the club up for sale quite a while ago but when a serious offer came in (and at a price that was so over-valued that it came close to his frankly ludicrous £100m price)  it was suddenly withdrawn from sale. The reaction to the initial announcement that the club was to sell the naming rights to the stadium from the end of this season was furious: what other explanation could be given for then, considering how hated he is in that part of the world, then naming the stadium after his own company?

And then the cherry on the cake is expecting supporters of a club that was relegated from the Premier League with one of the highest wage budgets to be placated by saying that the money from the sale – which it would to defy belief to suggest that he doesn’t – on more players! It’s difficult not to doff one’s cap to what is starting to look like quite a sophisticated sense of humour. However, the truth is a little less palatable. If Ashley is doing this to anger the supporters, then as the ultimate owner of Newcastle United, he could theoretically make things even worse for them if he wanted to.

Newcastle United are at home against Peterborough United on Saturday. It will interesting to see whether the fans pack St James Park out to make their protest or stay away in the hope that empty seats might jolt some sense into him. Considering that their last two wins in the league against Doncaster Rovers and Sheffield United were scrambled, messy affairs would seem to indicate that their automatic promotion back into the Premier League is far from a done deal just yet, and we have still to see how Chris Hughton pans out as manager in the long term, in spite of his encouraging start. Perhaps Mike Ashley should stop for a moment that if he desists from what seems to be his ongoing mission to turn Newcastle United into a living circus with a football team attached to it, perhaps everybody at the club can get on with the job of getting back into the Premier League, which, one would have thought, is what everybody associated with Newcastle United Football Club actually wants in the medium to long term.

Surprise results aren’t merely restricted to the latter rounds of the FA Cup. In a Fourth Qualifying Round replay at Priory Lane last week, Eastbourne Borough of the Blue Square Premier were beaten 4-3 by Tooting & Mitcham United of the Ryman League Premier Division. The win for the South London club was a welcome return to the competition proper for the club. It’s their first appearance in the First Round since the 1977/78 season, and the reward for their win at Eastbourne is a trip to the North-West to play Stockport County. Tooting & Mitcham United, however, have a story that is richer than just their win at Eastbourne would suggest.

The last thirty years or so haven’t been kind to the non-league football clubs of London. Grounds such as Wealdstone’s Lower Mead, Walthamstow’s Green Pond Road, Enfield’s Southbury Road and Edgware Town’s White Lion Ground have been lost to property developers. Dulwich Hamlet had to sell a chunk of their cavernous Champion Hill stadium in 1990 and they perpetually seem to be in danger of losing the scaled-down ground that they have been playing at since then. Tooting & Mitcham United, however, are still here even though it seemed likely for much of the last twenty years that somehow their days may be numbered.

The golden days of Tooting & Mitcham United were the last golden days of amateur football in England. While the likes of Bishop Auckland were frequently showing their professional rivals how to play from the Northern League, Tooting & Mitcham United became, in the post-war years, Isthmian League royalty after their promotion from the Athenian League in 1956. They won the title twice in their first four seasons in their new league, and in 1957 an astonishing crowd of 17,500 packed into their Sandy Lane stadium to see them play Queens Park Rangers in the Second Round of the competition.

Two years later, though, they were back in the competition proper and the extent to which they meant business this time in the qualifying stages, in which they beat Bromley 5-1, Redhill 7-1, Sutton United 8-1 and Horsham 4-0. In the First Round they were drawn against Bournemouth & Boscombe Athletic and beat them 3-1, and followed this up with a 2-1 win against Northampton Town. The Third Draw saw them drawn at home against Nottingham Forest of the First Division. Anything other than avoiding a hiding would have been an achievement for the club, but a crowd of 14,500 saw them race into a 2-0 half-time lead, before an own goal and a disputed penalty scraped a draw for the visitors, who won the replay 3-0 at The City Ground.

They never quite reached the heights that they did in the late 1950s in the league, but Tooting & Mitcham United managed to go one stage further in the FA Cup during the mid-1970s. By then, they were managed by Roy Dwight, who, ironically enough, had scored for Nottingham Forest in the 1959 FA Cup Final before breaking his leg (as well, of course, as being the cousin of Elton John). In the 1974/75 season they were narrowly beaten at home in the First Round by Crystal Palace. The following year beat the previous season’s giant-killers Leatherhead after a replay in the Second Round, and followed this up with a surprise win, 2-1 away at Swindon Town. In the Fourth Round they lost 3-1 to Bradford City.

After that came a slow decline, symbolised most poignantly by their falling attendances, which at their low point fell to not many more than 100, and by the decay of their Sandy Lane stadium, which had been one of the finest non-league grounds in London during its heyday. By the 1990s, however, the concrete terraces were crumbling and had weeds growing through them and the wooden stand was falling to pieces. Something had to be done, and chairman John Buffoni struck up a deal with Ron Noades to sell the Sandy Lane site and move to a new stadium built on the site of the old Crystal Palace training ground. It may have been a deal with the devil, but the club pulled through and moved to Imperial Fields in 2002.

They have bounced between the Ryman League Premier Division and Division One South since then, last winning promotion in 2008. They currently sit in fifth place in the Ryman League Premier Division, with two games in hand on two of the four teams above them. The runaway leaders Dartford may prove to be a stretch too far, but a place in the play-offs for the Blue Square South may not be beyond them. Saturday’s trip to Edgeley Park is a bonus, but the meat and drink of the matter is that Tooting & Mitcham United still exists, which is more than can be said for some of the clubs that used to be their contempories during their salad days in the 1950s.

It’s not what you own, it’s what you’re owed – this is how the balance of power currently lies at the Rangers Football Club. Lloyds Banking Group is owed far more than they own, and they are prepared to take drastic measures to get what they are owed – up to and including administration, if reports of Rangers’ mid-October board meeting are to be relied upon. The immediately subsequent appointment to that board of “corporate recovery specialist” Douglas Muir was the clearest indication that Lloyds wanted their money, about £30m of it, but even those in Scotland who knew that something like financial implosion was coming Rangers’ way weren’t prepared for amount of figures thrown at them recently, concerning the debts and borrowings which have kept them just within touching distance Celtic over the latter part of the decade.

In February, Rangers released interim financial results. These revealed the impact of their disappearance from European competition entirely, while most of the rest of us were watching pre-season friendlies. For Rangers, defeat in Lithuania even denied them the financial consolation of the UEFA Cup, a matter of weeks after they’d contested its final. The interims were, shall we say, to the point, running to as many paragraphs as there are pages in other clubs’ equivalent results. £4m losses over the six months, and a massive drop in turnover from £33m to £20m, and some non-mainstream media commentators were focusing on the fraught state of Murray International Holdings (MIH), the floundering business empire of former chairman Sir David Murray, and how Rangers reliance on them would have to be less, at a time when it needed to be greater.

A lengthy article on a Celtic fans’ website might not have promised a wholly objective analysis, but there was no denying the figures quoted. They backed up the argument that MIH’s superficially positive results were due mostly to “a whole host of one-off adjustments” such as £37m from one business sale and “operating profits from businesses that they no longer own of £16m.” (‘Number cruncher’, E-Tims website, 7 January 2009). Not all of the current bombardment has been reliable. One Scottish paper, admittedly on different days, reported that club bankers Lloyds Banking Group owed 11.5% of Rangers, while MIH owned 92%. By my calculations, that would certainly make Rangers the biggest club currently in financial grot. So for a minority shareholder to be pulling so many strings (ie, all of them) seems a little mystifying at first. One can’t imagine many 10% shareholders in England being such a pain.

Of course, the overall context is that Lloyds Banking Group is in a bigger financial mess than anything Scottish football as a whole, let alone one club, can muster – at the centre of yet another “biggest shake-up in British banking history” and on the front as well as the sports pages. They are chasing up all their debts. And the old ones from Bank of Scotland include generosity to Rangers and the Murray business empire which has underpinned current Ibrox troubles. In a sense, Rangers could be portrayed as victims of ‘Old Firm’ history, which placed them as the ‘Scottish’ club as opposed to Celtic being the ‘Irish’ one. There is a clear historical basis for the latter; Celtic was specifically formed, in 1887, to help Irish immigrants in the poor, predominantly East End of Glasgow. But even the Lloyds Banking Group statement, denying that they were currently running Rangers, contained traces of what sounded like the old mentality, with their insistence that Rangers “is an intrinsic part of Scottish life,” which is a lot to place on the head of a football club.

One suspects, however, that, Celtic wouldn’t be treated much differently these days and that the bank’s mentality is borne of the unhealthy dominance of the ‘Old Firm’ in Scotland. Either way, the story is bigger than the bare figures because it is Rangers. If Aberdeen had announced big losses one year after the best financial results in their history, the papers wouldn’t be running features all week long and dragging in their business editors for in-depth analyses, and we know this because Aberdeen did exactly this, and the papers didn’t. If, however, Rangers’ current problems are exacerbated by Lloyds’ perilous position, the list of proposed ‘solutions’ promises to do likewise.

Dave King, now a Glaswegian now resident and previously allegedly one of the richest people in South Africa is at the forefront of most takeover stories, and not just because of the easy headlines to which his surname lends itself. He is a ‘lifelong’ Rangers fan who invested millions in Murray’s Rangers’ dreams at the turn of the century and has expressed an interest in becoming Rangers’ new messiah. And the 322 charges of financial misdeed wouldn’t yet prevent him being considered ‘fit and proper’ to own the club. But…well…I didn’t even know there were 322 things you could do with money, and if there are, the law of averages suggests some of them must be illegal. King allegedly owes £180m in taxes), both personal and business, and the South African Revenue Service (SARS) has been after him for most of the decade.

The back story provides a few question marks. SARS has a blemished reputation for investigating and prosecuting tax offences, largely down to a lack of experience if one strange accusation against King has substance, his “attempts to evade the culture of growing tax compliance in South Africa”. Also, King was apparently originally rumbled when a SARS investigator saw a picture of a painting in King’s house worth many times more than the income King had been declaring to SARS. Quite why the investigators’ suspicions were aroused by the painting and not by the interview about King’s business successes, held in his posh Johannesburg suburban mansion isn’t clear. But what is clear is that if King is able to meet Lloyds current £30m asking price for Rangers, SARS will be quick to claim first call on that money and portray it as proof that King’s inconsequential South African income, such a pittance as to barely make it worth his while registering it for tax purposes at all, was a work of creative accountancy.

So, if King might find obstacles on his path from Johannesburg to Glasgow, who else is there? The list is not endless. The only other ‘business’ people named have been Hamilton-based Douglas Park (which, to confuse us Sassenachs, is also the name of Hamilton Academical’s grounds, both old and new) and Pau Murray. That apart, only the possibility of some form of supporters’ buy-out has been mooted, with the ‘Barcelona model’ much-quoted as the basis of such ideas. Rangers’ supporters’ organisations, including its Supporters Trust and the ‘Supporters Assembly’, have been quoted as vaguely in favour, although much of the talk so far has been woollier than the average Scottish greyface. The idea has been juxtaposed with Rangers’ past as a “covert”, “insular” and “conservative” “institution,” represented as a quantum leap from the old “no Catholics” days to, “what amounts to a socialist model.” Irrelevant and unhelpful in equal slices, and it has been dismissed by some because fans “had their chance” to buy the club during a rights issue in 2004, and “steadfastly” refused to take it.

Such criticisms ignore the context of the right issue, a clear attempt by Murray to clear debts, which were over £40m in advance of current levels, without ceding any real power or control and, in general, the arguments over supporter involvement have centred on democratic structures and cost, without touching on the real lesson to be learned from Rangers’ past, the need for financial transparency and good governance, every bit as much a priority for the Supporters Trust movement in the UK, as any “socialist model” of ownership. There’s been no lack of hindsight in contributions to the Rangers debate, and the ‘hind’ could be presented as the source of much of it.

Certainly no-one from the blue side of Glasgow is going to take heed of a Celtic chairman like Dr John Reid, a graduate of the “away and boil your head” school of diplomacy and a member of a Labour party in government whose record of borrowing is scarcely a shining example of financial probity. It should also be noted that Celtic were rather closer to outright bankruptcy in 1994, within the living memory of all but the youngest contributors to the debate. Rangers’ fans’ reaction has scarcely been more helpful, though. At the same time as fans are asking how draconian the bank’s cost-cutting proposals are, they are waving banners at televised games, proclaiming Muir, the bank’s board representative, “the enemy within”. They are also threatening boycotts of Lloyds services, which will hardly make Lloyds less keen to chase Rangers for money (unless there are echoes here of 1970s student protests against Barclays for their dealings with apartheid-South Africa: “If you don’t pull out, I shall take my overdraft elsewhere”).

At the moment, then, Rangers’ best bet seems to be to follow bank instructions and hope that any cost-cutting measures won’t have too drastic an effect on their playing fortunes. This is a strategy which is as reliant on Celtic’s dismal form continuing as on the quality of any players coming through the Rangers ranks to replace the “stars” that may have to leave. So it might just work. That apart, though, there are no winners in this game. Except one. Rangers play Romanian champions Unirea Urziceni in the Champions League this week, a match overshadowed by the finance stuff. Unirea’s 4-1 win at Ibrox two weeks ago inspired calls for Rangers boss Walter Smith to “away and boil his head” (and other, more profane requests). Four days later, Smith “let slip” that Lloyds Bank were “running” Rangers, and all of a sudden, he was the victim. Handy, that.