A Run For All Seasons

Jordan 'Rhodes of Goals' Rhodes

Quite a big thing managed to sneak under the radar this week, presumably as the radar itself was either straining to measure superluminal neutrinos, or joining the rest of the football universe in providing repeated shots of England’s Brave John Terry either falling over or looking contrite. What was happening, in actual fact, was that Huddersfield Town were putting the finishing touches to the most unlikely run since Adam Bushby went for a run.* A shining and magical apple obscured by all the oniony inadequacies of Super Sunday and Gary Neville’s David Luiz/Playstation joke. Well, no longer.

Creepy Crawley

Time to fill out that expenses form...

The weekend just gone saw the first side across England’s top five divisions promoted. Yes, I said five divisions, because I’m a York City fan and I like to feel relevant. Crawley Town made it to the promised land of the Football League, leaving the other 23 Conference sides to scrap over the one remaining promotion place. And if you think I’m going to doff my cap in recognition of Crawley’s achievement, then you have another thing coming.

Teams That Made Us Fall In Love With Football #8: Oxford United 1995-96

Exploring the hearts and minds of the old Division Two, a warm welcome to Magic Spongers for Sam Macrory (with additional memories supplied by Frank Webster).

This piece opens with a confession. I didn’t grow up in a footballing household. Looking back, I cringe to think that my mum phoned the BBC to demand why the football was still being shown when the listings had promised a cartoon, the lack of which left my brother and I devastated. It was May 20th 1989, and the Liverpool-Everton FA Cup Final – which I later learned to be one of the great finals – had gone into extra time. But if that came at the expense of ten minutes of Tom and Jerry, then the schedulers should know better.

Richard Butcher 1981-2011

There seems something particularly unfair about the fact that, after the Football League’s most romantic of weekends – the Third Round of the FA Cup – tragedy should strike one of its smallest clubs for the second time in less than a year.

Moving On Up

Stevenage celebrate promotion

Watching Macclesfield play at Stevenage last weekend I was struck by a couple of things. The first was that it is very difficult to achieve things in a game of football (like attacking) when the ball spends seven minutes of every ten either in the air or out of play. The other was that it was almost universally agreed before kick-off that the sides promoted from the Conference, Stevenage and Oxford, would ‘do well this year’, with the only justification being that ‘promoted teams always do well’.

A 2-2 draw for the Silkmen was received well by most of the Macclesfield faithful. An 89th minute equaliser was hard to swallow, but again, the opinion prevailed that we would have taken a point before the game. Even Gary Simpson, speaking after the match, reckoned that, “We battled hard away from home against a side who I still believe will be one of the front runners this season.”