When Saturday Comes, 398

Rezension


When Saturday Comes
The Half Decent Football Magazine
Issue 398, May 2020
48 S.








Ich schätze die Lektüre von Printmedien sehr. Leider traf am 7. April ein E-Mail folgenden Inhalts ein: “Due to the Covid-19 outbreak, we have unfortunately been forced to suspend overseas subscriptions. This is due to each country having different import rules, and the reduction in the number of flights causing shipping costs to increase dramatically.” Daher kann ich das Heft derzeit nur in Form des E-Paper online lesen.

Die Coronavirus-Pandemie hat alle und alles betroffen. “So the confident prediction made in WSC 396 – that Liverpool would wrap up the Premier League title during March – didn’t come to pass, due to an unforeseen circumstance.” stellt das Editorial fest. So ist das Hauptthema des Hefts auch der Umgang mit der plötzlichen Stop des Fußballs und der andauernden Krise. Kieran Maguire beschäftigt sich mit den Folgen: “For clubs without rich owners, who themselves may be experiencing a cash crisis, drastic action is needed. The most likely means of achieving this is via wage cuts (seen at Hearts and Birmingham), threatened job losses (Barnet) or a combination of the two.” und resumiert “In theory some good could come from this, if the game learns that it has been living beyond its means for far too long. [...] But it is hard to imagine owners looking after anything other than their own self-interest.”

Harry Pearson wiederum widmet sich in nostalgischer Erinnerung in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren auf der Insel üblichen Klopapierrollenwürfen auf das Spielfeld: “The pockets of parkas were so stuffed with lavatory paper they bulged like Puskas’ waistband and at matches up and down the land thousands of rolls were lobbed out of the ends behind the goals before the game and again at the interval until the posts and net looked like they’d been bandaged by a child.”

Weitere Themen im Heft sind Ligareformdiskussion in Argentinien, das Jubiläum des französischen Meistertitels von Nantes 1994/95 oder der sechswöchige Kampf von Fans von Hibernian und Hearts gegen Fusionsideen zu einem Edinburgh United 1990.