Ruud awakening

Who were your heroes, growing up? Being a footballer is the dream for many boys and girls – I was no different. My dad used to work near Loftus Road, so despite having Arsenal and Palace fans in the f

O wen Hargreaves is one of English football’s most curious cases. The son of a Welsh mother and an English father, he was born in Canada before moving to Bayern Munich as a teenager. There, he broke i

How did your move to Southampton come about in 1996? I was scoring loads of goals in Norway and I went to Southampton on trial for a few days. They liked what they saw. It was a dream come true: every

When the Chernobyl nuclear disaster happened in April 1986, I was nine years old. I’d just had a trial with Dynamo Kyiv, and it had gone well, but everything changed. In the first few days following t

Forty years ago, football hooliganism was at its peak, causing outrage, fear and fatalities. How did the sport recover from its darkest days, and what happened to the men who belonged to the “firms”? Rosa Silverman reports

Margaret Thatcher’s administration had spent 1984 battling the miners and dismantling the coal industry. But with that fight almost won, as the clock ticked into the New Year, she had another of the U