Dotmund (who still has some pictures for sale, including his World Cup output for Twohundredpercent and original Mungos) made this action happen.

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The sunny August bank holiday is almost deceptive with the lazy calmness as it spreads over the compact but well appointed ground. Westleigh Park will shortly be witness to the latest edition of a rapidly heating rivalry as home side Havant and Waterlooville take on Eastleigh. It is a young rivalry. Havant and Waterlooville being been formed as the result of a merger between Havant Town and Waterlooville FC relatively recently as 1998. The success it brought loosely coincided with Eastleigh’s awakening from their long time slumber in the Wessex League., and both clubs found their way to the Conference South. They played their maiden competitive fixture against each other in 2005 with Havant claiming a 2-1 victory.

An outside observer could be forgiven for thinking that the rivalry between theses two teams rides on the coat-tails of that most infamous south-coast rivalry; Eastleigh is a shor hop over the greenbelt from Southampton and Havant and Waterlooville a stones-throw from Portsmouth who use Westleigh for their reserve games. This, though, is no case of little brothers squabbling in the shadows of their older siblings, but an intense rivalry which in recent years has acquired a back-story all of its own, a bitter affair taking in feuding former friends, shifting allegiances and controversy at virtually every turn.

This owes much to events in October 2007 when then Havant manager Ian Baird, who as a striker turned out for both Southampton and Portsmouth, accepted the offer of the managers position at Eastleigh a club harbouring similar ambitions to reach the pinnacle of non-league football. Havant expressed their shock at the move; Baird being only two months into a three year contract and an ensuing wrangle over compensation resulted with the threat of an injunction for breach of contract hovering in the air briefly, before evaporating when a compensation deal was reached between the clubs.

Despite Havant’s website stating that the reasons for Baird’s departure “remain shrouded in mystery”, the Havant Secretary Trevor Brock was at the time keen to dispel any conspiracy theories in telling the Southern Daily Echo that there had been “no arguments or bust-ups” and that Baird simply “said he wanted the challenge of managing a club on his doorstep with much greater resources”, adding that Baird, “genuinely seems to feel he has taken our current squad as far as he can.” Shaun Gale, Baird’s former assistant who Baird reportedly wanted to take with him to Eastleigh was installed as first-team manager at Westleigh Park and publicly wished his former boss well praising him for the strong position in which he had left his previous club.

Just seven weeks later Gale led the team to a famous 1-0 victory over Notts County in the second round of the FA Cup. The side then made history by defeating Swansea on the way to a thrilling heroic fourth round encounter with Liverpool taking the lead twice before collapsing 5-2 drained but elated with the heady romance of the competition. In the less glamorous business of league however, form was harder to maintain with the team managing a disappointing 7^th place in the Blue Square South table. Meanwhile, Baird, like many managers who switch clubs, had his eye on at least some of his former squad including team captain, defender Tom Jordan.

The Tom Jordan affair would severely damage relations between the clubs. Havant insisted their player was not for sale, rejecting subsequent offers for Jordan. However, Jordan was committed to re-joining Baird a position which led to him relinquishing the captaincy and sitting out the Notts County tie along with much of the season before eventually signing for Eastleigh in the close season. At its nadir, the saga saw accusations from Havant assistant manager Charlie Oatway of foul play telling The News that Eastleigh had been ‘tapping-up’ some of their players, a claim which was vigorously denied by Eastleigh. Oatway also claimed that Baird’s Havant contract had contained a clause which prevented him from signing Havant players for a six-month period in the event of him leaving the club.

Hostilities were still in evidence last season during the meeting between the two teams, played at Eastleigh’s Silverlake ground on an appropriately frosty February day. Prior to the match, the managers programme comments were notable largely by their absence. Wounds were still raw and Baird, it seemed, was remaining tight lipped. On the pitch Havant recorded a 1-0 away win in a game which became, unsurprisingly, a niggly affair. Whilst this was being played out on the pitch, a row broke out over the issuing of boardroom passes with Havant directors declining pre-match and half-time hospitality as only the usual ten passes were supplied rather than the requested twelve. Eastleigh retorted that had an e-mail been sent they would have provided the requested number.

The end of the game also generated fresh controversy with Baird’s refusal to shake his former assistant and successors Shaun Gale’s hand at the final whistle. When asked to explain Baird told Daily Echo reporter Wendy Gee that, “He’s not my cup of tea, let’s just leave it at that.” Baird added to the air of pantomime surrounding the day by adding the suggestion, over Gale’s reaction to the handshake incident, that the Havant manager should apply for an equity card.

Against this backdrop, the latest instalment kicked off in the August sun. Gale has taken the opportunity provided by the programme notes to ponder on the nature of derby games, possibly hinting at recent history, by saying “As we all know it is still only three points we are playing for but for some reason there is always an extra spice in these games.” Gale’s words must have been taken to heart by Havant’s experienced ex-Portsmouth wide-man Sammy Igoe; scoring the first goal against the run of play he sprints the length of the ground to cup his ear in front of the away supporters, firmly establishing himself as the Eastleigh fans newest villain.

As for his opposite number in the villain stakes, Jordan; his name receives boos from three sides of the ground as the team is announced and he is later caught in a tussle with Havant midfielder Bobby Hopkinson as they tangle on the floor following Jordan’s header over the bar. Hopkinson then appears to lash out at Jordan, but he is beyond the sight of the referee and manages to stay on the pitch. Later, karma rears its head when Hopkinson concedes a soft looking penalty for a foul on Jordan at the end of the first half. The spot kick is coolly slotted in the bottom corner by Jamie Slabber; one of Havant’s side on that day at Anfield. Derby-day tackles abound and Mustafa Tiryaki puts Havant in front again with a blasted free-kick before Chris Holland heads in from a corner in added time. It finishes 2-2, and Sean Gale gives an interview referring to Eastleigh as ‘a set piece team’. Talk about damned by faint praise.

And so another chapter is added to growing rivalry. Many local rivalries in non-league football can have a somewhat transitory feel to them as rivals overtake each other and some go to the wall. For now, though, having played in the same level for several seasons, Eastleigh and Havant & Waterlooville have built a healthy rivalry that should end up lasting for a good few years yet which, if channelled healthily, might just prove to be to the benefit of both clubs.

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Back in Horsham, there was a none-too-brief conversation about German football teams with railway links. But once we’d got that sadly regular lunacy out of the way, the inevitable questions began to be asked: “Does anyone know how Croydon Athletic got on next Saturday?”, “With all that money about, why couldn’t they get that walk to the ground lit?” And the horribly selfish “Does that mean they’ll get chucked out of the FA Cup?” (Kingstonian host the Rams in the next round). We’re a gracious bunch. Last season, the Rams ran away with the Ryman League Division One South title, amid accusations that the success had been “bought.” Manager Tim O’Shea was bullish in response, noting, correctly, that “we have had a fair amount of stick and unwarranted second guessing in relation to what we have. Players have been coming to us for the right reasons while others say they have come for the money.” Such accusations are common enough at our level of non-league football. In my short time working at the Non-League Paper in 2008’s close season I spoke with managers who seemed to have an in-depth knowledge of Kingstonian’s budget and were claiming that “we can’t compete financially with the likes of them and Met. Police.”

Such comments were ready-made excuses for failure. As a Kingstonian club patron I knew they had their figures wrong, which stopped one particular Kent manager in his tracks. But the accusations stuck, however speculative and under-informed they were. And when Croydon Athletic were building a quality title-winning squad on the back of average gates of phone-box proportions even for Ryman Division One South, the accusations naturally stuck to them too. Co-owner Roy Price was even more bullish in response than O’Shea, telling the Croydon Guardian newspaper in no uncertain terms that the accusations were “bitterness and sour grapes…contrary to what everybody may think, which is fine if they want to gossip, we would say our budget is top 10 but that would be it. I know there are clubs that have bigger budgets than us.” The defensiveness seemed partly-justified. The Rams’ were a mixture of big names and academy talent. Price added, pertinently if, allegedly, inaccurately: “We will not pay players exorbitant amounts next year, either. If you do that you are likely to self-destruct.”

He was speaking from experience, having bought the Rams out of trouble in 2007, after “Mr Croydon Athletic,” Keith Tuckey died, leaving them bereft of a hugely-loved figure at the club… and his hugely-important financial backing. Tuckey co-founded the club in the mid-1980s when his Norwood FC merged with Ken Fisher’s Wandsworth FC to form the imaginatively-entitled Wandsworth and Norwood FC, which quickly morphed into Croydon Athletic. They spent much of the 1990s finishing second in the London Spartan League and being refused entry to the Isthmian League because their ground wasn’t deemed good enough (“not enough gin in the boardroom,” was one Kingstonian fans contemptuous dismissal of contemporary ground-grading criteria).

In 1994, they hosted Kingstonian in the FA Cup and made their only stand all-ticket… to away fans. We had a good away following for our level (still do, as the Queen’s Head in Horsham will readily testify). But this seemed remarkable. It was actually a sensible piece of organisation. And Athletic seemed like a club on the rise, not least because despite being three levels below Ks, we were reliant on a very late winner (Sports Report was well underway) to sneak a fortunate 2-1 win. They eventually won the Spartan League and, after another refusal, eventually got into Isthmian ranks (possibly on the back of the bar take from the Ks game…hic!) and, having run through its Third Division like a dose of salts, they settled in Division One South. Roy Price and others helped the club survive the post-Tuckey trauma and it’s been onwards and upwards since. And there was nothing illegal about spending money… ah…

If it wasn’t for bad luck, the Rams would have had no luck at all with recent owners. Among the “others” who helped the club survive the post-Tuckey trauma was one Dean Fisher, who was son of the afore-mentioned club co-founder Ken and had served Athletic in many important capacities down the years. Fisher became Rams chairman when Tuckey passed away and when he stood down in November 2009 he cited “many reasons, the main one being that I have worked tirelessly for the club over the years and have not devoted enough time to my family and myself.”

This was a cover-up by the club, apparently. It soon emerged that “overweight Dean Fisher” – as newspaper reports branded him in the relevant stories – had been funding the high life for himself and the Rams via a “£500,000 fraud” at Central London-based advertising company TCS media, where he was administration/production manager. Among the juicier elements of the story were Fisher’s “fat-busting gastric band”, luxury spends such as Rolex watches and Rolls Royces and a particularly invidious lie about suffering from cancer which, reportedly, he’d told in order to get time off work to go horse racing and help fuel a six-figure gambling spree. Among the more pertinent elements of the story was the prosecution claims of “more than £250,000 running costs” associated with the Rams, which suggested that they were very high among the top 10 budgets in Ryman League Division One South – some way higher than second.

Especially as the ground remained ‘perfunctory’ throughout and the path to it remains an expedition which even Sir Ranulph Fiennes might regard as “risky.” (BBC London’s broadcasts “live at Croydon Athletic” were done from the road rather than outside the ground). The club denied receiving any of Fisher’s ill-gotten gains, citing a “recent accounts audit by the FA” which “confirmed that no financial contributions (from Fisher) had been used to fund the club in any way.” But the club had known when Fisher stepped down that he’d been up to no good and that the “not devoted enough time to my family” statement was the pure guff that “spend more time with my family” usually is.

When they did their own accounts check, they noticed that Fisher was “answerable for considerable unauthorised spending which disrupted the club’s financial planned budget for the season.” But the FA could make their statement about the non-involvement of Fisher’s finances because his “role as chairman was to manage the Rams’ accounts, settling bills and invoices where necessary before being paid back by owner Mazhar Majeed every month.” At the time, that served as exoneration. “You tried to look big,” said the judge at Fisher’s trial earlier this summer, either clean forgetting the gastric band or producing the sort of unintended irony for which judges are all-too-well-known. “And you were prepared to steal…to do it.” Fisher got three years.

The fraud took place between May 2008 and August 2009, just as Majeed’s Croydon Athletic career was getting underway. Majeed was born in Croydon, schooled in nearby Coulsdon and current mansion occupant thanks to his property development business Bluesky and…well…check press for, alleged, details – although his business history is littered with failed companies too. Majeed became Rams co-owner, with Price, and majority shareholder in July 2008 promising “promotion this season and then hopefully get another promotion.” He added: “What this club has achieved and how much it’s spent achieving it compared to other clubs in the same division is quite outstanding.”

What the Rams achieved since was more “outstanding,” especially as gate receipts remained a ‘limited’ contributor to income. The first promised promotion didn’t arrive. Yet they took four points out of six from champions Kingstonian, and deservedly beat us 3-1 in a very high-class London Senior Cup tie (if that isn’t an oxymoron). So their promotion last April was no surprise. But now that Majeed stands accused of admitting money-laundering through the club, manager Tim O’Shea’s April bullishness doesn’t sound so clever. The Rams beat Folkestone to automatic promotion only because the Kent side were deducted 10 points for entering administration. But O’Shea had “no sympathy whatsoever. We have carried the burden this year of everyone guessing what our budget is…and they were deducted those points because they overspent.”

“Rules are rules and they are there for a reason,” he concluded. And whilst he remains combative when it comes to “bought the title” accusations, he admitted that Majeed funded the club and Fisher “supported us all season.” As I type (Tuesday evening), HM Revenue and Customs are crawling over the Rams’ books and the Daily Telegraph newspaper is quoting sources claiming £500-per-week wages for Rams’ players (“absurd when you consider the crowds are between 150 and 250”). O’Shea may soon discover how right he was about “rules” being “rules.”

Majeed is currently an innocent man, on police bail, charged with nothing. But without Majeed’s money, the Rams might be without key players for Saturday’s “Non-League Day” hosting of fellow-promotees Concord Rangers. Sympathy for their plight is not all it might be among fellow non-league fans. The air of self-confidence which has emanated from certain sections of the club and its support in recent seasons hasn’t always smelt pleasant. But amongst even such a small band of fans as the Rams there will be those who have supported the club through thin and thinner, put the hours in cleaning the ground, operating matchdays, raising funds (in the old days) and doing the literally thankless, unpaid tasks without which clubs at this level would struggle so much more. If the money-laundering allegations are true, they are a kick in the teeth to these people who, in this lead-up week to “Non-League Day”, deserve our sympathy, even if many in this sorry tale do not.

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In a modern age of sponsors’ names, play-offs and the occasional feeling that we have reached a point in football at which change is the only constant, The FA Amateur Cup is a name that is absolutely reeks of a different age. It calls to mind an era of oak-panelled board rooms infused with the aroma of cigar smoke, of The Great And The Good, decked out with monocles and walrus moustaches, making decisions for the benefit of “The Game”, but which largely served to benefit themselves the most. It is a long lost world of obsolete phrases such as “Old Boys”, “gentleman players” and “shamateurism”, and its decline was rapid as the FA ended one of its most enduring idiosyncracies in the face of a problem that threatened to mushroom out of all control. Yet at its height the FA Amateur Cup Final was, albeit briefly, a sporting event that could almost rival the FA Cup Final itself.

The formation of the competition came at the behest of the oldest football club in the world, Sheffield FC. By the start of the 1890s, the professionals had won the argument over who provided the best players. The Football League had begun in 1888 and this was a challenge to the autocracy of the FA, to the extent that the clubs threatened to break away and form a British Football Association. To this extent, the FA was obviously conflicted. It was still (as it would be for many years) run by the upper classes and amateurism (including but not limited to the notion of players that weren’t paid to play because they didn’t need to be) was a part of its make up. The first professional player to represent England, for example, wore a blue shirt while the others on his team wore white. Something had to give, and it was a difficult act to juggle the mutually suspicious worlds of professional and amateur football.

The FA turned down Sheffield’s original offer to pay for a trophy for a competition for amateur clubs, but they began a competition for amateur clubs only themselves in the 1893/94 season, with Old Carthusians (the “Old Boys” team for the public school, Charterhouse) beating Bishop Auckland in the first final. The appearance of the Bishops in the first final was a warning that the FA Amateur Cup wouldn’t be a safe house for the Old Boys for long and, indeed, Bishop Auckland would go on to win the trophy ten times, by far and away an Amateur Cup record. The clubs of the already well-established Northern League won seven of the next ten competitions, and the formation of the Arthur Dunn Cup in 1902 for the former public school teams and the formation of the Amateur Football Association in 1907 deprived the competition of many of its other southern entrants, which further tightened the Northern League’s strangle-hold on the competition in the years immediately prior to the start of the First World War.

The years immediately after the end of the war, however, were dominated by clubs from London and the south-east of England. The Isthmian League had founded in 1905 and expanded in the years after the war, and only Bishop Auckland and the Manchester-based Northern Nomads (one-off winners in 1926) won the competition from outside of this area between 1915 and 1950. The powerful Southern League had been professional from the outset and didn’t enter the competition. The possibility of election to the Football League – not possible from the Isthmian League – was a strong enough pull for many smaller southern clubs, although the Southern League was weakened when the Football League expanded to three divisions in 1920, taking the overwhelming majority of the strongest teams from its top division.

Still, though, Amateur Cup crowds continued to rise. In the years immediately after the end of the Second World War, they shot up in the same way that attendances had throughout the rest of the game, and the Amateur Cup was rewarded accordingly with a Wembley final from the 1948/49 season on. Bromley beat Romford in the first Wembley final, but this season was also notable for the entry for the entry of Pegasus, the last hurrah of “Corinthian” values within the game. Formed by Sir Harold Thompson (a former Oxford University blue who would go on to be the Chairman of the FA), they were a team that were supposed to revive such values but, while they won the Amateur Cup in 1951 and 1953, they folded in 1963. Indeed, their appearance in the 1951 final arguably marked the peak of the competition’s success, with a capacity crowd of 100,000 seeing them beat Bishop Auckland.

The final managed capacity crowds at Wembley for much of the 1950s, but the end of the line for the amateur game was already on the horizon. The notion of “shamateurism” (making under the counter payments to supposedly amateur players) was as old as the game itself, but the FA had largely turned a blind eye to the problem. However, in 1960 the maximum wage was abolished and professional players’ wages began to rise significantly. If “shamateur” payments rose in line with these, the FA and clubs themselves could find itself facing major difficulties from the taxman. The Amateur Cup remained competitive and (albeit to a lesser degree) popular – 75,000 people, the highest crowd in the competition for ten years, turned out to watch the 1967 final between Enfield and Skelmersdale United – but the FA gave its clearest signal that its days were numbered when they introduced the FA Trophy for semi-professional clubs for the 1969/70 season.

The bell was tolled on the 27th of November 1972, when the FA Council voted to abolish the difference in status between professional and amateur players. The FA’s secretary, Denis Follows, noted soberly that, “My headache has gone. It’s been passed to the tax man”. The final FA Amateur Cup Final was played on the 20th of April 1974 at Wembley in front of a crowd of 30,500 people, with Bishops Stortford beating Ilford by four goals to one. The larger former amateur clubs were subsumed into the FA Trophy for the following season whilst a new competition, the FA Vase, was introduced for the smaller clubs. Both competitions still exist to this day, although neither has reached the status that the FA Amateur Cup did in its heyday and the FA Trophy in particular has suffered with the change in make-up of the Football Conference, even more so since the introduction of play-offs for a second promotion place into the Football League.

The death of the FA Amateur Cup was inevitable for, as we have seen, a number of different reasons, and that the FA Trophy and FA Vase have, between them, failed to catch the public’s imagination in the same way is likely to be more about changes in public perception than anything else. In the same way the the FA Cup has started to pall in comparison with the Premier League, so have the FA Trophy and FA Vase lost their sheen in the face of the relentless promotion of the league game. For the FA, the question of quite how the FA Trophy, in particular, can maintain its credibility when faced with the onslaught of the Blue Square Premier (particularly when an ever-growing number of its member clubs’ supporters are grumpy enough about having been relegated from the Football League and don’t seem to want much reminding of their new, reduced, status) remains one of the great unanswerables of modern non-league football.

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These are the things that people do not know.
They do not know because they are not told.

“Vince” Hilaire Belloc

There is, as you may have struggled not to know these last few days, a certain amount of media and public interest in “spot-fixing”, specifically as regards certain members of the Pakistan cricket team and their agent. The allegations against these men are, of course, both unproven and the subject of a police investigation. They will not, therefore, be the direct subject of this article.

What I would prefer to write about, instead, this being a football site, is the incident that came into my head almost as soon as I head about the cricket allegations, not long after close of play at Lord’s on Saturday. What came to mind was Matt Le Tissier’s confession, last year, to having done exactly what Mohammed Amir et al are presently accused of.

As widely reported, Le Tissier admitted, in his autobiography, that he had seen fit to bet on a throw-in taking place early in a game at Selhurst Park in 1995. If that event had happened early enough, it would have won him and his associates up to 56 times their sizeable stake. So, when Southampton kicked off and he received a pass, he tried to hit the ball straight into touch – only to underhit it and see it kept in by his teammate, Neil Shipperley, who was unaware of the scam.

This being a spread-bet, where losses were theoretically unlimited, Shipperley’s interception constituted a potential disaster: “I have never run so much in my life….suddenly it was no longer a question of winning money. We stood to lose a lot of cash if it went much longer than 75 seconds before the ball went out. I had visions of a guy coming to kneecap me.” As the Mail put it, Le Tissier admits to “charging around the pitch desperately trying to put it out”, which behaviour may not of course have seemed unusual to anybody watching football at Wimbledon.

Le Tissier wrote: “I couldn’t see a problem with making a few quid on the time of the first throw-in”, but insisted, “obviously I’d never have done anything that might have affected the outcome of the match”. Obviously not, but what interests me about his justification is – as with several aspects of the scam – how it reflects the one presently being claimed to have occurred at Lord’s. Early no-ball: early throw-in. No real impact on the game. So nothing to worry about. Nobody’s letting anybody down. One can imagine similar things being said to cricketers in hotel rooms and dressing-rooms: and by them.

At which point I would like to write: “as with the cricket, revelations of Le Tissier’s involvement in a scam provoked widespread controversy, police investigation and internal investigation by the football authorities which led to prominent figures being banned from the game”. Except that they didn’t. The controversy was small and short-lived, as was the police investigation, which was called off after discussions with the Crown Prosecution Service. In turn, the FA dropped their own investigation. Le Tissier retains a high-profile job as a pundit with Soccer Saturday, for a television station which shares its owner with the News Of The World.

Yes of course, the situations are very different in some ways. We are talking about an incident which had occurred fourteen years before. No current player was the subject of any allegations. There were no suspicions of any other misconduct by the people involved, nor was there a history of such allegations to be taken into account. The player confessed of his own free will. All these things are pertinent. Yet even so, there is something unsatisfactory about the ease with which the Le Tissier scandal was allowed to drop.

Partly, there is the absence of scandal, the apparent unwillingness of the authorities, the media or the great football-following public to perceive that anything bad had really happened. To me this sits uncomfortably alongside the justified outrage, the call for bans and investigations, which surround the Pakistan cricket team following the allegations. But more substantially, what bothers me is that nobody took the opportunity of Le Tissier’s revelations to do what has rightly been demanded in the world of cricket, which is to find out how widespread this sort of cheating is.

Betting is no harder today than it was in 1995. Footballers are not less interested in money. Human beings are not less foolish. So – in the fifteen years since a panicking Matt Le Tissier rushed around Plough Lane, how many other professional footballers have been involved in similar scams? How many games have been affected by people trying, unobtrusively, to make themselves a little pot of money? None? It’s possible. Hundreds? That’s possible too. The Matt Le Tissier confession was an opportunity to try and find out. One that wasn’t taken.

Perhaps, because Selhurst Park was so very long ago. Perhaps, because Matt Le Tisser was such a nice chap who gave such service to the only club he played for. Or perhaps because nobody really wanted to ask the question. Nobody wanted to find out the answer.

These are the things that people do not know. They do not know because they are not told.

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There are, of course, plenty of examples to back this up. Two years ago, Hull City thundered up the Premier League with an extraordinary run before finding their level. Results elsewhere meant that they survived their first season, but the second proved to be too much for them. They now sit seventh from bottom in the Championship, with rumours of a potential financial implosion continuing to circle. The problem with such theories is that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that they are nonsense. It doesn’t explain why a newly-promoted team tends to get relegated every season, or why some clubs, upon getting promoted into the Premier League, establish themselves quite comfortably in the middle of the table. For every Hull City, there is a Fulham, who arrived in the Premier League and settled in with relative comfort. Second Season Syndrome feels like a media construct, created in order to keep teams that have managed to navigate their way through their first Premier League season in their place.

This season is Wolverhampton Wanderers’ second back in the Premier League, and last season saw them finish comfortably clear of the relegation places. They have started this season effectively, with a workmanlike win on the opening day against Stoke City followed by picking up a handy draw at Goodison Park against Everton last week. Today they take on a Newcastle United, who, like them, have been widely predicted to struggle this season. Newcastle remain enigmatic at the moment. They were predictably brushed aside by Manchester United on the opening day of the season, but last weekend they tore a demoralised looking Aston Villa apart at St James Park and will have arrived at Molineux flush with confidence.  Wolves look sluggish in the early stages, with Andy Carroll forcing a save from the Wolves goalkeeper Marcus Hahnemann, Wayne Routledge getting around him from and crossing a couple of inches behind Joey Barton and Kevin Nolan stabbing the ball twice at Hahnemann from close range.

Wolves do start to rally, however, and come the closest of either team when Sylvan Ebanks-Blake heads against the far post from a deep corner, but a mix-up in their central defence gives Carroll a clear chance, but he shoots well over with only Carroll left to beat. Two minutes from half-time, however, it is Wolves that take the lead. Jelle van Damme crosses from the right-hand side and Ebanks-Blake, who has has an outstanding start to the season, brings the ball under control and shoots under Steve Harper. It’s a little tough on Newcastle to be going in behind at half-time, but Wolves have worked hard for their lead and neither team look very much like the relegation candidates that so many had predicted before a ball had been kicked this season.

For all the hard work, however, this is something of a rough and tumble match and referee Stuart Atwell manages to pull his yellow card from his pocket twelve times, although both teams do end the match with eleven players. The direction of the match, however, hangs on one incident that Atwell misses. Early in the second half, Matthew Jarvis charges down the left wing and James Perch brings him down. In such a situation, the only reasonable decisions that could be awarded would be a corner (assuming that Atwell believed that Perch played the ball) or, correctly, a penalty. A two goal lead may have finished the game off, but instead Wolves start to look jittery, and just after the hour Newcastle haul themselves level. Joey Barton swings a free kick over from the left hand side and Andy Carroll gets away from his marker to head wide of Hahnemann and in off the post. From here on, Newcastle look the more likely winners. Hahnemann makes a fine one-handed save from Kevin Nolan and Shola Ameobi, who comes on for Carroll, heads goalwards with his first touch, only to see the ball prodded away from under the crossbar. At full time, however, honours are even.

On balance, a point apiece feels like a fair enough result, but Wolves will feel hard done by over the Jarvis penalty incident and Newcastle will feel as if, having got themselves level and with half an hour left to play, they could have snatched all three of the points. Both teams may yet find this season to be a struggle, but for clubs like Wolves, who are likely to spend much of the season looking nervously over their shoulders at those below them, going the first three matches of the season unbeaten is a strong start and there was plenty about their performance to suggest that Mick McCarthy has got the balance of his team just about right. Those fearing a bout of Second Season Syndrome at Molineux this season might find that they have less to be concerned about than they had anticipated.

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Mandaric, owner of Leicester since February 2007, has been making regular-as-clockwork pleas almost ever since to investors to help “ease” his Leicester City “burden” whilst all the time claiming that he was “not actively trying to sell the club.” The latest of these denials arrived, on time, last month. “I’m not about to sell Leicester City, vows Milan Mandaric,” ran the headline in Leicester’s Mercury newspaper. But, on this occasion, Mandaric spoke of “on-going negotiations” with “several interested parties.” A club statement added that “(he) has always maintained that he welcome the right partner to help him move the club forward.” And he rounded things off with a solemn pledge. Whatever transpired, “The Leicester City fans would be the first ones to be told the truth.”

Three weeks later, Mandaric announced a takeover deal with Thailand’s 27th-richest man, 52-year-old Vichai Raksriaksorn and a “consortium led by Thai businessman Aiyawatt Raksriaksorn”, Vichai’s 25-year-old son. And he added that he would “stay on as chairman and hold a minority stake in the club for the next two years. This is not an arrangement with a hugely successful track record, as Portsmouth fans are bitterly aware. Although there is no remote suggestion that Vichai and Aiyawatt share any of the ‘colourful’ history of the Gaydamaks, who were Mandaric’s Pompey legacy. Indeed, Vichai is President of the Ham Polo Club in South-West London suburbia. So he must be fit and proper – as well as “fit and proper.”

But the club’s 600-word announcement contrived to overlook some important details. Amid considerable guff from Mandaric and his chief executive, the never-knowingly-popular Lee Hoos, there was no reference to trivialities such as how much of the club had been sold, for how much, and specifically to whom. These were vital questions, not only because they were…well…the vital, issues of any such deal, but also because conflicting stories about these and every other conceivably linked matter were appearing in media, old and new, from the East Midlands to South-East Asia.

Mandaric had accused the media of “creating their own information” when stories first emerged that the Thai consortium were buying 49% of the club for £26m. “It is all false information. We are not even close to talking about anything close to those kind of details,” he insisted. “I have no idea where it comes from.” The figures did though make some sense, in the light of what Mandaric had said about easing burdens without ceding control. 49% would specifically not cede control, while £26m specifically would clear the club’s over all reported debt.

But in newspaper reports of the takeover announcement – if not the announcement itself – different figures emerged, about which Mandaric appeared to have no quarrels or queries about source. Raksriaksorn senior would take a 60% stake in the club, while “Mandaric and a third, as yet un-named Asian business person would own the remainder.” So far, so vague. As per. But it soon seemed as if Mandaric had himself been “creating” his “own information. A week after the takeover announcement, the Raksriaksorns held a press briefing in Bangkok’s Pullman Hotel (prop: Vichai Raksriaksorn). And the Mercury’s second-hand account said: “Vichai Raksriaksorn is the mastermind behind the Asian Football Investments Corporation that took over City last week after buying a 100% stake in the club.” And the “mastermind” added that “he would reduce his 100% share in the club to 51% in the future by allowing co-investors”, plans he seemed rather more able to carry out than his “60%” stake suggested.

In the same report there was further confusion about one of the nuts and bolts of the deal – the transfer budget available to new manager Paulo Sousa. “Sources close to the deal” had suggested a figure of “£4-5m.” Vichai told his press briefing: “We will provide financial support…to buy new players…The Budget may be more than £10m.” And there was more. Vichai also said that “Paulo Sousa would be allowed to look for all his recruits,” an award of transfer market authority and autonomy which didn’t fit exactly with Aiyawatt’s later reported suggestion “that he (Aiyawatt) would have a say in which players would be signed.” Because, where better to look for advice on building a Football League Championship side than the mind of a 25-year-old Thai businessman with no previous involvement in the game?

So Mandaric, it seemed, had found kindred spirits. Because he was simultaneously back home “creating” some more information, claiming a hyper-inflationary increase in his financial contribution to the club during his tenure. At announcement time, he “said he had put more than £9m into the club” and that he “would make a loss when he came to sell.” By the end of this week, he was suggesting he “would probably get part of it back” after claiming he had “put at least £21m into the club.”

This figure was neither challenged nor broken down and accounted for. And it prompted one Mercury reader to comment: “If that greedy Mandaric invested £21m into City then I’m dating Kim Kardashian,” which, at my age, I have to assume is cynicism. More pertinently, it has emerged that the Football League are as partly and confusingly informed as the rest of us, which has become particularly important since August 4th, when its member clubs – Leicester City very much among them – voted in new “owners and directors” regulations.

These stipulate that considerable detail of any takeover’s protagonists and the source of their funding be related to the League in advance of any announcement of such a deal, even an announcement such as Leicester’s afore-mentioned 600-word allergy to facts. This clearly hasn’t happened, as the protagonists themselves don’t seem entirely sure. And Mandaric stated that the un-named “third man” in the deal would only “be named in the next few months,” and “has yet to formally sign up to the deal.”

In such circumstances, ratification is some way off. Under the new chairmanship of, fate would have it, a former Leicester director in Greg Clarke, the League have made a big play of transparency in takeover deals and ownership and finances in general. Clarke is not involved in the ratification process due to the obvious potential conflict of interest. But he would have been unlikely to let Leicester off lightly anyway. He became a “former” Leicester director in January 2007, a month before Mandaric’s own takeover and because he disagreed with it.

It’s an attitude which ought to lengthen his Christmas card list this year. But a worrying number of Leicester fans seem very trusting of Mandaric and his ilk. When the Leicester Supporters Trust, the ‘Foxes Trust’ called last month for fans to be better informed about takeover proceedings, they were met with hostility and opposition. And not just from those who were clearly asleep when Munto Finance ‘got involved’ at Notts County and consider their own Trust to be self-important, interfering busybodies. Another Mercury reader wrote: “Mandaric walked out at Pompey and made a cool £42m. If he does the same at LCFC well good on the bloke.”

Such people have been swayed by Mandaric’s persistent trumpeting of his own efforts at Leicester, and are willing to overlook his mediocre record (better than Hicks and Gillett, who took over Liverpool a week before Mandaric arrived at Leicester). And they focus less on Leicester’s considerable annual financial losses (£6m in 2009, £14m in 2008) than his claim, last March, that what money there is “is always coming out of my pocket, out of my money in America, what I work very hard to earn… and pay all my taxes on” (yes, he really said that).

Most concerning for everyone, though, is what has really got the Thai consortium involved. Mandaric had insisted on his partners being in it for the game rather than the money. The Raksriaksorns are certainly that and are more honourably motivated than the last Thai in English football – Thaksin Shinawatra at Manchester City. It’s just that, as Vichai openly admitted last week: “Many investors have already approached me to be shareholders in my consortium and we all have a similar goal – to build Thailand as a football academy for Asia in the future.” As a method of “building” Thai football, it’s a few notches above making Peter Reid national team boss. But Leicester, its own academy and all that “Premier League as soon as possible” stuff, is, quite possibly, just a means to an end. So maybe Mandaric was up-front and honest when he said that “The Leicester City fans would be the first ones to be told the truth.” Because, until now, no-one else has been.

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Times look pretty stressful at the DW Stadium, but now is not the time to lose sight of the fact that football matches are for entertainment.  As such, Twohundredpercent is proud to reveal Roberto Martinez’s Anxiety Bingo! Simply print out your game card and then check off each pained facial expression as you see them in the dugout.  First person to complete their card then stands up and lustily shouts ‘BINGO!’, before claiming their prize!*

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* N.B. there is no prize.

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Mungo is brought to you once more by Dotmund.

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Why, though, is Steve Evans so despised? It’s easy, from a distance, to assume that the ongoing antipathy towards Evans is an antipathy like any other. An abrasive “larger than life” character will always stir up negative emotions in the supporters of other clubs, but Evans seems to strike something baser – a raw nerve that provokes florid and colourful streams of abuse, something that makes others desperately hopeful to see him fail. There may be an element of truth in this interpretation of the dislike of him, but it seems likely that much of the hatred of Steve Evans is based on something more tangible. Because Steve Evans is a convicted criminal, part of a scam that took a club from the middle ground of the non-league game into the Football League and, moreover, for many non-league supporters, he is also the man that, in spite of his criminal record, for many people, got away with it.

After an average playing career in his native Scotland that was cut short by a knee ligament injury at the age of twenty-eight, Evans briefly pitched up at Corby Town as chairman in 1994 before moving on to Stamford FC. After four years at Stamford, he was given a managerial leg-up when he accepted the managerial job at Boston United – a club frequently described at the time as “sleeping giants”, in non-league terms at least – in 1998. Two years later, they were promoted into the Football Conference as the champions of the Southern League, and after a further two years, following a neck and neck race against Dagenham & Redbridge, he took his club into the Football League on as slim a margin as goal difference. Both of these title wins, however, would come to be regarded as fundamentally tainted by the revelations that followed them.

Within weeks, the FA’s then-compliance officer, Graham Bean, had launched an investigation into the financial irregularites at Boston United, and, July of that year, the club was found guilty by an FA disciplinary committee of systematically lodging false contracts for players. The ploy was a simple one. Players signed contracts that were worth a fraction of the value of what they were being paid. In one case, Ken Charlery was recorded as being paid £120 per week when he was actually being paid £620 per week and had received a £16,000 signing on fee for the club, against which no tax had been paid. In another, the former Liverpool defender Mike Marsh was contracted as being paid £100 per week when he was actually earning £1,000 per week. The difference was paid through “expenses”, against which no tax was payable.

The club was fined £100,000 and docked four points for the following season, a decision that enraged Dagenham & Redbridge, who had missed out so narrowly on promotion to Evans’ club. More notable than this, though (at least from the point of view of this particular story), was the fact that Evans and the club’s owner at the time, Pat Malkinson, were both found guilty by the FA of having, “”facilitated a payment of £8,000 to a witness to attempt to mislead, impede and frustrate” the FA’s enquiry into the scam. Malkinson was fined £5,250 and suspended from football for thirteen months. Evans was fined £8,000 and suspended from football for twenty months.

Evans may have been banned from football, but he wasn’t out of work for long, taking a job working for a recruitment company owned by a Staffordshire businessman called Jon Sotnick. Sotnick (who went on to act as Chief Executive at Darlington and was linked with a take-over of Sheffield Wednesday in 2008) was persuaded to put money into Boston United and Evans returned as the Boston manager in February 2004. By this time, though, the mere bans of the FA were the least of Evans’ concerns. A criminal investigation had been launched into the goings-on at Boston, and in September 2005 he and four other people connected with Boston United (including former Boston chairman Pat Malkinson) were charged with – and denied – committing fraud at the club between 1998 and 2002.

Meanwhile, on the pitch, he was earning himself a reputation for the levels of abuse that he threw around when decisions didn’t go his way. In February 2006, for example, he was escorted from Grimsby Town’s Blundell Park by the police after verbally abusing the fourth official. After the match, Sotnick (by then the Boston chairman) claimed, with regard to the police’s involvement during the match, that, “There seems to be a conspiracy at work. At every game Steve seems to be singled out for extra attention from the police – and I’m determined to get the bottom of this”. Perhaps the choicest quote of all from Sotnick on the matter, however, was this, which needs no further comment:

Steve was thrown out of the ground with no money, no mobile phone and was left to fend for himself.

Sotnick resigned in June of 2006 to take over as the Chief Executive of Darlington, and sold his shares to director Jim Rodwell for a nominal sum. The trial of Steve Evans, Pat Malkinson, et al, meanwhile, reached trial at Southwark Court in September 2006. The court heard evidence regarding the contracts from Ken Charlery, and the total amount that had been creamed off by the club through fraudulently failing to pay tax and national insurance contributions on the wages of Boston’s players was confirmed at £245,188. While two of the other defendants were acquitted by the judge and one more had his case thrown out, though, Malkinson and Evans changed their pleas to guilty at the last minute. Malkinson was given a two year prison sentence, suspended for two years and ordered to pay back the money that the club owed in tax plus just over £100,000 in interest. Evans received a one year suspended sentence.

The one common thread of the summing up of Evans’ trial is how much sympathy many concerned seemed to have for him. His defence counsel, Jim Sturman QC, for example, stated that, “If your honour sends Steve Evans to prison today he will lose his job again. It has already cost him £140,000 in legal fees, fines from the FA and loss of income. I ask for tempering justice with mercy. Is it worth sending Steve Evans to overcrowded prisons? He is terrified of spending one day in prison… There has been the stress and anxiety over four years. He has not slept. His family have not slept. He is terrified”. Diddums. To the fury of Boston supporters, who had seen the name of their club dragged through the mud by the whole affair, Jim Rodwell announced that, “I think Steven has been working under incredibly difficult circumstances and it’s been a struggle for him”, and kept him in his job.

Evans resigned his position as Boston’s manager in May 2007, shortly after a by then financially-crippled Boston United were relegated from the Football League after a last day of the season defeat at Wrexham. Boston were demoted straight into the Blue Square North in June 2007 and then demoted again into the Premier Division of the Northern Premier League a year later, but Evans landed on his feet. Two days after his resignation, he took up the managerial position at Blue Square Premier club Crawley Town. Crawley’s financial problems since then have been well documented. Crawley’s financial difficulties over the last three years have been well documented (they were fighting off a winding up order from HMRC earlier this year), but they ended up under new ownership and the club paid off all of its debts at the start of this summer.

Since then, the club has been on a spending spree that is unprecedented in recent years. They have, to date, spent £330,000 on new players (without taking into consideration the burden on their wage budget) and have been looking at plenty of others as well. Their attempt to sign Wimbledon’s captain, Danny Kedwell, on the eve of the new season, however, was less successful, with Kedwell himself saying:

“Crawley are trying to buy everyone and I’m flattered but I’m captain of this club and hopefully next season we’ll be in the Football League instead of them.”

Boston United beat Bradford Park Avenue in the play-offs in May to secure promotion back into the Blue Square North. The legacy of Evans’ time as their manager is that they had fallen so far in the first place. Crawley Town supporters have had three years of Evans and do not need to be told about his past and they may well not give a damn about the moral aspect of Evans’ past if their team does manage to get promoted into the Football League at the end of this season, but the story of Steve Evans is a story that stands being told again as a reminder of chronic mismanagement and one of the most clear-cut examples of what has come to be known as “financial doping” imaginable. Ultimately, whatever else Evans achieves in his career will be tarnished by his past and whichever club employs him will be tainted by his involvement with them. Promotion is one thing, but respect can’t neccessarily be bought.

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