The Speccie leads with sport

I wonder how often the Spectator magazine has led with a football story but this week it does and a cracking piece from former BBC man Mahir Bose who writes that the game is England may be beautiful but it is also broke

Last week’s Financial Times carried an advert seeking a buyer for the bankrupt Crystal Palace. Portsmouth FC, winner of the FA Cup just two years ago, is unable to meet players’ wages or pay for a website. Dozens of clubs are wrestling with their creditors, and the game is effectively divided into two financial leagues: those with, and without, a foreign sugar daddy to write the cheques.

and he adds

Worse still, the global success of the English game has done nothing to nurture English, or even British, talent. It has never been harder for an English player to make it in the English Premier League.

It was 20 years ago today

That is the theme of the special edition of New Statesman which reminds us what a very different world it was then.

It was the year that saw the crumbling of the Iron curtain.At the time it seemed almost a fairytale.Events were running out of control and it was all over in a flash with the Christmas day executions of the Ceausescu's the culmination of two months of intense focus on the communist block.

But the year had other defining moments too in world events.The death of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Tiannaman square massacre.

And in Britain things were changing two.1989 saw the first rumblings of discontent over the Thatcher government that was to culminate in Poll tax riots and her resignation a year later.

Football would never be the same again after the Hillsbro disaster and would be reborn at a multi billion pound leisure industry a few years later.

Editor Jason Cowley sums it up

And yet nothing was certain; this feeling of being in suspension, of not knowing what would happen next, of living at the end of one world-historic era while waiting for another to begin – this sense, more personally, of having graduated and now to be on the cusp of adulthood at just this moment of quickening change: the feeling was heady. It felt as if the world was indeed in motion, not quite spinning out of control but in new and strange ways; a world turning, breaking apart and re-forming, a world in flux.

A massive cock up in Riyadh

Peace has once again broken out between Syria and Lebanon after last month's fighting in Beirut between factions loyal to Syria and the Lebanese government.

Therefore when the Lebanese football team turned up at the King Fahd Stadium to play a world cup qualifier,tensions were raised when the Syrian national anthem by mistake.

Fans were left shocked and Lebanese players were visibly angry when the Syrian national anthem began blaring from the stadium’s speakers, the Arriyadiyah sports daily reported yesterday. Officials quickly realized their mistake, and eventually played the correct national anthem. However, the error, which was committed by the organizing officials of the tournament, prompted the President of the Saudi Football Federation, Prince Sultan ibn Fahd, to order an official investigation into the incident.

For the record Lebanon lost 2-1