I suppose the first question to ask is why Cardiff City are included in a supposed history of ‘English’ football in the first place. It’s a difficult one to answer without insulting any Welsh readers, because it comes down to two things to the detriment of their fine country: the first is that the likes of Cardiff, Swansea and Wrexham were simply too good to play in Wales; the second is that Wales is a pretty hopeless place to football at all [...]
Growing up in a household that didn’t watch football, Rotherham were perhaps the first club I was aware of. Paul and Barry Chuckle, rather than Bryan Robson, Gary Lineker or Ian Rush, were the figures that introduced me to the sport in the late 1980s. Various references to their hometown club featured in ChuckleVision, culminating in the brothers turning out for the Millers in a 1996 episode that also featured cameos from Ronnie Moore and Tony Towner [...]