Some within the game suspect a private agenda at the League to allow “natural wastage” to prune its 72-club membership. A League spokesman denied this, but stressed the League’s approach is to leave clubs to sort themselves out: “The clubs are businesses. We are there to guide but cannot run clubs ourselves.”This hands-off approach could hardly contrast more vividly with increasing supporter involvement at almost every club. At both Chester and Luton, the mooted rescue packages are aiming to follow the examples of Bournemouth and Northampton Town, in which supporters bought stakes in the clubs and have elected representatives onto the board. Tomorrow, supporters of Barnet, protesting the refusal of planning permission for a new stadium, will lay symbolic wreaths at a rally at Downing Street, joined by supporters of some 22 other clubs, including those of Premiership giants Manchester United and Arsenal.”There’s massive solidarity between fans,” says Michael Edwards, chair of the Keep Barnet Alive campaign.

“Premier League clubs see themselves as corporations, but fans don’t To us, the game is still about community and local pride Greed is destroying it. The Government is doing nothing to help, and fans are uniting to say that something must be done.”The Government would point to the Football Task Force, whose last report proposed support for clubs in financial crisis and encouraging supporter trusts, as evidence that positive moves are being taken to help out. The forthcoming final report is expected to address wider concerns about commercialism, and Government sources say they are committed to wider redistribution. But a growing lobby is wearying of recommendations being made to the game itself, which has promoted, not looked to solve, the corrosive inequality at the heart of the problem.”Unless redistribution of money becomes fairer, clubs are going to go bust,” says John Reames.

“The game itself will not put it right, Government has to step in. But Tony Banks is not addressing problems at the grass- roots; he is increasingly seduced by the glamour end of the game and the 2006 World Cup campaign.”As football’s divide widens by the season, Coppell’s prescient warning about the Premier League breakaway is becoming ever more starkly accurate. With Palace struggling hard to meet a deadline simply to remain a Football League club, Coppell will be hoping that it does not take the final demise of his own club to prove him right.. Sir: Tim De Lisle recently wrote a very cogent article criticising the England cricket selectors for their “chop and change” policy.

How much more apposite are those criticisms when applied to the managers of the England football team. There seems, ever since the time of Don Revie, aided and abetted by the football pundits in the media, to be a belief that if you change the XI after every match, win, lose or draw, you will eventually arrive at a team which, by some strange alchemy, will be perfect. It is ironic that Revie achieved his great reputation with a Leeds United team that picked itself week after week but after two years in charge of England he was still trying “to find the right blend”. This policy reached its apotheosis under Graham Taylor who, if memory serves me right, used something like 53 players in just over 20 matches. The fact that this policy has not brought success has not deterred any of them including the present incumbent, Kevin Keegan. When are we going to get an England manager with the courage to pick the XI he believes in, ignoring the media, and to play the same side, barring injuries or suspensions, for match after match, win lose or draw, until he has forged them into an effective team..

Sir: Two short items on your sports pages raised my hackles at the recent decision of the FA to give Manchester United the chance to withdraw from the FA Cup. I see that, in rugby, Leicester and Northampton will play their traditionally hard-fought derby on 11 September without any of their international players and, moreover, will be without them until mid-November because of the Rugby World Cup. By contrast, the re-arranged Ireland Euro 2000 qualifier against Yugoslavia on 1 September was seen as adding to Manchester United’s fixture problems as they would be without Denis Irwin and Roy Keane. When teams like United (Arsenal and Chelsea too) have first-team squads with team numbers up to the high 30s, and many of the players are high quality internationals, surely it is not beyond reason to insist that the practice of postponing matches at the time of international games, at least, should be stopped. Throughout the cricket season county teams play on in two separate leagues without a whimper while their best players turn out for England and clearly the same is about to happen in rugby.. Sir: Arsenal recently transfer-listed four players, two of whom were English.