Cardiff 2017: Champions League final despair

“Somebody said: ‘Football’s a matter of life and death to you. I said, ‘Listen it’s more important than that’.”

WORLD class sport has never really understood irony – which perhaps explains why people have never really known whether to take revered Liverpool manager Bill Shankly’s comments on football as a matter of life and death seriously.

Of course football, or any other game, isn’t more important than life or death and Shankly was talking, with regret, at how he’d prioritised his career, his passion, over his family when recalling a quip that had become folklore.

Cardiff’s ‘Panini’ Wall of fame: honour for park footballers

IF every young footballer dreams of playing at the World Cup then their own place in a Panini sticker album is perhaps the most vivid form of recognition a football inspired child can imagine.

For a collection of recreational footballers who meet up three times a week at a Cardiff park those dreams of seeing their own smiling faces staring back at them are now a reality.