One of the more curious aspects of the game of football is the narrow range of scores that turn up in professional matches. Teams will often score five goal in a match a couple of times over the course of a season, and they will usually concede the same number in one match. How come, then, that we only get to see a 5-5 draw once in a blue moon?

As the Thierry Henry story rumbles on into its fourth day, a story is starting to break which might begin to put it into perspective. It is a story that is breaking from Germany and involves the arrest of seventeen people in connection with what would be the biggest, most systematic match-fixing ring that European football has ever seen.

Well, at least "The Sun" didn't go with "The Hand Of Frog" as their headline. This, however, was about the best thing that could be said for the media hysteria over Thierry Henry's handball for France against Ireland last night. First of all, though, we may as well take a quick look at the incident itself.

This week's Shit Shot Mungo sees the financial crisis at Heart of Clackmannanshire deepen still further, as the £30 fine imposed by the authorities for playing a match when their entire squad knowingly had swine flu proves to be the final nail in their coffin. The club is forced to put all of its players on part-time wages, but one man (who has been earning £190,000 per week for as long as anyone can remember) may be able to save the day.

It's a rivalry that goes back decades. Some say that it's political, whilst others point at matches from the past that have inflamed sensibilities in a world that seems to consider the art of taking offence to be the next step in the evolutionary chain. Both sides of the divide sees the other as being the absolute opposite without ever seeming to take the similarities between their two nations into account.

That Bradford City should be yet again linked with a move away from Valley Parade should come as no surprise. This time, the local council want them to move to a "sports village" at Odsal Stadium, which they will share with local rugby league club Bradford Bulls. Many Bantams supporters, however, are struggling to see what exactly the benefits of moving to Odsal would be to the football club.

Statutory demands are curious documents which have caused some degree of controversy in recent months in the world of debt recovery. They are served under the Insolvency Act of 1986 and are the first step in the process of petitioning somebody's bankruptcy or issuing a winding up order against a company.

For a couple of years, it looked as if "100 Greatest" or "50 Greatest" television programmes might just eat up the whole of the schedules in Britain. Channels gave over whole evenings to raiding their archives and there was hardly a subject that they didn't broach. The results, perhaps predictably, were often mixed but occasionally they got it just about right and this is what happened with "The 100 Greatest World Cup Moments".

The title of ‘most repugnant man in world football' isn't hotly contested. Anyone remotely aware of FIFA Vice-President Jack Warner knows that he'd have got to keep any trophy years ago, and that he'd keep it anyway, even if he was supposed to give it back. To sum up his football administration career, he's a ticket tout and swindler an arrogant, ignorant, thuggish, loutish, borderline racist, dictatorial, political failure.

In the olden days, local aldermen and dignitaries would be the people that kept football clubs going. These butchers, bakers and candlestick makers were far from perfect they were often autocratic, completely insular and frequently treated the supporters of their clubs like dirt but, for the most part, they partly ran their clubs for the honour of their local communities.

It requires some planning, quite a lot of peering of timetables and unintelligible weather forecasts, but we decided to go in the end. The bus chunters up through Kemptown and Hanover, eventually depositing us in the centre of Whitehawk, which feels like the very top of the world. The wind is gusting at sixty to seventy miles per hour and as we walk down to The Enclosed Ground the heavens open and rains falls horizontally, a lacerating experience made all the worse for the creeping suspicion that Whitehawk FC is hiding from us.

It has taken twenty-eight years, but New Zealand are back on the global stage in world football. Their 1-0 win against Bahrain this morning saw them through to the World Cup finals next summer. A record crowd for a football match in the country of over 35,000 packed out The Westpac Stadium in Wellington.

Weymouth Football Club, one of the ongoing financial basket-cases of the last three years in non-league football, might have finally reached the end of the line. Reports on the BBC this morning confirmed that, with talks with new buyers having collapsed, the club's administrators are planning to wind the club up this morning.

Phil Gartside's plan to revolutionise the Premier League (any personal gain from which to him or his club Bolton Wanderers would, of course, be entirely coincidental) has failed, for now. The issue of relegation from Premier League Two can be stored away for another day (in December 2010, to be precise), and Bolton Wanderers can get on with the small matter of avoiding the relegation that Gartside is so scared of.

After last week's swine flu debacle, Heart of Clackmanannshire Football Club find themselves in court in this week's Shit Shot Mungo, accused of deliberately and maliciously spreading the virus through playing an infected team in a recent match. A draconian punishment awaits them, unless Mungo McCrackas or Sir Roddy Bulbs can save the day.

It has been one of the quieter football revolutions of the last decade Peterborough United have, over the last couple of years, gone from being also-rans in League Two to being back in the Championship for the first time (if we gloss over the various name changes) for the first time since 1994.

The death of Hannover 96 and Germany goalkeeper Robert Enke at the age of just thirty-two would have been a savage shock to anybody interested in international football regardless of the circumstances. The fact that his death is being widely reported as suicide is numbing. Our thoughts obviously are with his family and his friends at this time, and it would not be appropriate at this time comment much further on the specifics of what has happened this evening.

Q. Where do you see Chester City FC and Steve Vaughan in 5 years time?

A. Chester City in the Championship or even the top flight. As for myself, still chairman unless of course you know something I don't! Are you the VAT man, or the Taxman or maybe even the police?

In October 2004, Stephen Vaughan was interviewed by the independent Chester City website "Blues Mad" and volunteered that answer to a question from a supporter of the club.

They wait and watch. That's what they do. About three hundred or so of them on either side of you. The older ones seem to be to the right of you, with the younger ones on the left. Watching football in the away end at Millwall is a strange, surreal experience. It starts at South Bermondsey railway station, where you're funneled away from the home supporters and down a long walkway with metal fencing on each side.

This week's Video Of The Week takes us back to the race for the Second Division title from the 1978/79 season and features three matches from an episode of London Weekend Television's "The Big Match", presented as ever by Brian Moore. The first match is between from Selhurst Park and is between Crystal Palace and Notts County, the second match is from The Goldstone Ground and is between Brighton & Hove Albion and Blackburn Rovers (about whom Moore says, "they've already been relegated to the Third Division, so at least they'll be relaxed) and the final match is from Roker Park, and is between Sunderland and Cardiff City.

Whilst it is normal for one or two Football League clubs to be given a bloody nose by a non-league club at some point during the early rounds of the FA Cup, predicting where this will happen is a slightly trickier business. Yesterday, ITV went with the "romance of the cup" and saw Norwich put seven goals past a Paulton Rovers side whose defence's pre-match training didn't appear to contain any extra "hap" sessions.

It seems as if there's been an exponential increase in clubs heading for the courts over unpaid tax or VAT bills this season. The answer to the question, "Accrington Stanleee, ‘oo are dey?" was "the League Two club that owe £308,000 to HMRC" until they found salvation the other week. And it feels like every other lower league Scottish club has been up before the tax beak in recent weeks.

We'll be back a little later on today with a report on the match between Paulton Rovers and Norwich City. In the meantime, however, The First Round of The FA Cup started yesterday evening with three matches. The remainder, of course, are to be played over the next three days. One of the traditions of The FA Cup is the press sending one of their hacks who is probably none too happy at not being to assigned to a Premier League match to write a few words about the smaller clubs that are taking their spot in the limelight.

Twice a year, Phil Gartside lays bare his most inner fears. Bolton Wanderers may some day be relegated from the Premier League, and Phil doesn't like the idea of that. He is scared that they will relegated and that they won't be prepared for life back in the Footbal League. He's right to be.

Just as the Second World War had started at the beginning of the football season, it ended in Britain, at least at what would have been the end of it. It took, however, many years for the country to recover from the end of the fighting, so perhaps it is unsurprising that the Football League was unable to resume fixtures for the start of the 1945/46 season.

Swine flu fever has overtaken Heart of Clackammanshire this week but new manager Gary Burns isn't going to let that get in the way of the club's best winning run in years, in this week's episode of "Shit Shot Mungo", which also lays bare the truth of Mungo McCrackas Lemsip addiction. This week's Mungo is brought to you by Ted "The Neck" Carter (who, if you were wondering how he got his nickname, fell through a roof and broke his neck a little over three years ago, in case you were wondering he's okay now, but he's not allowed to go on rollercoasters any more), and is available in a higher resolution here.

When the story first broke that Newcastle United's Mike Ashley had decided to sell the naming rights to St James Park, it seemed unlikely that he was doing it with the best interests of the supporters of the club at heart. However, the confirmation made this week that for the rest of this season St James Park will be known as "sportsdirect.

Surprise results aren't merely restricted to the latter rounds of the FA Cup. In a Fourth Qualifying Round replay at Priory Lane last week, Eastbourne Borough of the Blue Square Premier were beaten 4-3 by Tooting & Mitcham United of the Ryman League Premier Division. The win for the South London club was a welcome return to the competition proper for the club.

It's not what you own, it's what you're owed this is how the balance of power currently lies at the Rangers Football Club. Lloyds Banking Group is owed far more than they own, and they are prepared to take drastic measures to get what they are owed up to and including administration, if reports of Rangers' mid-October board meeting are to be relied upon.

The second of our articles to mark the First Round Proper of The FA Cup heads west to Paulton, a village between Bath and Bristol tonight. This weekend, the village team, Paulton Rovers, plays host to Norwich City in a live, televised match, but the club has already won financially, at least.

On Wednesday this week Stirling Albion face a winding-up order from HMRC, their second recently following a similar one back in May. A deal was agreed by Chairman Peter McKenzie back then, but according to the latest petition, the amount seems to have gone up slightly in the interim, to £48,000.

It's the FA Cup First Round this weekend so, in the first of five pieces about the Oldest Cup Competition In The World (and there's a phrase that is probably copyrighted by The FA), we take a look back at Wycombe Wanderers' run to the semi-finals of the competition in 2001.

The FA Cup is a competition that throws up surprise results every season, but some records remain and one that may never be broken is that no-one from the bottom two divisions of the Football League has made The FA Cup final.

More than a decade before "The Full Monty", the decline of the city of Sheffield and the effect of the collapse of the city's steel industry was already well documented. This week's Video Of The Week goes back to 1984. "Steel City Blues" traces the decline of the city and ties it together with Sheffield Wednesday's attempts to get back into the First Division for the first time since 1970.

After a disappointing start to the season that sees them sitting above the League One relegation places on goal difference, Brighton & Hove Albion have parted company with their manager, Russell Slade. This in itself isn't much of a surprise, but it does provide us with a reasonable case study on the psychology of football supporters and the pressure under which clubs find themselves.

1974: The year of the Watergate scandal, West Germany hosting and winning a World Cup made nervous by the hostage crisis of the Olympic Games held in the same country two years earlier, the death of Juan Peron and two British general elections. It was also the last year in which Rochdale AFC last played outside the bottom division of the Football League.