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.

Football fans have become better educated in the mysteries of football finances over recent years out of necessity as much as anything else, but just occasionally old naiveties come to the fore. It might just be that they can't believe that things could be as bad off the pitch as on it at the moment, but Hull City fans are less concerned than they should be about the lack of financial information coming out of their club in recent times, and now that the information has come out and has proved as grim as one may have feared, they still don't sem to believe that things can be as bad off the pitch as on it; despite the phrase "significant doubt over their ability to continue as a going concern" appearing not once, but three times in a relatively short annual report and statement of accounts for the Tigers' promotion year.

Marlon King is twenty-eight years old. His contract with Wigan Athletic was worth £35,000 per week. He has scored twelve Premier League goals in his entire career. Never has in the field of human endeavour has such mediocrity been so handsomely rewarded. For this reason and this doesn't obviously doesn't even take into account what he has been sent to prison for and if nothing else comes from this grimly predictable story, at least Dave Whelan may be breathing a sigh of relief at getting such an expensive burden upon Wigan Athletic's wage bill.

This week's episode of "Shit Shot Mungo" features the aftermath of Heart of Clackmannanshire's outstanding 3-0 win last week. Glen Roeder is sacked as the Director of Football and, after a viral outbreak at the club, the club's new plutocratic owner brings in a plague doctor in to help out. Drawn by the fair hand of Ted "The Neck" Carter, and available in a higher resolution (you have to click on "all sizes, for those of you that are unfamiliar with the ways of Flickr) here.

There comes a point at which inept management crosses an invisible rubicon and passes into something even more depressing and worrying. There can be little arguing with the case for the prosecution. Ashley's time in charge of the club has been an unmitigated disaster. He oversaw relegation from the Premier League when the club had the fifth highest wage budget, has managed to almost the entire support of the club and managed to fail to sell the club when it had a buyer which seemed keen to tie up a deal to secure the purchase of it from him.

The loss of Setanta Sports during the summer didn't only have knock on effects for the Premier League, although that was the story which hogged the headlines at the time. The Scottish Premier League had to negotiate a new (and reduced) deal with Sky Sports, the Blue Square Premier started the new seasons without any television coverage at all and the FA were left seeking new partners for the FA Cup.

One of the things that many people that usually inhabit the world of the Premier League regularly comment upon when they visit the singular world of non-league football is how close one feels to the action. Every shout can be heard, and every gesticulation spotted. What supporters at that level often seem to forget, however, is that this works both ways and the average non-league footballer can pick out from a distance that it was you that called him a "useless sack of shite" half-way through the first half.

Crisis over at Anfield, then. Blimey, even David Ngog scored. Maybe it is because of such miracles that all the sensible advice from pundits about how "just one win" wouldn't alter Liverpool's dire on and off-field straits has gone through the defenestration process. Liverpool were almost everything against United that they weren't against either Sunderland or Olympique Lyonnais.

To the surprise of absolutlely nobody that knows anything as much as an iota about the way in which they run themselves, the Football Conference bowed down at the altar of Stephen Vaughan for (depending on which way you look at it) either the second, third or fourth time yesterday. They decided, having issued a stern warning to the club at the end of last week, to adjourn the issue of whether this hollowed out, withered shell of a club can actually, realistically, viably continue to trade for anything like the long term future yesterday for another three weeks.

This week's Video Of The Week is "Heading For Glory", the official film of the 1974 World Cup Finals in West Germany. There was no English presence (although with the benefit of hindsight there was no disgrace in being knocked out by a Polish side that didn't get a million miles from reaching the final of the competition), but Scotland began their four-yearly routine of almost getting to the Second Round of the competition, the Dutch fielded possibly the best ever international team to not win a World Cup, East Germany met West Germany for the only time (and beat them) and Gerd Muller eventually won the tournament fof the host nation.

Today, October 25th, is the fifteenth anniversary of the second and most famous of the three appearances of Brian Potter's senior football career, and this site has very kindly indulged me by allowing me to write a tribute to the great man. You've almost certainly never heard of him, and mention of his name usually makes people think of Peter Kay, but no, it's not that one.

At later stages, clubs are now fairly open in their contempt for the FA Cup, fielding reserve teams and compaining about fixture congestion, but at this stage it still matters. This weekend sees the Fourth Qualifying Round, the sixth stage of the competition and that at which Blue Square Premier clubs enter.

On their website this week, Notts County Football Club have invited all to "celebrate the football league decision on Saturday" when they entertain Crewe Alexandra. But before you decide whether to join the party, it might be an idea to examine what it is they are celebrating. Remarkably, Notts County fans themselves will be celebrating the fact that they are not allowed to know who owns their club (what was, earlier this year, literally their club).

We are occasionally reminded that, although the amount of money in football has increased dramatically over the last two decades or so, football isn't quite the "big" business that we might occasionally believe it to be. Real Madrid's annual turnover is reported to be over £300m, which sounds like a lot until you start comparing it with other businesses.

Following their recent take-over by a Sudanese billionaire food additive magnate, Heart of Clackmanannshire is buzzing. However, Faisal Wally Camel has something of a maverick streak and, in this week's "Shit Shot Mungo", he decides that the "man in the street" could do better job than any of these so-called football "managers" and appoints, well, the first person that he comes up in the street.

Chester Fans United, a coming together of the different fans' groups at the stricken Blue Square Premier club, meet tomorrow night to formally agree their formation. They have a few thousand pounds in the bank, which is enough to get them up and running, but it certainly isn't enough to save their club and the general consensus now is that they already know it.

Fifty years after it first went on air, Tyne Tees Television is now a mere relic. A name from the past. Along with almost all of the other ITV regions, the company name all but vanished from our screens in October 2002 when ITV did away with its regional network and finally merged together as one lumpen mass.

Opinion is polarised in football about Birmingham's new frontman Carson Yeung (not ‘owner,' you'll notice; takeovers just cannot be that simple). Some would agree with the man who sneered: "He's not going to put a penny in...I don't think that's likely to change." Others would back the man who declared: "We believe his people can take this football club to the next level".

It was something of a disappointment that there wasn't a big empty space in this morning's edition of the Guardian's sports section. It would have been the most fitting response to Ken Bates' decision to ban the newspaper from Elland Road as a result of reports written by David Conn about the increasingly murky issue of the ownership of Leeds United.

You'd have thought that even the publicity junkie that is Sulaiman Al-Fahim would keep as low a profile as possible, after his dismal, embarrassing failures at Portsmouth, but no. Having done a round of self-justificatory chats with the UK press, who didn't balk at pointing out the flaws in every argument he put forward, he returned to the happier, compliant hunting ground of the Arabic press for his latest lecture to the masses.

There's something afoot in the court of Chelsea. After a start to the season that carried on the way that last season ended (high octane football mixed with the arrogance of the club that knows that it is amongst the best in Europe), they have started to look just a little bit ropey of late.

This year's annual Supporters Direct conference found the organisation at something of a crossroads. The high profile failure of Supporters Trusts at Notts County and Stockport County have caused a deal of unwanted attention to be cast upon SD (even though they are obviously not for responsible for the goings on at specific trusts) and, with continuing concerns about the credentials of some of the owners coming into the game, this year's conference was always going to carry an underlying theme about two subjects: foreign ownership and the question of whether supporter ownership of clubs is always a good thing.

It was as if Birmingham was doing its best to live down to my expectations. Brighton, just after noon, had been warm and sunny a splendid Indian summer's afternoon. By the time I alighted the train at Birmingham International railway station, however, the sky was slate grey and rain was falling.