ThreeMatchBan
The articles section is the heart of Three Match Ban. Here you will find long reads on the birth of professional football in a Lancashire mill town, guides to every side at the 2011 Copa América, and pieces on why co-commentary turned so gloomy. There are tributes to cult heroes, arguments about managers, and reviews of television studios that nobody asked for.
Most pieces began life as a reaction to a weekend's football and have been rewritten with what happened next: who won the tournament, which wonderkid made it and which one ended up in the Conference. Some are pure nostalgia: Ceefax pages, Nike boots from the late 2000s, International Superstar Soccer 64 and the strange joy of a football sticker with a moustache on it.
How the articles are organised
Everything is listed below with the newest at the top. Use the year buttons to jump to a season, or follow a topic from any article to its hub page, such as Aston Villa, Arsenal or the 2010 World Cup. Club crest histories live in the badges section, and the weekly round-ups of back-page puns have their own home in Week in headlines.
What the articles cover
The oldest pieces date from 2009, when the site began as a reaction to whatever had happened at the weekend: a sacking, a strange transfer, a studio pundit saying something odd. Those pieces now read as a record of how football looked at the time, so each one has been brought up to date with what happened next. A preview of a title race ends with the name of the eventual champion, and a profile of a teenage prospect says where the career really went.
Alongside them sit the evergreen pieces that keep finding new readers. The story of Darwen FC explains how a Lancashire mill town helped to make football a paid profession. The two-part history of Premier League club badges, from Arsenal to Manchester United and from Newcastle to Wolves, became the starting point for the full badges section.
Tournaments, television and the things fans collect
There is a full guide to the 2011 Copa América in five parts, from the minnows to the giants, and pieces on European Championships and World Cups that look at the players and the politics as much as the results. Television gets its own strand: reviews of studio line-ups, the death of Ceefax, Saturday-lunchtime shows and the change in tone of co-commentary.
Then there are the objects. Football boots, video games such as International Superstar Soccer 64, annuals from the late 1950s and stickers with moustaches all have a place. These are the pieces that usually start a conversation in the comments, because almost everyone remembers the same boot or the same cartridge.
Reading in order
The list below runs newest first. The year buttons narrow it to a single season, which is the quickest way to find a piece you half remember. Every article also links to the topic hubs it belongs to, so a story about a club leads to everything else written about that club.
A few pieces stand slightly apart: the guest columns, the occasional sponsored post, which is always labelled as such, and the lists that started as a bit of fun, such as the best team names in world football. They are all here in the same list, because they are all part of the same long conversation about the game, and many of them still attract new comments years after they were written.
If a piece mentions a player with a profile or a club with a badge history, the link is in the text, so it is easy to move from a match report to the wider story without searching.