On the eve of the first match in the two-test series on Wednesday, captain Brendon McCullum said the final place would go to either Doug Bracewell or left-arm spinner Bruce Martin, who played in the drawn three-match series in New Zealand this year.

Rain is forecast throughout the first four days of the match and the prospect of a shortened game will also influence the selectors’ decision with Kane Williamson able to chip in with a few overs of off-spin if Martin is omitted.

Martin bowled well and batted usefully in the first two tests at home after making his debut at the advanced age of 32. But he failed to take a wicket in the third test in Auckland, when New Zealand fell just short of winning the series, and was expensive in the tour match against the England Lions in Leicester.

“We’ve got 12 at the moment and that’s just the balance issue for us,” McCullum said. “We’re trying to work out whether to play the four seamers or have Bruce and the same setup we brought into the three tests at home. That’s something we are going to look at in the morning. Either way we have got good options.”

New Zealand made a horrible start to the year when Ross Taylor withdrew from their tour of South Africa after he was replaced as captain by McCullum. They were then bowled out before lunch for 45 on the opening day of the first test.

However, they then had the better of England in the first test at home and eventually drew the series 0-0 after they needed only more wicket to win in Auckland.

HARDER CHALLENGE

“Obviously that series back home was really good for us. We learned a lot as a team. We know that this challenge is going to be a lot different and it’s going to be a lot harder as well,” McCullum told a news conference.

“We know we are going to have improve as a team on our performance. We know that they (England) are going to be a tough proposition but we believe we have got some guys who will be favoured by these conditions as well.”

McCullum said his relationship with Taylor, New Zealand’s premier batsman who returned for the home series against England, was fine.

“Ross has been great since we arrived in the UK, he’s been outstanding. Ross is determined to perform well throughout this series,” he said.

“We had a discussion when we first arrived here and it was a really good discussion. We have some great moments over the last 10 to 12 years and some great moments both on and off the field.”

McCullum, now batting at number six after a brief spell as an opener, scored 248 at an average of 82.67 in the home series in England. His aggressive batsmanship was paralleled by an attacking and innovative approach as captain.

“It’s early days,” he said. “For us as a group, we know that we are going to struggle to go to go toe to toe with the big boys of world cricket playing our style of game for long periods.

“We have been slow starters, we have tried to address that with our preparation on this tour. But these conditions are more familiar to us than they are on the Indian sub-continent, conditions where we have been caught on the hop.”

(Editing by Alison Wildey)

On the eve of the first match in the two-test series on Wednesday, captain Brendon McCullum said the final place would go to either Doug Bracewell or left-arm spinner Bruce Martin, who played in the drawn three-match series in New Zealand this year.

Rain is forecast throughout the first four days of the match and the prospect of a shortened game will also influence the selectors’ decision with Kane Williamson able to chip in with a few overs of off-spin if Martin is omitted.

Martin bowled well and batted usefully in the first two tests at home after making his debut at the advanced age of 32. But he failed to take a wicket in the third test in Auckland, when New Zealand fell just short of winning the series, and was expensive in the tour match against the England Lions in Leicester.

“We’ve got 12 at the moment and that’s just the balance issue for us,” McCullum said. “We’re trying to work out whether to play the four seamers or have Bruce and the same setup we brought into the three tests at home. That’s something we are going to look at in the morning. Either way we have got good options.”

New Zealand made a horrible start to the year when Ross Taylor withdrew from their tour of South Africa after he was replaced as captain by McCullum. They were then bowled out before lunch for 45 on the opening day of the first test.

However, they then had the better of England in the first test at home and eventually drew the series 0-0 after they needed only more wicket to win in Auckland.

HARDER CHALLENGE

“Obviously that series back home was really good for us. We learned a lot as a team. We know that this challenge is going to be a lot different and it’s going to be a lot harder as well,” McCullum told a news conference.

“We know we are going to have improve as a team on our performance. We know that they (England) are going to be a tough proposition but we believe we have got some guys who will be favoured by these conditions as well.”

McCullum said his relationship with Taylor, New Zealand’s premier batsman who returned for the home series against England, was fine.

“Ross has been great since we arrived in the UK, he’s been outstanding. Ross is determined to perform well throughout this series,” he said.

“We had a discussion when we first arrived here and it was a really good discussion. We have some great moments over the last 10 to 12 years and some great moments both on and off the field.”

McCullum, now batting at number six after a brief spell as a an opener, scored 248 at an average of 82.67 in the home series in England. His aggressive batsmanship was paralleled by an attacking and innovative approach as captain.

“It’s early days,” he said. “For us as a group, we know that we are going to struggle to go to go toe to toe with the big boys of world cricket playing our style of game for long periods.

“We have been slow starters, we have tried to address that with our preparation on this tour. But these conditions are more familiar to us than they are on the Indian sub-continent, conditions where we have been caught on the hop.” (Editing by Alison Wildey)

Although rugby union and the world champion All Blacks have cast a permanent shadow over the summer game, New Zealand have consistently punched above their weight, particularly in the one-day arena.

All their virtues of stubborn tenacity and the ability to maximise limited resources came into play this year when just one more England wicket would have meant an upset series victory at home.

Their unexpected heroics after a horrendous start to the year means that Thursday’s first test at Lord’s has become, in effect, the fourth in a five-match series currently standing at 0-0.

An historical downside of New Zealand cricket has been an extraordinary ability to descend into factional infighting and feuding.

The latest imbroglio came when the country’s best batsman Ross Taylor withdrew from a tour of South Africa after he was deposed as national captain in favour of Brendon McCullum.

In Taylor’s absence, New Zealand were bowled out for 45 before lunch on the first morning of the first test, equalling the 12th lowest test innings total.

Taylor returned to the team for the one-day and test series against England but, after a century in the second one-day international, his form was modest and he scored only 94 in five test innings.

Tellingly, he hinted that all was still not well when he said after the series: “I wouldn’t say I’m as comfortable as I would like to be, but I guess that will improve with time.”

GRIPPING SERIES

The issue flared up again when former New Zealand batsman John Parker, who played 36 tests in the 1970s, released a document questioning decisions made by New Zealand Cricket (NZC), including the Taylor ousting.

NZC countered by saying the document “consists of hearsay, speculation and rumour and appears to concentrate almost entirely on attempting to re-litigate the issues surrounding the replacement of Ross Taylor as Black Caps captain”.

Taylor and McCullum both left the Indian Premier League early to join the tour of England, although persistent rain during the match against the England Lions last weekend meant they have had only one innings before the Lord’s test.

McCullum, still only 31, is effectively in his third incarnation as a test player. He started as a wicketkeeper-batsman before injuries took their toll, moved to opener in 2010, where he scored his highest test score of 225 against India, and batted number six against England.

The latter position seems ideally suited to one of the world’s most exhilarating attacking batsmen, whose strength, bat speed and enterprise earned him 248 runs at an average of 82.67 against England this year.

“I thought we deserved to win the series against England. The guys were absolutely heartbroken by not getting across the line. But it was one of those things, it was a gripping series.” McCullum said on arrival in England.

“From where we were at the start of that series, especially after a tough South African tour, to where we sat at the end, we could take an immense amount of pride in the characteristics that we showed on the field.”

New Zealand, as former Australia captain Steve Waugh once pointed out with a hint of exasperation, like to assume the role of underdogs. McCullum clearly prefers to accentuate the positives.

Asked about the 1980s New Zealand side, which was undefeated at home for a decade and recorded series wins both home and away against England and Australia, McCullum said it was hard to compare eras.

“The team of the early 1980s achieved some excellent things,” he said. “But these guys are excellent players and have the potential to be equal, if not better, than what they were.”

(Editing by Greg Stutchbury)

Although rugby union and the world champion All Blacks have cast a permanent shadow over the summer game, New Zealand have consistently punched above their weight, particularly in the one-day arena.

All their virtues of stubborn tenacity and the ability to maximise limited resources came into play this year when just one more England wicket would have meant an upset series victory at home.

Their unexpected heroics after a horrendous start to the year means that Thursday’s first test at Lord’s has become, in effect, the fourth in a five-match series currently standing at 0-0.

An historical downside of New Zealand cricket has been an extraordinary ability to descend into factional infighting and feuding.

The latest imbroglio came when the country’s best batsman Ross Taylor withdrew from a tour of South Africa after he was deposed as national captain in favour of Brendon McCullum.

In Taylor’s absence, New Zealand were bowled out for 45 before lunch on the first morning of the first test, equalling the 12th lowest test innings total.

Taylor returned to the team for the one-day and test series against England but, after a century in the second one-day international, his form was modest and he scored only 94 in five test innings.

Tellingly, he hinted that all was still not well when he said after the series: “I wouldn’t say I’m as comfortable as I would like to be, but I guess that will improve with time.”

GRIPPING SERIES

The issue flared up again when former New Zealand batsman John Parker, who played 36 tests in the 1970s, released a document questioning decisions made by New Zealand Cricket (NZC), including the Taylor ousting.

NZC countered by saying the document “consists of hearsay, speculation and rumour and appears to concentrate almost entirely on attempting to re-litigate the issues surrounding the replacement of Ross Taylor as Black Caps captain”.

Taylor and McCullum both left the Indian Premier League early to join the tour of England, although persistent rain during the match against the England Lions last weekend meant they have had only one innings before the Lord’s test.

McCullum, still only 31, is effectively in his third incarnation as a test player. He started as a wicketkeeper-batsman before injuries took their toll, moved to opener in 2010, where he scored his highest test score of 225 against India, and batted number six against England.

The latter position seems ideally suited to one of the world’s most exhilarating attacking batsmen, whose strength, bat speed and enterprise earned him 248 runs at an average of 82.67 against England this year.

“I thought we deserved to win the series against England. The guys were absolutely heartbroken by not getting across the line. But it was one of those things, it was a gripping series.” McCullum said on arrival in England.

“From where we were at the start of that series, especially after a tough South African tour, to where we sat at the end, we could take an immense amount of pride in the characteristics that we showed on the field.”

New Zealand, as former Australia captain Steve Waugh once pointed out with a hint of exasperation, like to assume the role of underdogs. McCullum clearly prefers to accentuate the positives.

Asked about the 1980s New Zealand side, which was undefeated at home for a decade and recorded series wins both home and away against England and Australia, McCullum said it was hard to compare eras.

“The team of the early 1980s achieved some excellent things,” he said. “But these guys are excellent players and have the potential to be equal, if not better, than what they were.”

(Editing by Greg Stutchbury)

Copper smelting succeeded ship building as the city’s primary industry and the disparity between a bleak industrial centre and the attractions of Swansea Bay led poet Dylan Thomas to describe his birthplace as an “ugly, lovely town”.

Modern Swansea contains a fresh contradiction. In a small nation whose sporting identity has been forged on the rugby field, a vibrant football club teetering on the brink of oblivion 10 years ago are riding high in the English Premier League and will play in Europe next season.

Swansea City’s 5-0 win over Bradford City in the League Cup final at Wembley on February 24 propelled them into next season’s Europa League and prompted a congratulatory message from Michael Douglas at the Oscars ceremony later the same day.

Douglas is married to Swansea-born actress Catherine Zeta-Jones and there has already been talk in the city of a Hollywood movie, dizzy heights for a club which just escaped relegation to non-league football on the final day of the 2002-3 season

“It’s an amazing story and it’s amazing to live through it,” said Peter Stead, a Swansea writer and broadcaster. “We pinch ourselves, it is a miracle whatever gods we pray to.

“I think history is important. I’ve watched the Swans since 1957 and the remarkable feature about the Swans in 1957, when they were a second-division side and had been so for several years and would remain so for some time, was the local identity they had.”

Stead said nearly all the footballers in Swansea had come from terraced houses close to the city centre.

“SUPERB SCHOOLBOY FOOTBALL”

“What you find as you move out from Swansea, as you move five (eight kms) or six or eight miles out, the villages tend to be rugby. In the villages they tended to be more Welsh-speaking and more rugby playing. But the inner suburbs, the places where you could walk into the centre of the city, they were football,” Stead said.

“Somehow or other, Swansea had superb schoolboy football in the 1940s and 50s, quite remarkably successful. They won the national British championships on a couple of occasions. They came close in other years.

“They had huge crowds, they would have over 20,000 to watch the schoolboys play. I don’t quite know why that is, Swansea was quite prosperous in the 40s and 50s, Swansea was never hit as badly in the depression as some of the other towns because of the diverse industrial base.

“Swansea was a dynamic place in the 40s and 50s and somehow the culture of schoolboy football developed which went on to produce five or six, and this isn’t putting too much of a spin on it, five or six of the best players in the world.

“One or two of them didn’t play for Swansea but came through the schoolboy football: John Charles, the greatest, Jack Kelsey, the Arsenal goalkeeper, Terry Medwin who went on to play for Spurs, it was John Charles’s brother Mel who played for Swansea.

“Above all was Ivor Allchurch, the golden boy of Wales football who was generally regarded as one of the best inside forwards in the country in the 1950s and early 60s, so there was a remarkable generation of schoolboy football which produced great players and out of that culture there was respect for a certain kind of football.

“It was the passing game, it was cultured football. Cultured football became the hallmark of Swansea football.”

Spectators who first watched Swansea City at the Vetch Field, eventually replaced by the Liberty Stadium in 2005, were accommodated on spoilheaps of ash and brick while their team played on a cinder pitch.

The Liberty Stadium is based on a large copper slag heap and a modest statue of Allchurch sits to one side of the main entrance, serving both as a memorial and a meeting point.

The stadium, which seats 20,500, is shared with the Ospreys regional rugby side who attract crowds of some 7,000. Such is the demand for Premier League football that the club plans to add 12,000 more seats. It is the second smallest ground in the Premier League, ahead of only Queens Park Rangers’ Loftus Road.

Underpinning the on-field success of a stylish, attractive football side, is a financial structure which has been hailed as a model for the Football League.

This month, Swansea City announced a record profit of 15.9 million pounds ($24.31 million) for the six months to the end of November 2012. Turnover, with the exclusion of player sales, rose to 28.5 million pounds, an increase of 11.5 percent.

In a country where the sense of community remains strong, the Supporters Trust, which was formed in 2001, has a 20 percent holding in the club and an elected member on the board of directors.

“The perfect example of how a club can thrive and survive – through inspired management, clever recruitment and prudent housekeeping,” a financial analysis of the 20 Premier League sides in The Times newspaper concluded. “Next season brings more challenges.”

Stead said dropping out of the Football League a decade ago would have spelt the end of the club as a football force.

“Everybody knew if the Swans had gone out they would never have come back. In England some of these smaller teams drop out of the league, you know in two or three years they are going to bounce back. Swansea is at the end of the railway line,” he said.

WELSH FOOTBALL HERO

“This sea town is my world,” Thomas concluded. Swansea remains the home of the man revered in the city as a Welsh football hero and acclaimed in later life as a saviour of the local club.

Mel Nurse, 76, was a combative and skilled centre-half in the 1950s and 60s who bought and sold properties in his spare time and is now the proprietor of the Seahaven Hotel roughly 200 metres from the derelict Vetch.

In 1986, Nurse helped to rescue the club, which had been wound up by a court order, and in 2001 he was the public face of the consortium who reclaimed the Swans from the Australian-based Londoner Tony Petty who had bought them from chairman Michael Lewis for one pound and quickly managed to antagonise an entire community.

The Seahaven Hotel is one of a cluster of small hotels and bed-and-breakfasts on Oystermouth Road adjoining the bay and on fine days Nurse will sit in a deckchair in front of his property and chat to passers-by.

A bitter spring, which gripped the British Isles well into April, has kept Nurse indoors and on a quiet Easter Sunday morning he sits in the empty, darkened bar of his hotel, crowded with photographs and memorabilia, and talks fluently for more than an hour about a life in football.

“I was brought up in a council house, I left school at 15,” he said. “The only two things I was interested in when I was young was sport, any kind of sport – I was a better cricketer than footballer – and carpentry. Always top of the class in carpentry. I loved it, I loved woodwork but I also loved sport as well.

“I played for Swansea schoolboys for two years, I also played for the Welsh schoolboys for two years and when I left school I could have gone to Arsenal, Chelsea, West Bromwich and Bristol Rovers.

“Bristol Rovers is a nonentity at the moment but it was a big club. West Brom was a first division club, Arsenal was and Chelsea was.

“We had gone to Ireland with the Welsh schoolboys. Ireland was behind the times in those days – horse and carts down the roads, very slow progress. It was carts and tracks and things.”

He pauses, and does a quick calculation.

“Sixty years ago, bloody hell, 60 years ago…they had shawls on their shoulders, it was different altogether.

“I came home at eight o’clock at night, it was getting dark and I walk through the door and as I walk through the door my mother comes to meet me and says ‘Son there’s a gentleman from the Swans come up to see you’.

“Oh God, I prayed. Honest, things in life, you look back at your life, things in life that are very important to you, it’s hard to explain to you, the one thing that I wanted to happen wasn’t happening. All of a sudden I walk through the door and it tells me it is happening. I didn’t want to go to those four clubs, I wanted to go to the Swans but nobody from the Swans had come down to see me. So I didn’t think they wanted me.”

Nurse, still a powerfully built man with a Welsh dragon tattooed on each forearm, shares Bobby Charlton’s birthdate of October 11, 1937. He declined an invitation to join England’s leading international goalscorer at Manchester United two years after the 1958 Munich air disaster, in which eight players and three members of the United staff died.

He did eventually leave for Middlesbrough in 1962, returning six years later and helped Swansea to get into the third division in 1970.

“Football has been my life,” Nurse said, pointing to a replica of a newspaper front-page headline from 2001 reading “Mel saved our beloved Swans.”

“Why do you think I did what I did over there?”

“Tony Petty bought the club, I offered 400,000 pounds to buy the club. Nobody knows, nobody said that. And Mike Lewis turned it down.

“I’m not concerned who owns the club, I want the club to survive. That’s what I think about, it’s as simple as that. I don’t want to own a club, I didn’t want to run the club.

“I’d had it all, I’ve had a fantastic life when you look back, it’s brilliant.”

“Everything I told you is about survival of the club. The progress of the club is down to the people who are running it now. Fantastic, I can’t compliment them enough. I know what they have done because I was involved in similar situations in the past and we still struggled to progress.

“I can’t put it into words what I felt about the club, it was my world.”

OLDEST SUPPORTER

Freezing weather has deterred the club’s oldest supporter from attending some home games, including an attractive fixture against Tottenham Hotspur over the Easter weekend.

John Conibear lives in Newport, the first port of call in Wales for travellers heading west, and on Swansea home match days he would normally make the trip with his daughter, son-in-law and grandson.

“It has been particularly cold and I’m getting on a bit,” Conibear said by telephone. “I’m 90 now. Getting up is the problem.”

Conibear watched his first match from his mother’s lap at the Vetch in 1925.

“I remember the last game I went to together with her and after that I used to go on my own; playing with the school team I used to get a free ticket and throw the ticket over the wall and someone else would get in for nothing,” he said.

“South Wales was full of football in the 1920s. And then, unfortunately, we had the general strike in 1926.

“That was followed by a very bitter coal strike which went on for another 12 months or more and that was followed by the world recession. The heart was knocked out of the country pretty well.”

Conibear watched the League Cup final, the greatest day in the Swans’ 101-year history, on television.

“Aye, it was exciting wasn’t it? Very exciting,” he said. “But I didn’t go. I’ve been to Wembley several times and when you get to Wembley there’s still a lot of walking and I couldn’t face it.”

Also watching on television was the man without whom the Wembley triumph would not have been possible.

James Thomas, now an ambulance driver in Port Talbot, prevented Swansea City from dropping into the probably permanent anonymity of the football conference on the final day of the 2002-3 season with a hat-trick in a 4-2 win over Hull at the Vetch to secure his team’s League Two (third division) place.

The team was captained by Roberto Martinez, one of the Spaniards who were to influence a club who have always prided themselves on their attractive football, and managed by Brian Flynn.

Flynn was succeeded by Kenny Jackett, who took Swansea to League One in their last season at the Vetch. Jackett was in turn replaced by Martinez and in 2008 Swansea won the League One title.

Martinez left for Wigan in 2009 to the dismay of the clubs’ supporters. He was followed by Paulo Sousa, then Brendan Rodgers who guided Swansea into the Premier League through the playoffs.

Last season Swansea finished 11th, Rodgers moved to Liverpool and club chairman Huw Jenkins appointed Michael Laudrup, named the best Danish player ever by the Danish Football Association in 2006.

Stead said the Swans had caught the imagination of a new generation at the start of the new century.

“With Martinez came the realisation that football was European, the football has taken off and the bandwagon is quite amazing,” he said.

Three Spaniards started against Bradford City – Angel Rangel, Pablo Hernandez and Michu, who has proved the bargain of the season after he was bought from Celta Vigo for two million pounds ($3.05 million) and is fourth in the Premier League goalscorers’ table with 17 goals. Chico Flores was injured.

FEAR AND LOATHING

Laudrup, who has added a steely resilience to Swansea’s style, has welcomed the promotion of Cardiff City this month to the Premier League.

“I don’t think I’m the one to be asked what it fully means for Welsh football because I’m a newcomer and have only been here eight months,” he said.

“But even from the outside you can still see this is a great achievement for a small country like Wales to have two teams in one of biggest leagues in the world.”

Hardcore Swansea supporters will be less welcoming towards their compatriots.

“If the most important element in the wellbeing of any football supporter is the prosperity of their own team, a good second is a clearly defined object of fear and loathing – a role filled with great efficiency by Cardiff,” observed Huw Richards in a pithy history of the Swans entitled “The Swansea City Alphabet”.

Huw Bowen, Swans’ fan and professor of history at Swansea University who watched Nurse with awe in his first visit to the Vetch at the age of 10, said the wider impact of Swansea’s success had been significant.

“At the university we’re bucking the trend,” he said. “Application numbers across the United Kingdom are down by two percent this year, because of tuition fees the figure across Wales is particularly dismal; our applications are up 25 percent.

“Our recruitment officers report, particularly at international fairs, that they are getting a lot more interest from students who are just generally aware that something is going on in Swansea because of football.

“There’s a glamour, the fact that the Swans play sexy football and they play in white. They look like Real Madrid and everybody says they play like Barcelona.”

(Editing by Clare Fallon)

Copper smelting succeeded ship building as the city’s primary industry and the disparity between a bleak industrial centre and the attractions of Swansea Bay led poet Dylan Thomas to describe his birthplace as an “ugly, lovely town”.

Modern Swansea contains a fresh contradiction. In a small nation whose sporting identity has been forged on the rugby field, a vibrant soccer club teetering on the brink of oblivion 10 years ago are riding high in the English Premier League and will play in Europe next season.

Swansea City’s 5-0 win over Bradford City in the League Cup final at Wembley on Feb. 24 propelled them into next season’s Europa League and prompted a congratulatory message from Michael Douglas at the Oscars ceremony later the same day.

Douglas is married to Swansea-born actress Catherine Zeta-Jones and there has already been talk in the city of a Hollywood movie, dizzy heights for a club which just escaped relegation to non-league football on the final day of the 2002-3 season

“It’s an amazing story and it’s amazing to live through it,” said Peter Stead, a Swansea writer and broadcaster. “We pinch ourselves, it is a miracle whatever gods we pray to.

“I think history is important. I’ve watched the Swans since 1957 and the remarkable feature about the Swans in 1957, when they were a second-division side and had been so for several years and would remain so for some time, was the local identity they had.”

Stead said nearly all the footballers in Swansea had come from terraced houses close to the city centre.

“SUPERB SCHOOLBOY FOOTBALL”

“What you find as you move out from Swansea, as you move five (eight kms) or six or eight miles out, the villages tend to be rugby. In the villages they tended to be more Welsh-speaking and more rugby playing. But the inner suburbs, the places where you could walk into the centre of the city, they were football,” Stead said.

“Somehow or other, Swansea had superb schoolboy football in the 1940s and 50s, quite remarkably successful. They won the national British championships on a couple of occasions. They came close in other years.

“They had huge crowds, they would have over 20,000 to watch the schoolboys play. I don’t quite know why that is, Swansea was quite prosperous in the 40s and 50s, Swansea was never hit as badly in the depression as some of the other towns because of the diverse industrial base.

“Swansea was a dynamic place in the 40s and 50s and somehow the culture of schoolboy football developed which went on to produce five or six, and this isn’t putting too much of a spin on it, five or six of the best players in the world.

“One or two of them didn’t play for Swansea but came through the schoolboy football: John Charles, the greatest, Jack Kelsey, the Arsenal goalkeeper, Terry Medwin who went on to play for Spurs, it was John Charles’s brother Mel who played for Swansea.

“Above all was Ivor Allchurch, the golden boy of Wales football who was generally regarded as one of the best inside forwards in the country in the 1950s and early 60s, so there was a remarkable generation of schoolboy football which produced great players and out of that culture there was respect for a certain kind of football.

“It was the passing game, it was cultured football. Cultured football became the hallmark of Swansea football.”

Spectators who first watched Swansea City at the Vetch Field, eventually replaced by the Liberty Stadium in 2005, were accommodated on spoilheaps of ash and brick while their team played on a cinder pitch.

The Liberty Stadium is based on a large copper slag heap and a modest statue of Allchurch sits to one side of the main entrance, serving both as a memorial and a meeting point.

The stadium, which seats 20,500, is shared with the Ospreys regional rugby side who attract crowds of some 7,000. Such is the demand for Premier League football that the club plans to add 12,000 more seats. It is the second smallest ground in the Premier League, ahead of only Queens Park Rangers’ Loftus Road.

Underpinning the on-field success of a stylish, attractive football side, is a financial structure which has been hailed as a model for the Football League.

This month, Swansea City announced a record profit of 15.9 million pounds ($24.31 million) for the six months to the end of November 2012. Turnover, with the exclusion of player sales, rose to 28.5 million pounds, an increase of 11.5 percent.

In a country where the sense of community remains strong, the Supporters Trust, which was formed in 2001, has a 20 percent holding in the club and an elected member on the board of directors.

“The perfect example of how a club can thrive and survive – through inspired management, clever recruitment and prudent housekeeping,” a financial analysis of the 20 Premier League sides in The Times newspaper concluded. “Next season brings more challenges.”

Stead said dropping out of the Football League a decade ago would have spelt the end of the club as a soccer force.

“Everybody knew if the Swans had gone out they would never have come back. In England some of these smaller teams drop out of the league, you know in two or three years they are going to bounce back. Swansea is at the end of the railway line,” he said.

WELSH SOCCER HERO

“This sea town is my world,” Thomas concluded. Swansea remains the home of the man revered in the city as a Welsh soccer hero and acclaimed in later life as a saviour of the local club.

Mel Nurse, 76, was a combative and skilled centre-half in the 1950s and 60s who bought and sold properties in his spare time and is now the proprietor of the Seahaven Hotel roughly 200 metres from the derelict Vetch.

In 1986, Nurse helped to rescue the club, which had been wound up by a court order, and in 2001 he was the public face of the consortium who reclaimed the Swans from the Australian-based Londoner Tony Petty who had bought them from chairman Michael Lewis for one pound and quickly managed to antagonise an entire community.

The Seahaven Hotel is one of a cluster of small hotels and bed-and-breakfasts on Oystermouth Road adjoining the bay and on fine days Nurse will sit in a deckchair in front of his property and chat to passers-by.

A bitter spring, which gripped the British Isles well into April, has kept Nurse indoors and on a quiet Easter Sunday morning he sits in the empty, darkened bar of his hotel, crowded with photographs and memorabilia, and talks fluently for more than an hour about a life in football.

“I was brought up in a council house, I left school at 15,” he said. “The only two things I was interested in when I was young was sport, any kind of sport – I was a better cricketer than footballer – and carpentry. Always top of the class in carpentry. I loved it, I loved woodwork but I also loved sport as well.

“I played for Swansea schoolboys for two years, I also played for the Welsh schoolboys for two years and when I left school I could have gone to Arsenal, Chelsea, West Bromwich and Bristol Rovers.

“Bristol Rovers is a nonentity at the moment but it was a big club. West Brom was a first division club, Arsenal was and Chelsea was.

“We had gone to Ireland with the Welsh schoolboys. Ireland was behind the times in those days – horse and carts down the roads, very slow progress. It was carts and tracks and things.”

He pauses, and does a quick calculation.

“Sixty years ago, bloody hell, 60 years ago…they had shawls on their shoulders, it was different altogether.

“I came home at eight o’clock at night, it was getting dark and I walk through the door and as I walk through the door my mother comes to meet me and says ‘Son there’s a gentleman from the Swans come up to see you’.

“Oh God, I prayed. Honest, things in life, you look back at your life, things in life that are very important to you, it’s hard to explain to you, the one thing that I wanted to happen wasn’t happening. All of a sudden I walk through the door and it tells me it is happening. I didn’t want to go to those four clubs, I wanted to go to the Swans but nobody from the Swans had come down to see me. So I didn’t think they wanted me.”

Nurse, still a powerfully built man with a Welsh dragon tattooed on each forearm, shares Bobby Charlton’s birthdate of Oct. 11, 1937. He declined an invitation to join England’s leading international goalscorer at Manchester United two years after the 1958 Munich air disaster, in which eight players and three members of the United staff died.

He did eventually leave for Middlesbrough in 1962, returning six years later and helped Swansea to get into the third division in 1970.

“Football has been my life,” Nurse said, pointing to a replica of a newspaper front-page headline from 2001 reading “Mel saved our beloved Swans.”

“Why do you think I did what I did over there?”

“Tony Petty bought the club, I offered 400,000 pounds to buy the club. Nobody knows, nobody said that. And Mike Lewis turned it down.

“I’m not concerned who owns the club, I want the club to survive. That’s what I think about, it’s as simple as that. I don’t want to own a club, I didn’t want to run the club.

“I’d had it all, I’ve had a fantastic life when you look back, it’s brilliant.”

“Everything I told you is about survival of the club. The progress of the club is down to the people who are running it now. Fantastic, I can’t compliment them enough. I know what they have done because I was involved in similar situations in the past and we still struggled to progress.

“I can’t put it into words what I felt about the club, it was my world.”

OLDEST SUPPORTER

Freezing weather has deterred the club’s oldest supporter from attending some home games, including an attractive fixture against Tottenham Hotspur over the Easter weekend.

John Conibear lives in Newport, the first port of call in Wales for travellers heading west, and on Swansea home match days he would normally make the trip with his daughter, son-in-law and grandson.

“It has been particularly cold and I’m getting on a bit,” Conibear said by telephone. “I’m 90 now. Getting up is the problem.”

Conibear watched his first match from his mother’s lap at the Vetch in 1925.

“I remember the last game I went to together with her and after that I used to go on my own; playing with the school team I used to get a free ticket and throw the ticket over the wall and someone else would get in for nothing,” he said.

“South Wales was full of football in the 1920s. And then, unfortunately, we had the general strike in 1926.

“That was followed by a very bitter coal strike which went on for another 12 months or more and that was followed by the world recession. The heart was knocked out of the country pretty well.”

Conibear watched the League Cup final, the greatest day in the Swans’ 101-year history, on television.

“Aye, it was exciting wasn’t it? Very exciting,” he said. “But I didn’t go. I’ve been to Wembley several times and when you get to Wembley there’s still a lot of walking and I couldn’t face it.”

Also watching on television was the man without whom the Wembley triumph would not have been possible.

James Thomas, now an ambulance driver in Port Talbot, prevented Swansea City from dropping into the probably permanent anonymity of the football conference on the final day of the 2002-3 season with a hat-trick in a 4-2 win over Hull at the Vetch to secure his team’s League Two (third division) place.

The team was captained by Roberto Martinez, one of the Spaniards who were to influence a club who have always prided themselves on their attractive football, and managed by Brian Flynn.

Flynn was succeeded by Kenny Jackett, who took Swansea to League One in their last season at the Vetch. Jackett was in turn replaced by Martinez and in 2008 Swansea won the League One title.

Martinez left for Wigan in 2009 to the dismay of the clubs’ supporters. He was followed by Paulo Sousa, then Brendan Rodgers who guided Swansea into the Premier League through the playoffs.

Last season Swansea finished 11th, Rodgers moved to Liverpool and club chairman Huw Jenkins appointed Michael Laudrup, named the best Danish player ever by the Danish Football Association in 2006.

Stead said the Swans had caught the imagination of a new generation at the start of the new century.

“With Martinez came the realisation that football was European, the football has taken off and the bandwagon is quite amazing,” he said.

Three Spaniards started against Bradford City – Angel Rangel, Pablo Hernandez and Michu, who has proved the bargain of the season after he was bought from Celta Vigo for two million pounds ($3.05 million) and is fourth in the Premier League goalscorers’ table with 17 goals. Chico Flores was injured.

FEAR AND LOATHING

Laudrup, who has added a steely resilience to Swansea’s style, has welcomed the promotion of Cardiff City this month to the Premier League.

“I don’t think I’m the one to be asked what it fully means for Welsh football because I’m a newcomer and have only been here eight months,” he said.

“But even from the outside you can still see this is a great achievement for a small country like Wales to have two teams in one of biggest leagues in the world.”

Hardcore Swansea supporters will be less welcoming towards their compatriots.

“If the most important element in the wellbeing of any football supporter is the prosperity of their own team, a good second is a clearly defined object of fear and loathing – a role filled with great efficiency by Cardiff,” observed Huw Richards in a pithy history of the Swans entitled “The Swansea City Alphabet”.

Huw Bowen, Swans’ fan and professor of history at Swansea University who watched Nurse with awe in his first visit to the Vetch at the age of 10, said the wider impact of Swansea’s success had been significant.

“At the university we’re bucking the trend,” he said. “Application numbers across the United Kingdom are down by two percent this year, because of tuition fees the figure across Wales is particularly dismal; our applications are up 25 percent.

“Our recruitment officers report, particularly at international fairs, that they are getting a lot more interest from students who are just generally aware that something is going on in Swansea because of soccer.

“There’s a glamour, the fact that the Swans play sexy football and they play in white. They look like Real Madrid and everybody says they play like Barcelona.” ($1 = 0.6564 British pounds) (Editing by Clare Fallon)

Of more pressing relevance to those attracted by the second word in the title of the new publication was the warning that fielders stopping the ball with their hat would automatically incur a five-run penalty.

And in an acknowledgment that gambling had been part of their game since its inception, readers were told that umpires were not allowed to bet.

The primary purpose of an unpretentious little volume, costing a shilling with a penny postage, was to collate the statistics of a bat-and-ball game between teams of varying numbers which was evolving into the summer game of the British Empire.

In 1869, the possessive apostrophe was shifted one space to the right and the following year the founder’s name was added to create John Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanack. It survives today in its 150th edition, enclosed by the familiar primrose cover, as Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack.

Cricket’s enduring attraction is due in large part to its statistics, faithfully recorded each year by Wisden and similar in importance to those in baseball, which shares a similarly distinguished literary heritage.

Wisden, through its editor’s notes, has developed into the custodian and conscience of a sport which during the late Victorian era was made to carry more moral weight than any game can usefully bear through such strictures as “playing a straight bat”.

Lawrence Booth, the publication’s youngest editor for 72 years, faces the challenge of maintaining its authority and importance at a time when the internet and social media are transforming the journalistic and publishing worlds.

SOCIAL HISTORY

Booth, 38, said in an interview his task had been to take the annual, which he is editing for the second time, into the next phase of its evolution, particularly since the arrival of the wildly successful Cricinfo website.

“By that I don’t just mean having a Facebook and Twitter page, all those kinds of things, but respond to the challenge posed by the fact that Cricinfo can update its statistics by the second and here we are an annual where some of the statistics are out of date even before we publish them,” he said.

“So it was really managing that transition, trimming down the records section, moving more of those to our website but also the flipside of that was beefing up the literary side of Wisden,” added Booth.

“We reminded people that a lot of good stuff to read in there was not just the records of a statistical book but that in an age of instant comment, I guess, it still has an important role to play in being able to step back like the authoritative voice it always has done.

“So it was a bit of building on that tradition while also responding to the internet demands of the day.”

Wisden has always served as an invaluable social history of class-obsessed Britain and a repository of some of the finest writing on the game. Sometimes it is both.

The editor’s notes for the 100th edition in 1963 at the advent of the swinging 60s did not welcome the abolition of the distinction between gentlemen (amateurs) and players (professionals).

“Beyond a Boundary” by the Trinidadian Marxist CLR James, published in the same year, was acclaimed in Wisden by the peerless English radio commentator and writer John Arlott as the finest cricket book ever written.

TEST OF TIME

This year’s edition contains a remarkable piece by Christian Ryan entitled “The Fastest Spell of All?”, detailing how a grouchy and hungover Jeff Thomson ripped an opposition side apart, at times literally, in a Sydney club match.

Book of the year is “Bookie, Gambler, Fixer, Spy” by Ed Hawkins, a compelling if consistently depressing account of the illegal cricket gambling industry on the Indian sub-continent.

South Africans Hashim Amla, Jacques Kallis and Dale Steyn, West Indian Marlon Samuels and Englishman Nick Compton are the five cricketers of the year.

Australian captain Michael Clarke, who will lead his country in this year’s Ashes series in England if his chronic back complaint permits, is the international cricketer of the year after four test double centuries in 2012.

Booth’s task is both to edit a publication and write editor’s notes which will stand the test of time.

“It’s slightly frightening,” he said. “I could write precisely the same thing in the Daily Mail (newspaper) and no one would bat an eyelid.

“But the moment it appears in the Wisden notes it’s international news. You’re aware this stuff will be pored over.

“You’re looked at as the conscience of cricket in a way, you care for the game and you’re always looking out for it.

“And of course your judgment might be proved wrong within months. The trick is to not fall into that trap, to be conscious of the hostages to fortune, because Wisden is one massive hostage to fortune. So yeah, it’s a privilege but a scary one.”

(Editing by Nick Mulvenney)

Of more pressing relevance to those attracted by the second word in the title of the new publication was the warning that fielders stopping the ball with their hat would automatically incur a five-run penalty.

And in an acknowledgment that gambling had been part of their game since its inception, readers were told that umpires were not allowed to bet.

The primary purpose of an unpretentious little volume, costing a shilling with a penny postage, was to collate the statistics of a bat-and-ball game between teams of varying numbers which was evolving into the summer game of the British Empire.

In 1869, the possessive apostrophe was shifted one space to the right and the following year the founder’s name was added to create John Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanack. It survives today in its 150th edition, enclosed by the familiar primrose cover, as Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack.

Cricket’s enduring attraction is due in large part to its statistics, faithfully recorded each year by Wisden and similar in importance to those in baseball, which shares a similarly distinguished literary heritage.

Wisden, through its editor’s notes, has developed into the custodian and conscience of a sport which during the late Victorian era was made to carry more moral weight than any game can usefully bear through such strictures as “playing a straight bat”.

Lawrence Booth, the publication’s youngest editor for 72 years, faces the challenge of maintaining its authority and importance at a time when the internet and social media are transforming the journalistic and publishing worlds.

SOCIAL HISTORY

Booth, 38, said in an interview his task had been to take the annual, which he is editing for the second time, into the next phase of its evolution, particularly since the arrival of the wildly successful Cricinfo website.

“By that I don’t just mean having a Facebook and Twitter page, all those kinds of things, but respond to the challenge posed by the fact that Cricinfo can update its statistics by the second and here we are an annual where some of the statistics are out of date even before we publish them,” he said.

“So it was really managing that transition, trimming down the records section, moving more of those to our website but also the flipside of that was beefing up the literary side of Wisden,” added Booth.

“We reminded people that a lot of good stuff to read in there was not just the records of a statistical book but that in an age of instant comment, I guess, it still has an important role to play in being able to step back like the authoritative voice it always has done.

“So it was a bit of building on that tradition while also responding to the internet demands of the day.”

Wisden has always served as an invaluable social history of class-obsessed Britain and a repository of some of the finest writing on the game. Sometimes it is both.

The editor’s notes for the 100th edition in 1963 at the advent of the swinging 60s did not welcome the abolition of the distinction between gentlemen (amateurs) and players (professionals).

“Beyond a Boundary” by the Trinidadian Marxist CLR James, published in the same year, was acclaimed in Wisden by the peerless English radio commentator and writer John Arlott as the finest cricket book ever written.

TEST OF TIME

This year’s edition contains a remarkable piece by Christian Ryan entitled “The Fastest Spell of All?”, detailing how a grouchy and hungover Jeff Thomson ripped an opposition side apart, at times literally, in a Sydney club match.

Book of the year is “Bookie, Gambler, Fixer, Spy” by Ed Hawkins, a compelling if consistently depressing account of the illegal cricket gambling industry on the Indian sub-continent.

South Africans Hashim Amla, Jacques Kallis and Dale Steyn, West Indian Marlon Samuels and Englishman Nick Compton are the five cricketers of the year.

Australian captain Michael Clarke, who will lead his country in this year’s Ashes series in England if his chronic back complaint permits, is the international cricketer of the year after four test double centuries in 2012.

Booth’s task is both to edit a publication and write editor’s notes which will stand the test of time.

“It’s slightly frightening,” he said. “I could write precisely the same thing in the Daily Mail (newspaper) and no one would bat an eyelid.

“But the moment it appears in the Wisden notes it’s international news. You’re aware this stuff will be pored over.

“You’re looked at as the conscience of cricket in a way, you care for the game and you’re always looking out for it.

“And of course your judgment might be proved wrong within months. The trick is to not fall into that trap, to be conscious of the hostages to fortune, because Wisden is one massive hostage to fortune. So yeah, it’s a privilege but a scary one.” (Editing by Nick Mulvenney)

Now that the euphoria of last year’s acclaimed London Olympics has dissipated, however, a spate of troubling stories in the first quarter of 2013 show an altogether darker and more disturbing side to a glamorous, multi-billion-dollar industry.

In January, American cyclist Lance Armstrong admitted in a television interview that he had doped before each of his record seven Tour de France victories.

His confession after years of denial followed the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s (USADA) decision to strip him of the title and accuse him of being at the center of the “most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen”.

A report from Australia’s top criminal intelligence unit linked doping in sport with money-laundering and match-fixing after a year-long investigation. Six leading rugby league clubs, from one of the country’s four football codes in a sports-obsessed nation, confirmed they were under scrutiny.

And Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, on trial in Madrid for allegedly running a doping ring in cycling, said in his opening testimony that he also had clients in soccer, tennis, athletics and boxing.

Fuentes, who said outside the court this month that he might be willing to co-operate with anti-doping authorities, is appearing in court almost seven years after steroids and blood bags were seized in an investigation code-named Operation Puerto.

“The same people who are trafficking in steroids and encouraging athletes to cheat by doping are the ones who are engaged in illegal betting,” said World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) director general David Howman.

“This is essentially money-laundering, bribery and corruption in relation to match-fixing and spot-fixing.”

BLACK MARKETS

At a WADA media symposium in London in February, Howman said at least 25 percent of international sport was controlled by the underworld.

“The black markets supply a lot of pharmaceutical products before they are out on the white market,” he said. “That’s run by the criminal underworld, so a lot of the pharmaceutical stuff comes out in that way.”

Rob Koehler, the director of education and program development at WADA, told an anti-doping conference in London this month the drugs problem in sport reflected the problems of society as a whole.

“We are always trying to push the limit,” he said. “Adults are cheating. Students are cheating, in fact they think they are smart if they don’t get caught.”

Koehler said one percent of the population as a whole was rich while the middle class was shrinking and the lower class growing. The position was similar in sport.

“Top athletes are making millions, some athletes make a modest living, most barely get by,” he said. “But what some athletes used to make in their career they are now making in one year.”

Doping’s black heartland has traditionally been in the speed and strength sports of track and field, weightlifting and cycling.

But it has also become increasingly apparent that the nature of ball sports, which rely on a unique set of skills peculiar to their disciplines, has changed.

Baseball, with its explosion of home runs in the 1990s, is an obvious example and this year slugger Barry Bonds, the record holder for home runs, and pitcher Roger Clemens, a seven-times Cy Young winner, were not elected to the Hall of Fame.

WIDESPREAD DOPING

The pair, appearing on the ballot for the first time after waiting five years following their retirements, were linked with performance-enhancing drugs in the Mitchell report which detailed widespread doping in the sport.

Baseball is similar in nature to Twenty20 cricket, where strength as well as technique is necessary to repeatedly clear the boundaries. Rugby union players, who used to be a mixture of the big and the powerful and the small and the speedy, are now uniformly bulked up.

Tennis, as the five-set marathons now common in the men’s game demonstrate, demands sustained power and endurance to an extent once unimaginable.

Even golfers, as the modern breed of players headed by Tiger Woods demonstrates, are now athletes working out in the gym as well as frequenting the driving range.

In England, the Football Association reacted to concerns expressed by Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger about the possible use of EPO by announcing it would bring in testing for the blood booster, which was introduced into cycling in the 1990s.

“We have had some players come to us at Arsenal from other clubs abroad and their red blood cell count has been abnormally high. That kind of thing makes you wonder,” Wenger said.

Wenger also called for blood testing in soccer, adding: “I don’t think we do enough. It is very difficult for me to believe that you have 740 players in the World Cup and you come out with zero problems.”

Roger Federer, a 17-times grand-slam tennis champion, also called for the introduction of biological passports, pioneered in cycling and subsequently introduced in athletics, which track changes in a competitor’s blood profile which could be caused only by doping.

“A blood passport will be necessary as some substances can’t be discovered right now but might in the future, and that risk of discovery can chase cheats away,” the Swiss said.

“But there also should be more blood tests and out-of- competition controls in tennis.”

WADA and its president John Fahey, whose six-year term ends this year, have never been busier and he told the London symposium there was no sign the bad news would end any time soon.

“As long as there is sporting competition there will be athletes who choose to cheat, and consequently a need to lead the fight against this global threat to sport’s integrity,” Fahey said.

“And, if the last eight months are anything to go by, that need is increasing in its urgency rather than receding.”

(Editing by Clare Fallon)

Now that the euphoria of last year’s acclaimed London Olympics has dissipated, however, a spate of troubling stories in the first quarter of 2013 show an altogether darker and more disturbing side to a glamorous, multi-billion-dollar industry.

In January, American cyclist Lance Armstrong admitted in a television interview that he had doped before each of his record seven Tour de France victories.

His confession after years of denial followed the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s (USADA) decision to strip him of the title and accuse him of being at the centre of the “most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping programme that sport has ever seen”.

A report from Australia’s top criminal intelligence unit linked doping in sport with money-laundering and match-fixing after a year-long investigation. Six leading rugby league clubs, from one of the country’s four football codes in a sports-obsessed nation, confirmed they were under scrutiny.

And Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, on trial in Madrid for allegedly running a doping ring in cycling, said in his opening testimony that he also had clients in soccer, tennis, athletics and boxing.

Fuentes, who said outside the court this month that he might be willing to co-operate with anti-doping authorities, is appearing in court almost seven years after steroids and blood bags were seized in an investigation code-named Operation Puerto.

“The same people who are trafficking in steroids and encouraging athletes to cheat by doping are the ones who are engaged in illegal betting,” said World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) director general David Howman.

“This is essentially money-laundering, bribery and corruption in relation to match-fixing and spot-fixing.”

BLACK MARKETS

At a WADA media symposium in London in February, Howman said at least 25 percent of international sport was controlled by the underworld.

“The black markets supply a lot of pharmaceutical products before they are out on the white market,” he said. “That’s run by the criminal underworld, so a lot of the pharmaceutical stuff comes out in that way.”

Rob Koehler, the director of education and programme development at WADA, told an anti-doping conference in London this month the drugs problem in sport reflected the problems of society as a whole.

“We are always trying to push the limit,” he said. “Adults are cheating. Students are cheating, in fact they think they are smart if they don’t get caught.”

Koehler said one percent of the population as a whole was rich while the middle class was shrinking and the lower class growing. The position was similar in sport.

“Top athletes are making millions, some athletes make a modest living, most barely get by,” he said. “But what some athletes used to make in their career they are now making in one year.”

Doping’s black heartland has traditionally been in the speed and strength sports of track and field, weightlifting and cycling.

But it has also become increasingly apparent that the nature of ball sports, which rely on a unique set of skills peculiar to their disciplines, has changed.

Baseball, with its explosion of home runs in the 1990s, is an obvious example and this year slugger Barry Bonds, the record holder for home runs, and pitcher Roger Clemens, a seven-times Cy Young winner, were not elected to the Hall of Fame.

WIDESPREAD DOPING

The pair, appearing on the ballot for the first time after waiting five years following their retirements, were linked with performance-enhancing drugs in the Mitchell report which detailed widespread doping in the sport.

Baseball is similar in nature to Twenty20 cricket, where strength as well as technique is necessary to repeatedly clear the boundaries. Rugby union players, who used to be a mixture of the big and the powerful and the small and the speedy, are now uniformly bulked up.

Tennis, as the five-set marathons now common in the men’s game demonstrate, demands sustained power and endurance to an extent once unimaginable.

Even golfers, as the modern breed of players headed by Tiger Woods demonstrates, are now athletes working out in the gym as well as frequenting the driving range.

In England, the Football Association reacted to concerns expressed by Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger about the possible use of EPO by announcing it would bring in testing for the blood booster, which was introduced into cycling in the 1990s.

“We have had some players come to us at Arsenal from other clubs abroad and their red blood cell count has been abnormally high. That kind of thing makes you wonder,” Wenger said.

Wenger also called for blood testing in soccer, adding: “I don’t think we do enough. It is very difficult for me to believe that you have 740 players in the World Cup and you come out with zero problems.”

Roger Federer, a 17-times grand-slam tennis champion, also called for the introduction of biological passports, pioneered in cycling and subsequently introduced in athletics, which track changes in a competitor’s blood profile which could be caused only by doping.

“A blood passport will be necessary as some substances can’t be discovered right now but might in the future, and that risk of discovery can chase cheats away,” the Swiss said.

“But there also should be more blood tests and out-of- competition controls in tennis.”

WADA and its president John Fahey, whose six-year term ends this year, have never been busier and he told the London symposium there was no sign the bad news would end any time soon.

“As long as there is sporting competition there will be athletes who choose to cheat, and consequently a need to lead the fight against this global threat to sport’s integrity,” Fahey said.

“And, if the last eight months are anything to go by, that need is increasing in its urgency rather than receding.” (Editing by Clare Fallon)