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1985 Wales vs Scotland football match

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted by User:Ian Rose 02:33, 17 August 2013 [1].

Nominator(s): Hammersfan (talk) 15:57, 30 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is a significant game between two of the UK's Home Nations for many reasons - it was one of the first to take place after the demise of the British Home Championship, it was against the backdrop of increasing hooliganism in England that had led to English clubs being banned from European football and the potential of wider political action to combat the problem, it was a game that would lead to one of the two teams participating qualifying for the 1986 World Cup, and it saw the death of Scotland manager Jock Stein in the stadium at the very end of the game. It has gone through the review process for GA status, and I would like to see what else would need to be done to get it to the highest status possible.Hammersfan (talk) 15:57, 30 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comments –

  • The second paragraph of the lead really needs more than a semi-colon to separate the items. This is a very long sentence and starts to run-on after a while.
  • Recent results: Since Spain was linked in the previous section, another link isn't needed here.
  • England and Iceland were also linked already.
  • Choice of venue: Another England link here. The whole article could use a run-through to get rid of these and other excess links that may be present.
  • Pressure on Jock Stein: Hyphen after "Group 7 was one of three UEFA qualifying groups with only four teams" should be an en dash instead per the MoS.
  • Potential for government intervention: Ref 26 should be moved outside the punctuation.
  • Again, the Margaret Thatcher sentence is enormous. There's way too much there for one sentence. In general, I see a tendency to clutter too much content into certain sentences, which doesn't make for brilliant prose.
  • "on the 1st June 1985" → "on 1 June 1985".
  • Another general tendency I've seen is for sentences to have "with ... -ing" kinds of structures. There are usually better ways to write such sentences, and I'm not thrilled to see so many of them in the half of the article I've read so far. Giants2008 (Talk) 00:31, 5 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm a little unclear as to what you mean by "with ... -ing"; please can you give a little guidance. Hammersfan (talk) 08:44, 7 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The example that Shudde gave below is one of many that I see in the article. Hopefully you can use that to help spot other similar instances that exist. For fixing them, this is the best resource that I know of, and I find it very helpful for improving writing in general. Giants2008 (Talk) 00:08, 11 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comments Oppose – I have a few comments, this is far from a comprehensive review. If these are addressed I'll come back and give it a more thorough read.

  • The structure of the article is very off-putting. There seems to be a lot of very small sections that I'm not sure should necessarily stand on their own. For example: Referee and Television broadcast
  • "The game was both teams' final match of the qualifying tournament, and both were still able to gain a place at the finals in Mexico; Wales needed to win the game, while Scotland knew that a draw would be enough." – this reads poorly. Why is the result not mentioned early on? This information is less important to the reader then saying the result, and the consequences of it: that Scotland won and therefore progressed to the 1986 FIFA World Cup finals.
    • On reading again, this wasn't enough for them to qualify, they still needed to win a play-off against Australia. This needs to be reworded and clarified.
  • "Despite Scotland having the advantage in the group, thanks to a superior goal difference, they went into the game as underdogs due to a number of their senior players being unavailable due to either injury or suspension, and because they had lost to Wales in the return fixture at Hampden Park in Glasgow the previous March." – This reads badly as well; consider rewording. For a reader unfamiliar with football, they'd find this very confusing.
  • There are a proliferation of tables and images that I don't think add anything to the article. I think the tables in particular are used rather than a sentence or two of prose. In Head-to-head for example, I think the table should be either removed or moved to the right, and the image of the UK home nations removed (it adds little value).
  • I agree with Giants regarding the use of "with ... -ing": for example:
    • "The British Home Championship had ended in the 1983–84 season, with England having announced their decision to withdraw from the competition on the 19th August 1983" instead maybe "The British Home Championship ended in the 1983–84 season after England withdrew from the competition"
  • What is the distinction between Background and Build-up? Are they not basically synonyms? I believe Recent results should be moved into background, and the table of results removed.
  • Again I'm not sure the value of the table in Choice of venue – the prose should do an adequate job, and the table reads as arbitrary. Why select that particular time-frame?
  • I'm not sure about the section Potential for government intervention – there were fears of a government crack-down, but nothing came of it. More needs to be said on this for it to remain. How great were these fears, what was done as a result, and what is mean't by "to extend the measures it was putting in place to crack down on hooliganism in England to Scotland and Wales."? What were these measures?
  • You need to cull some of the images. I would recommend eliminating the ones of Margaret Thatcher, the eye image (that should definitely go), the image of Gordon Strachan, and probably more.
  • I believe Post-match should be renamed Death of Jock Stein
  • A lot of the Aftermath section is just tables and images. I'm not sure of the value of the table of Scotland and Wales results are, and I'm the same with Welsh home venues.
  • I think that tables can add a lot of value to articles, especially those that are a bit statistics heavy, however I'm not sure that the prolific use of them enhances the article here.
  • I'm getting a harvard ref error for "Inglis 1983" – you should double check it's linking correctly.
  • Why does the TOC only have level two headers? – Shudde talk 01:45, 9 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Changing to oppose. Nothing has been addressed since my comments were added, and the article has not been edited by the nominator since 4 May: I'm not sure what chance this nomination has without some work being done on the article. – Shudde talk 04:00, 17 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Delegate comment -- Yes, I'd expect the above comments to have been actioned long before now, so will be archiving this nom shortly. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 06:16, 17 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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