Month: January 2007

With apologies to Andrew Sullivan: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni0PBPeyHDc]

Here’s one of them: Hi James, I saw your site on the blog of Clive Davis. I also run a site, the URL is http://www.101greatgoals.com/. We have added you to our “footie blogs” section and it would be great if you could link to us. All the best! In the way that you can sometimes…

You all know what I think. And I want to know what you think: this weblog welcomes intelligent comments. But football is too important a subject in the UK not to spread the net wider, so I’ve been harvesting recent opinion and here’s what interested parties from around the country have had to say. For…

Waste some time with this online free kick game. And see how close you think they come to an authentic atmosphere (speakers on, preferably). http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/174115

When I told the Vicar that I was interested in being confirmed, his face fell. I could sense his inner “oh, no, not another one”. But I wasn’t surprised. He’d seen me coming for him at the end of the service. But bolting into the vestry and shutting the door hadn’t helped, and now he…

Promoted from comments, Mark Holland draws attention to Albert Einstein’s brief and unsuccessful football management stint. Matthew Turner provides the Times’ coverage of the first radio commentary, and this from the last Spectator: Radio days The Spectator (London); Jan 13, 2007; Ruminating here a couple of weeks ago on those whom the wretched reaper had…

The BBC’s first football commentator, on radio beginning in 1927, was Henry Blythe Thornhill Wakelam, a former rugby player with Harlequins. You can hear a snippet of his commentary, from an Everton game of the early ’30s, here, including references relating to the original Radio Times grid system. The link to the recording is highlighted…

Here’s an entire 45-minute documentary covering the whole story of England v Germany encounters from the very beginning until.. well, I stopped watching after the 5-1 Munich victory, so I don’t know how it ends. Too many talking heads, as is always the case with this kind of thing, although one of those heads is…

Not my favourite part of the game, bound up as it sometimes is in the kind of rivalry and violence that’s dogged the British game. But in looking around for footballing siblings yesterday, I came across this, which I thought was quite clever in its way: (sung to the tune of David Bowie’s ‘Rebel Rebel’):…