Month: January 2007

English football is crowded with strikers at the moment. With the imminent return of Jon Stead, we can list Stead, Beattie, Johnson, Jeffers, Fowler, Crouch, Defoe, Marcus Bent, Darren Bent, Wayne Rooney, Davies, Ameobi, Christie, Heskey, Sheringham, Carlton Cole, Andrew Cole, Ashikodi and the injured Owen and Ashton. I may have missed a couple along…

When Herbert Chapman took over as secretary-manager of Leeds City, the press hailed his appointment. He was thought to have done well at his “first” club Northampton Town (his first as a manager: he’d had a supremely peripatetic playing career) and the hope was that he’d translate that success to Leeds. War intervened, then scandal,…

Why was football a working class sport in the United Kingdom? Why has it stayed that way? Yes, stayed that way. Middle class interest in football has become respectable since 1966, and especially since 1990. But have you noticed how sidelong, how bashful, that interest is? Even Nick Hornby, middle class fan par excellence, studs…

An interesting Youtube series showing the first “open” Wimbledon. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6ogLdYReCc] The commentator makes no effort to show himself as anything other than himself: a man with a “received pronunciation” accent. He doesn’t seem to mind it. Wimbledon is acknowledged, without embarrassment, as part of the social “season”, but also as a top rank world level…

No one chooses “their” team. Our teams rub off on us in early age like burdock seeds, then dig in. I found my team aged seven. Turning the (black and white) TV on when bored one warm day in May 1976, I found myself watching my first FA Cup Final, and, being a British patriot…

By the first years of the twentieth century, the sporting world we’re now familiar with had all but taken shape: the whig historian of sport would peer through the Edwardian era much as he/she would a telescope struggling to come into focus. The non-whig, correctly in my opinion, would regard the sporting forms of the…

So how different is football from the pre-Great War game? I’ve mentioned before that the paucity and low quality of Edwardian film makes direct comparisons difficult. Contemporary eye witnesses provide some clues, but because relatively few people, even among the sports journalists of the day, travelled to see a wide variety of clubs, their opinions…

David Hinchcliffe of the excellent cricket coaching weblog Harrow Drive was kind enough to ask me some questions about sports psychology in relation to cricket. He’s incorporated my answers into a fuller article which you can read here. David’s site is probably unique in terms of its reach and content, and it’s well worth setting…

John Nicholson (of Football365 and elsewhere) is, like Simon Barnes, a proper writer on football, someone to read complete and keep up to date with. If you’ve watched too much football telly in the last year, you’ll love this of his.

I’d like to promote two comments by Matthew Turner to this post: In cricket, I was unaware of the type of bowler known as the ‘lob’ bowler. Wisden’s dictionary of cricket says that this was not a specialist skill until the mid-19th century, when other forms of underarm bowling were obscolete (and since 2000, against…