Month: January 2007

One of the questions I ask here regularly is, how much has football really changed over time? How did the players from e.g. the Edwardian era compare with those from the 1960s and those from today? It’s hard to know. What little film remains from the 1901-1910 period was made for entertainment, not record, and…

Academic historians who specialise in a given period will know that keeping research within accepted chronological bounds can prevent worthwhile perspectives and insights coming to light. The French Revolution looks very different as the tail-end of the eighteenth century than as the opening to the “long” nineteenth century 1789-1914. It’s the sheer quantity of primary…

Every year, the online magazine The Edge publishes an “annual question”: this year’s – and, so far as I know, every year’s – is “What Are You Optimistic About – And Why?” A substantial number of psychologists have answered. Some of the replies are astonishing given the calibre of the name involved. For instance, Donald…

I was encouraged to find some of my own themes in an interview with Sir Clive Woodward’s colleague and mentor Humphrey Walters just before New Year. At least, I was encouraged to find one of my themes – that another, different one was confirmed by the interview is just downright depressing. Over the course of…

My attempts to keep things ticking over here while I was in the frozen north didn’t quite come off.. Anyway, 2007 hasn’t quite started for me yet, so one more Youtube post. As you know, one of the questions I chase about here is that of just how good football was pre-1939, and in finding…