Month: March 2007

The annual Boat Race between Oxford and Cambridge is now only just over a fortnight away. Today, it’s the amateur sporting event with the biggest television audience of any in the world. In the UK alone, over 7 million people watched last year’s race on ITV – quarter of a million actually turned up to…

This is supposedly the oldest film of football still in existence. It’s dated 1897, which puts it within a year of film first bursting onto the scene with the Lumiere’s astonishing touring show. Some kind of Match of the Day occurred to someone almost straight away: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mtzo5fc1PDc] It’s supposedly Arsenal – at their first proper…

(By the way, note that “Soccer” there in the title, any of you who are still sufficiently ignorant to think that the word’s of American coining and bigoted enough to think that there’s a worthwhile joke in it. “Tackle Soccer This Way” was published in the UK in late 1958 after the death of its…

Yesterday, I posted three snippets from Herbert Chapman’s Sunday Express columns. (See under “Herbert Chapman” in the category list on the left of the page). For those of you for whom Chapman isn’t a familiar figure, he was the first “star” football manager in the world, enjoying success at Northampton Town, Leeds City, Huddersfield Town…

From Herbert Chapman on Football, a posthumous collection of his Sunday Express articles that was published as a memorial to him in 1934: What do we mean by temperament? An old Scottish golfer described it as simply common sense, and he was probably correct. But perhaps the term self-control is more expressive and better understood….

From Herbert Chapman on Football, a posthumous compilation of his Sunday Express articles published in memory of him in 1934: I am always sorry for clubs who have to act hurriedly in seeking a new player, for under the most favourable conditions it is a tricky business and demands the closest consideration. It is not…

From Herbert Chapman on Football, a posthumous collection of his Sunday Express articles published in his memory in 1934. Football today lacks the personalities of twenty or thirty years ago. This, I think, is true of all games, and the reason for it is a fine psychological study. The life which we live is so…

Eight minutes, near enough, of Dixie Dean. Well, about thirty seconds, in between the usual talking head surplus: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD7tL514ek4]

(Yanked for further editing – liked the idea, hated the execution. )

A memorable passage from Simon Kuper’s excellent book, Ajax, The Dutch, The War: ..at six in the evening of 6 August, the day the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, the BBC Home Service reported: President Truman has announced a tremendous achievement by the Allied scientists. They have produced an atomic bomb. One has already…