Month: June 2007

..spreading back up the arm/Earlier and earlier (Philip Larkin, As Bad As A Mile) No sooner had the old one burst but a newer, stronger mockney bubble has Frank Lampard in its malignant, sentimental embrace. It’s not just Barcelona who won’t have him: He has been offered to us (Barca), Milan, Inter and Real Madrid….

This is the oldest colour film of sport available on the web. It’s the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and reflects, in amongst all of the Nazi horror, the advanced state of German photography of the time. Given all that we know of what was to come, the whole scene, which culminates in Jesse Owens’ 100m…

Villa Park (Philip Larkin MCMXIV) Don’t believe the broadsheets all the time. Leighton Baines’ left foot is NOT “used as a model for physical perfection in some art history courses” (the Guardian), although Sunderland’s probably abortive interest in him is one more facet of that now very apparent perfect fit between the club and their…

This is, to the best of my knowledge, the oldest colour film of team sports currently available on the web. It features a semi-pro American Football game in Warren, PA. in 1940. This is the pre-Pearl Harbour world, then. The existence of the film also demonstrates that, had someone bothered, the technology existed to film…

..the Oval or Villa Park.. (Philip Larkin, MCMXIV) It’s disappointing to learn that Frank Lampard’s move to Barcelona is not an attempt to get out of the mockney bubble, but because Chelsea won’t pay him £130,000 per week and because he’s being henpecked on the issue. Good for his other half. Readers of Stephen Oppenheimer’s…

Those long uneven lines Standing as patiently As if they were stretched outside The Oval or Villa Park, The crowns of hats, the sun On moustached archaic faces Grinning as if it were all An August Bank Holiday lark (Philip Larkin, MCMXIV) I thought it was time for a football rumour column that you can…

One of the frustrations in trying to write sport history is the difficulty in getting across that it was all real. Real, and the way it actually was. It’s particularly difficult when it comes to football. No one wants football’s history for its own sake: they want it as a depository for good-old-values schmaltz, a…

It’s often forgotten, in the wake of Clough’s mythologising, that Derby County are a club with real history behind them. Far from coming from nowhere under his tutelage, Derby were in fact one of the twelve clubs who played in the first Football League Season of all, in 1888, finishing tenth. From the late 1920s…

I’ve added a blogroll link to 101 Great Goals. Arthur Antunes Coimbra is probably the only original in the sporting blogosphere. Name another? Or an idea so obvious once it has been put into action? His site first broke through simply by providing a kind of Match of the Day online, but its since become…

To understand the true nature of what happened to Brian Clough in 1965, some history is in order. Until the Great War, the Football League had two divisions. In 1919, that became three through the simple expedient of incorporating the top division of the Southern League. (Grimsby Town were also elected to Division Three: their…