James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
That’s Widnes there, the chemical town where I was born. There are several versions of this photograph in circulation, and this is the mildest. The others have had additional smoke added: perhaps the photographer knew of worse places, and wished to compete. I came along some 12 years after the Clean Air Acts, and still…
New technology and the new sport of Association Football just seemed to go together in the last years of the nineteenth century. Not only was the modern game as we know it born in amongst cutting-edge manufacturing and mining in the English and Scottish industrial urban towns, not only did the arrival of telegraph, telephone…
In comments yesterday, George Szirtes enquired rhetorically about why Bobby Robson was so loved, and he answers his own question magnificently here. “The right sort of sportsman”, in other words. Most of the great football clubs of England were founded by firms or by churches to provide godly uplifting activity and entertainment to men in what…