James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
We end the year in darkness. Or on a dark topic, at any rate. In Glasgow and Edinburgh, 1909 began with the outbreak of “smog” – the sticky, intrusive and often lethal combination of coalsmoke and fog – that led not only to the coining of the term, but to an estimated 1,000 deaths. The…
If you’ve come across Humphrey Spender’s "Worktown" series of Bolton photographs from the ’30s (see his Bolton Wanderers sequence here) then you’ll enjoy this multi-part documentary about Tom Harrison, whose fault the whole Mass Observation thing ultimately was. Nosiness will never be the same again: Part One: Part Two: Part Three: …
A 1985ish Scotsport documentary on Alex Ferguson, the manager of Aberdeen, in three parts. It’s now ten years since the publication of Ferguson’s “Managing My Life” – if that doesn’t make you feel old, at the fag end of another year… Part One: Part Two: Part Three:
In 1981, Manchester City, a club in Salford whose big spending hadn’t brought results, allowed in the television cameras. Not entirely by coincidence, he chose the same period to sack championship-winning City coach Malcolm Allison in favour of John Bond, who’d take them to the FA Cup Final. Twenty years earlier, Bond had been a…
Merry Christmas, everyone, and two contrasting, non-sporting things for you today: A message to the Empire from King George V: And an Irish folksong. It’s not about the words – which we’ve had before – it’s about the accent. After 15 months in Scotland of bringing conversation to a halt every time I open my…
So many forward-thinking men in English football in the Fifties: Matthews and Finney after seeing Brazil in the 1950 World Cup, Malcolm Allison after watching Austrians train in Vienna in 1946, Joe Mercer and Don Revie in the wake of the Hungarians. It took England four years to go from the Magyars to once again…
Scotland drew the World Champions – and such World Champions! in their first round at their first World Cup. And played them off the park. Only Rivelino would have deserved a place in Willie Ormond’s side that day. Scotland could, if they wished, remember 1974 for this. Only the Netherlands, against the same opponents, would…
If not quite the best ever, undoubtedly the best of the ’80s. 1982’s Brazil don’t really seem to belong to their decade – shouldn’t they be in Basle in 1954 to take on the Magyars whose formation they aped? Scotland had them at 1-1 at half time, and with a little more self-belief might have…
I’ve just been reading David Tossell’s excellent biography of Malcolm Allison, Big Mal: The High Life and Hard Times of Malcolm Allison, Football Legend. In it, Allison joins that small but oh-so-familiar band of men whose intelligence and forward-thinking threatened to transform English football but who found themselves marooned by drink and the cowardice or…
The first thing Capello said on becoming England manager was that when an Englishman pulled on his international shirt, he lost all the confidence he felt at his club: he played in fear. The task for Capello was to create the conditions for confidence that already existed at Chelsea, Manchester United and Liverpool. And in…