James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
Commenter Will contrasts aspects of the 1929 FA Cup Final crowd (see here) with modern football audience behaviour: They are all there early. If you imagine the FA Cup final now there would be people drifting in right up to the kick off. But the stands are full at least 10 minutes before kick off….
In his analysis of eleven turning points in English football history, Rob Marrs has this to say about the Munich Disaster: Like 1966, I won’t write too much here. That terrible day robbed football (not just English football) of great players like Duncan Edwards. It is a point of conjecture to wonder what England would…
In 1929, pioneering firm British Talking Pictures Ltd went to Wembley and made a – talking picture! of the FA Cup Final. It was what Mitchell and Kenyon would have done, but by 1929 new tech chose other, newer vehicles. Considering its subject, this film is astonishingly early. You can watch, and listen, to the…
The National Football Museum is putting together its Eleven Key Moments in Football History for their new location and is interested to hear yours. Here are mine: 1864-8: Quintin Hogg, assisted by right-hand man Lord Kinnaird (who’d go on to be President of the Football Association and create the tradition of a royal presence at…
We arrived home in Edinburgh tonight to find the letter from the Home Office on the mat. My wife’s application for British citizenship has been accepted.
Paul Carpenter (Carpsio) takes the “passion and commitment” line of England criticism in an interesting direction with an informed comparison of Agincourt to that 4-1 defeat to Germany: In all these cases (Agincourt, Waterloo, Dunkirk, The Battle of Britain, Rorke’s Drift), we are assured that it was English ‘spirit’ that was critical to our victory…
Whatever you might say about the professionalism controversies in England in the 1880s, it was the case then, and has been ever since, that practically all the actual football is played by amateurs. Snopes-type legends about amateur football abound. About street football, which is alleged to have honed ballplaying skills so well – you can…
Here’s a gallery of all of the balls used at FIFA World Cups from the beginning. (H/T Metafilter). The top row of the gallery contains the kind of footballs that would have been familiar both to participants in friendlies in the 1960s and British schoolboys ninety years later. Row 2 contains what my generation might…
It was, in the end, a Final for people who enjoy complex, technical, thinking football. There has been plenty of this throughout the tournament, especially from the three European semi-finalists, and the standard of commentary on television and in the press has struggled to keep up. It struggled in the Final too. In musical terms,…
Given that I’ll be shouting for the Germans in tonight’s 3rd place playoff, I thought it appropriate to show this clip of the Uruguayans – when the South American team were still World Champions – coming a horrible cropper against Scotland: