James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
He wasn’t first choice: that was Jimmy Adamson of Burnley. And when the job offer did come, he didn’t agree straightaway. Alf Ramsey had enough about him to negotiate, and, courtesy of those elocution lessons he always denied, the voice to do it with. In 1962, these words were not blindingly obvious: I think an…
There was a period in the early 1980s when the great clubs of England’s industrial cities gave way to smaller clubs from quieter places. Southampton, Ipswich, Norwich, Watford and Luton all had their great days between Clough’s first European Cup and the end of the Falklands Conflict. To this south-eastern boy, they were home teams,…
(WARNING: this is quite long) I’d been casting about for months for an image that might effectively sum up the history of English football. A face, a stadium, perhaps a team lineup or training session. Perhaps a German airport, snowbound. It was a search for a picture that would say the most in the least…
My own pleasure at the appointment of Fabio Capello to the England manager’s post is largely down to non-footballing reasons. In England, there’s a sense that football is an acceptable interest for men, but more cultural pasttimes are suspect. Not so for the gastronome aesthete Capello. That’s not to argue that hinterland makes a manager….
There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? to say that English football managers just aren’t as intelligent as their foreign counterparts. In a comment left on an earlier post, John Sinnott said “I’ve done lots of interviews with overseas players and managers and invariably they were always smarter and brighter and more analytical…
Queen Victoria died in January 1901. A matter of months later came the first significant footballing appearance of the name Chapman. “Chapman H.”, once of Worksop, had trialled for Grimsby Town in 1898, but it was the inclusion of that name on a list of triallists at Sheffield Wednesday that marked his break into the…
It would prove to be a saving grace: the threat of a players’ strike in 1961 finally brought an end to the maximum wage in English football after 60 years. (You can read a superb discussion of the issue and its history here). At the same time, Clough became a leading player at a leading…
Corinthian attitudes and coaching greatness don’t run together: all of the great managers seem to have an exhaust trail of money, questionable money. For Revie it was undenied allegations of bribery in the early 1960s, then the undercover contract from the Arabian peninsular that took him from the England job. For Venables, it was his…
Before I start my post-mortem, spare a moment for the British press. They didn’t want Owen Hargreaves. Will any of them now admit their error, or will they fall back on saying that he’s “won over the fans”? They didn’t want Crouch. And no other manager besides Sven would ever have picked him. Or stuck…
You’d have asked for anyone save Portugal. It’s one for the remaining band who believe that the lesser the opposition, the better our chances. For the rest of us, we can only hope that England stir themselves, and trust in something more interesting for the semi-final. Brace yourselves for a week of the following stories…