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Three football cartoons from what I think is Chelsea FC’s second or third decade of existence. The club sprang into life fully formed in 1905, with a huge stadium at Stamford Bridge and League status. Some skullduggery lurks behind the status part, and their arrival in what was then industrial, working-class West London was greeted…

An inspirational skipper.. an English performance.. passion and commitment.. an English manager.. playing the game the English way.. “BBC World Service. The News, read by Roger Collinge…” The warm brown tones trickle out of Bush House like honey from a jar: rich and resonant on the Long and Medium Waves for domestic listeners or bright…

I admit that I spent the game reclining on a couch reading Colin Shindler’s Manchester United Ruined My Life and only turned the radio on for the last few seconds. So none of what follows relates to any actual football I might have seen – blame everything on that. I was surprised by 0-0 though….

Pini Zahavi, usually described in less than glowing terms by the UK football press, most often tagged as agent to the equally unpopular Rio Ferdinand, is all over the papers today as “a friend of Sven Goran Ericksson” with what he claims is the inside dope on the World Cup. Suddenly, he’s an honest eye-witness…

It’s not as early as all that – by 1908, the Olympic Games were fully formed and today’s games will differ only through the sheer number of sports involved and the improved drug testing regimes we now enjoy. The 1912 100m, not that you can really tell what’s going on: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIFgfh2CplQ] And the 200m. A…

“This way of spending your time demands real enthusiasm” comments the speaker behind this film. “Surprisingly few people are seriously hurt.” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKZ6gzAOUYs] The first great sports photographer, in my opinion, and the best photographer of any kind of the twentieth century, was Jacques Henri Lartigue. He knew how to photograph a car long before most…

Gracchi at Westminster Wisdom was kind enough to tag me with this back in February, and a combination of G’s own modest underwhelmedness with the whole concept plus my inability to read English meant that it’s only just registered with me. In fact, modesty, self-effacement, mockery and attempts to bring the meme to a halt…

Can I first apologise to readers who have emailed me asking about GoogleTV and what I said were hours of old Match of the Days and original Pathe News rushes? GoogleTV itself was a particularly wonderful hoax perpetrated by the evil minds behind Youtube’s “Infinite Solutions.” The days following the launch of the hoax were…

December 8, 1941, was, of course, the day Sir Geoff Hurst, cricketer and England’s 1966 hat trick hero, came into the world. Not that very many people knew at the time that it had happened. His mother, his father – assuming war duties allowed him within reach of the good news. Close relatives, friends too…

Incredible to relate, but the first essays in floodlit sport actually preceded Edison’s invention of a practical incandescent lightbulb by a year. On October 14th, 1878, 20,000 spectators turned up for the first floodlit football match in history, held at Bramall Lane. Eight days later, rugby, in the form of Richmond, followed suit. On November…