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From our correspondent, George Orwell: Now that the brief visit of the Dynamo football team has come to an end, it is possible to say publicly what many were thinking privately before the Dynamos ever arrived. That is, that sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will, and that if such a visit as this had…

My candidate won: Platini has said he will limit the number of automatic Champions League places to three clubs per country, a worry to England who presently have four, while also saying he will try to cap the amount of money a club can spend, a threat to Chelsea’s financial muscle. He said: “We must…

That’s the title of the paper to which this summary refers: Pain MA, Harwood CG. School of Sport and Exercise Sciences, Loughborough University, UK. m.a.pain@lboro.ac.uk The aim of the present study was to examine knowledge and perceptions of applied sport psychology within English soccer. National coaches (n = 8), youth academy directors (n = 21)…

Purely for it’s own sake. Although there was that phrase “steely and determined” a few posts ago, and there was always plenty of that about Revie’s fantastic, unlucky Leeds side of the 60s and 70s. This clip is as much about Leicester as Leeds, though: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2pn9FBehfo] And some sober analysis – no, really, and you…

I’ve been enjoying email exchanges and telephone conversations with John Sinnott and Chris Bevan of BBC Online in the last week or so, and I’m very grateful to both of them that you can read some of my thoughts about Chelsea v Nottingham Forest here. UPDATE: Apologies if I seem overly negative about Forest’s chances….

Thanks to Harry Rutherford of Heraclitean Fire for pointing out this article in Nature. Harry didn’t let on what he made of it. I suspect he was being polite, because this is academic psychology at its worst. Let’s start with this: On a summer evening last year, more than a billion pairs of eyes were…

Have you noticed how few examples of cup giant killing there have been lately? The last truly extraordinary one that I can think of belongs, oddly enough, to the team whose ground I can see from my window here – Sutton United, who beat First Division Coventry City in 1989’s 3rd round. Since then, there…

Between March 1936 and July 1937, the London and North Eastern Railway built a tranche of 25 B17 mixed traffic 4-6-0s (the “Sandringham” class) and named them after top football sides. The railway preservation movement that emerged in Britain in the late 1950s is an underestimated phenomenon – the Bridgnorth-based Severn Valley Railway made such…

I’ve put together the beginnings of a More Than Mind Games reading list here. At the moment, it’s little more than a bald list of titles under a variety of headings, but I’ll try to annotate it more fully over time. If I had to boil it down to absolute essentials, I’d plump for Madness…

In some senses, Uruguay was an altogether appropriate location for the inaugural World Cup. It’s population, 97% European in origin, has contingents from Spain, Italy, England, France, Germany, Portugal, Ireland, Russia, Croatia and the Scandinavian countries. Although Italian and Spanish dominate, in that context, the first football World Cup was won by the footballing world….