Category: Uncategorized

It’s a shame Butterfield had to be called Butterfield. To a modern ear the name suggests diet yoghurt or an ersatz spread. Butterfield’s core idea – that the past is valuable for more than what it tells us about how we got here – is one football badly needs right now. And it’s just football’s…

I’ve no comment to make on this – I just feel that it’s thought-provoking. John Lyall, at the 1980 FA Cup Final. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms7HGZSBoO0]

I won’t allow myself to feel old until the Pope starts looking young, but nevertheless there is the feeling of the end of an era today. What Beckham has announced today is his effective retirement. Around him, the United States MLS will find a sort of maturity, as the millions of young men playing football…

English football is crowded with strikers at the moment. With the imminent return of Jon Stead, we can list Stead, Beattie, Johnson, Jeffers, Fowler, Crouch, Defoe, Marcus Bent, Darren Bent, Wayne Rooney, Davies, Ameobi, Christie, Heskey, Sheringham, Carlton Cole, Andrew Cole, Ashikodi and the injured Owen and Ashton. I may have missed a couple along…

When Herbert Chapman took over as secretary-manager of Leeds City, the press hailed his appointment. He was thought to have done well at his “first” club Northampton Town (his first as a manager: he’d had a supremely peripatetic playing career) and the hope was that he’d translate that success to Leeds. War intervened, then scandal,…

Why was football a working class sport in the United Kingdom? Why has it stayed that way? Yes, stayed that way. Middle class interest in football has become respectable since 1966, and especially since 1990. But have you noticed how sidelong, how bashful, that interest is? Even Nick Hornby, middle class fan par excellence, studs…

An interesting Youtube series showing the first “open” Wimbledon. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6ogLdYReCc] The commentator makes no effort to show himself as anything other than himself: a man with a “received pronunciation” accent. He doesn’t seem to mind it. Wimbledon is acknowledged, without embarrassment, as part of the social “season”, but also as a top rank world level…

No one chooses “their” team. Our teams rub off on us in early age like burdock seeds, then dig in. I found my team aged seven. Turning the (black and white) TV on when bored one warm day in May 1976, I found myself watching my first FA Cup Final, and, being a British patriot…

By the first years of the twentieth century, the sporting world we’re now familiar with had all but taken shape: the whig historian of sport would peer through the Edwardian era much as he/she would a telescope struggling to come into focus. The non-whig, correctly in my opinion, would regard the sporting forms of the…

So how different is football from the pre-Great War game? I’ve mentioned before that the paucity and low quality of Edwardian film makes direct comparisons difficult. Contemporary eye witnesses provide some clues, but because relatively few people, even among the sports journalists of the day, travelled to see a wide variety of clubs, their opinions…