Category: Uncategorized

He left with such grace, patriotism and politeness. The manner of Steve McClaren’s departure would make a proper Englishman proud, but there were none of those in the press conference. I felt it was an error to let Ericksson go; now, here we are again amidst the tangled deckchairs as iceberg after iceberg slips through…

The emotions in question right now are those engendered by what has so far been a cack-handed performance by Scotland against Italy. I turned Radio 5 off in the car just after kick-off, sickened by all the “rain in their faces, cold air on their skin” comments from the BBC team. A pity: the Italian…

Of course it can: eat nothing but crisps and drink nothing but cheap lager for only one week, and you’ll see the world in an entirely new way. I’m interested in the opposite direction, of course. And I’m turning myself into a guinea pig for five days to see how far I can go in…

I was reading some newspaper or other on a late train home last week when I came across the opinion, expressed by an established football journalist, that all football pitches were the same and that home/away advantage was a mystery. Of course, it isn’t so, and all the reasons why it isn’t so are fairly…

In three parts, the life of John Edward Thompson Milburn. Before he became a football journalist on the fringes of the young Brian Clough’s circle, he could play a bit: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfyVSTcbitk&rel=1]

There is something repellant about the idea of Christopher Hitchens, of all people, having to waste his time in the company of “stop smoking” companies and the rest of the self-improvement industry. Waste your time on his account here and here. I spent a year of my life researching the smoking problem, and I was…

I’ve altered the permalink structure to the blog so that post titles are used in urls, not post numbers. Ergo, every single link to the blog is now broken, but the requirements of omelettes etc., and there it is.

A beautiful video tribute to Gordon Banks: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE4O2FRjt_M] You can read more about Don Mullan’s brilliant Banks biography here.

Pretty much what it says on the tin. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok07djiTy30]

Is football becoming middle class? It’s not that simple. The old industrial north from which professional football sprang is gone. That “working class” exists only in the lives of its elderly surviving members. You have to stake your claim to being working class nowadays. But the idea of what being middle class was has also…