James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
George Szirtes was thinking out loud about music: Thinking about the fortieth anniversary of Sergeant Pepper, I started wondering about those occasions when I had only to hear a bar of music to know that something had radically changed. …if anyone has the inclination, you could send me an email with a link (or if…
From the fascinating Plunketts website, which is well worth an hour of your time, a colour image of Norwich City’s then brand-new stadium at Carrow Road in 1935. There are some surprises here – at least, they would come as surprises to the good-old-days crowd, but I doubt that anyone who visits here would count…
I’ve spoken here of football being an emergent phenomenon of industrial urban society, of the kind of world that’s largely disappeared in the United Kingdom in recent decades. I’m going to be unable to update here with anything substantial until the weekend, so I’m going to leave you with a link to a photograph by…
We all know how to put our national game to rights. Get the old values back; show passion and commitment; get a proper English manager; get our kids to learn their skills playing football in the street just as we used to. Kick the money men out of the game and go back to the…
..all the drinks were dead/And all the glasses dirty (Philip Larkin Unpublished 1965) It’s happened, so it’s finally safe to say it now: Owen Hargreaves has joined Manchester United for approximately £16 million. No one is saying that his injuries of last season have lost him a yard of pace – whatever that actually means….
London, 1906: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh-W8gPiW-o] Short, but jarring nonetheless. And frustrating: how interesting had they eschewed the tourist trap and walked that camera through Whitechapel, or taken it to Crystal Palace to see Everton win the FA Cup. In this clip, London comes across as finished, developed, not waiting to evolve into something else in the old…
..spreading back up the arm/Earlier and earlier (Philip Larkin, As Bad As A Mile) No sooner had the old one burst but a newer, stronger mockney bubble has Frank Lampard in its malignant, sentimental embrace. It’s not just Barcelona who won’t have him: He has been offered to us (Barca), Milan, Inter and Real Madrid….
This is the oldest colour film of sport available on the web. It’s the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and reflects, in amongst all of the Nazi horror, the advanced state of German photography of the time. Given all that we know of what was to come, the whole scene, which culminates in Jesse Owens’ 100m…
Villa Park (Philip Larkin MCMXIV) Don’t believe the broadsheets all the time. Leighton Baines’ left foot is NOT “used as a model for physical perfection in some art history courses” (the Guardian), although Sunderland’s probably abortive interest in him is one more facet of that now very apparent perfect fit between the club and their…
This is, to the best of my knowledge, the oldest colour film of team sports currently available on the web. It features a semi-pro American Football game in Warren, PA. in 1940. This is the pre-Pearl Harbour world, then. The existence of the film also demonstrates that, had someone bothered, the technology existed to film…