Review: James Corbett’s “England Expects: A History of the England Football Team”

The first edition of James Corbett’s “England Expects: A History of the England Football Team” has sat somewhere near my desk since about a fortnight after its initial publication. There hadn’t really been a proper full England history before. Of course, there’d been books about England managers – but that’s not quite the same thing,…

An Ageing England Squad

Mike Adamson, writing in the Guardian, points out that this is the oldest England squad to travel to a finals. It surprises Rob Marrs too. The squad’s average age is 28.7, older than England’s awful nadir squad of 1954. It could have been older. Over at Attacking Soccer, Anthony reminds us that Joe Hart has…

Dickson Experimental Sound Film 1895

This isn’t strictly speaking to do with sport – but it is to do with what might very well have been. In 1998, my cousin by marriage Walter Murch was asked to help in the restoration of the first synchronized sound film. This was a product of Thomas Edison’s studio, as you might expect, and…

James Elsewhere: Aston Villa v Chelsea

I spoke to Chris Bevan of BBC Online yesterday about the prospects for Aston Villa v Chelsea in Saturday’s FA Cup Semi-Final. Context gives the game unusual interest. Only two weeks ago, Chelsea thumped Villa 7-1. Scores of that magnitude just don’t happen to top-four candidates like Villa. Just about every other instance of a…

Scottish Football: Introducing The Bloggers’ Manifesto

It’s hard for an incomer to get used to, but Scotland is just the most extraordinary and spectacular country.  One of my favourite drives is the drop down off the M9 into Perth. If you’re passing through the city, you’ll negotiate a series of roundabouts on the city’s edge, and you’ll see signposts pointing, temptingly,…

The Brain and Mind: A Short Annotated Reading List

I’ve put together reading lists before – see here. This one will overlap the earlier list, but is meant to provide a number of quick but intelligent ways into the whole brain/mind/therapy/neuroscience subject spread. As such, many of these books will be familiar, some perhaps not. Amazon UK links presented where possible. The Human Brain…

Talk Therapy, Sympathy and Meaning

Metatone raised three questions in comments on my earlier post here : 1. Is the common factor in talk therapies that work the regular contact with a relatively non-judgemental/sympathetic person who seems to be paying attention? 2. Is the common feature of all the talking therapies that they represent a process (thinking of process over…

Seligman & Layard: Positive Psychology in Politics

This post is in response to part of Metatone’s comment on my earlier post here Sport got there first, of course, and got there many decades earlier. Even before Freud and Kraepelin had begun constructing their contrasting disease models of mental illness, athletes and footballers had come to a basic conception of positive psychology. It…

Does it matter if Sport Psychology is Cod Psychology?

Usually, it starts with an email: “James/Hi James/Dear James: I’ve been reading some sport psychology textbooks and it’s all rubbish. Please could you point me to the real deal?” These emails are hard to answer. Because what my interlocutor has noticed is that the content of sport psychology is unacademic, unproven, shallow, and all too…

I Had Not Thought Death Had Undone So Many

I’ve just been groping through piles of statistics and have come across a thoroughly melancholy fact, namely that there are no survivors of England’s pre-War internationals. The earliest international match for which we have a living English representative is Northern Ireland v England on 28th September 1946: Sir Tom Finney (b. 5th April 1922) scored…