James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
..the Oval or Villa Park.. (Philip Larkin, MCMXIV) It’s disappointing to learn that Frank Lampard’s move to Barcelona is not an attempt to get out of the mockney bubble, but because Chelsea won’t pay him £130,000 per week and because he’s being henpecked on the issue. Good for his other half. Readers of Stephen Oppenheimer’s…
Those long uneven lines Standing as patiently As if they were stretched outside The Oval or Villa Park, The crowns of hats, the sun On moustached archaic faces Grinning as if it were all An August Bank Holiday lark (Philip Larkin, MCMXIV) I thought it was time for a football rumour column that you can…
One of the frustrations in trying to write sport history is the difficulty in getting across that it was all real. Real, and the way it actually was. It’s particularly difficult when it comes to football. No one wants football’s history for its own sake: they want it as a depository for good-old-values schmaltz, a…
It’s often forgotten, in the wake of Clough’s mythologising, that Derby County are a club with real history behind them. Far from coming from nowhere under his tutelage, Derby were in fact one of the twelve clubs who played in the first Football League Season of all, in 1888, finishing tenth. From the late 1920s…
I’ve added a blogroll link to 101 Great Goals. Arthur Antunes Coimbra is probably the only original in the sporting blogosphere. Name another? Or an idea so obvious once it has been put into action? His site first broke through simply by providing a kind of Match of the Day online, but its since become…
To understand the true nature of what happened to Brian Clough in 1965, some history is in order. Until the Great War, the Football League had two divisions. In 1919, that became three through the simple expedient of incorporating the top division of the Southern League. (Grimsby Town were also elected to Division Three: their…
Herbert Chapman became become Northampton Town’s secretary-manager in 1907, ending his playing career just as the development of football in Britain took on a second wind. The number of clubs administered by the Football Association went from 50 in 1871 to 10,000 in 1905, and five million fans passed through the nation’s football turnstiles in…
From today’s Times: Ask Guus Hiddink, another former Holland coach, for his three priorities in developing players and his list is simple. “Technique, technique, technique,†he said. “You have to be boss of the ball,†De Haan elaborated. “It’s very important, the technical skills. If you are not the boss of the ball, you cannot…
When the nineteen year old Herbert Chapman signed amateur forms for Stalybridge in 1897, the FA Cup was a quarter of a century old, professional football was twelve years old and the Football League itself nine. Not that Stalybridge had a great deal to do with the likes of Aston Villa, Sunderland or Newcastle. But…
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