James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
Football grows in young soil and greenfield sites. England’s ancient cities – Norwich, Bath, Durham, Chester, Canterbury, Westminster, Gloucester, Hereford, Lincoln, Oxford, Cambridge, Lancaster, Salisbury, Chichester, York, Ripon, Shrewsbury and the rest – aren’t football hotbeds and never have been. Football was an emergent phenomenon of industrialization. It still grows in relatively new places today…
Queen Victoria died in January 1901. A matter of months later came the first significant footballing appearance of the name Chapman. “Chapman H.”, once of Worksop, had trialled for Grimsby Town in 1898, but it was the inclusion of that name on a list of triallists at Sheffield Wednesday that marked his break into the…
It would prove to be a saving grace: the threat of a players’ strike in 1961 finally brought an end to the maximum wage in English football after 60 years. (You can read a superb discussion of the issue and its history here). At the same time, Clough became a leading player at a leading…
Thanks are due to Dave Heasman for pointing out my mistake in the last article in this series. Chelsea beat Sunderland to promotion in 1962-3, Clough’s second full season at Roker Park, on GOAL AVERAGE, not goal difference. Goal average – the number of goals scored by a team over a season divided by the…
The irony behind Brian Clough’s transfer to Sunderland is that, according to the tables at least, Middlesbrough were marginally the better side. In season 1960-61, Middlesbrough finished fifth, one place above Sunderland. But the story is stranger than that narrow gap would indicate. Middlesbrough enjoyed a fine season at home, winning thirteen of their 21…
Thanks to Gary for pointing this one out to me – it’s another half-time team talk of the Churchillian variety. Watch the faces of the players. (You’ll have to follow the link, but it’s well worth it..)
George Szirtes is asking his readers to tell him which opening passages to pieces of music marked changed times for them – his e.gs include the opening chord of “Hard Days Night,” and my own reply would be another sixties moment, the drum sequence that opens the Rolling Stones collectivist anthem “Get Off Of My…
Clough’s international “career” began in 1957, when he was picked to take part in a tour of Iron Curtain countries by England Under 23s. He started well, scoring against Bulgaria, but was dropped for the next game in favour of Derek Kevan, a centre-forward of the traditional kind. Jimmy Armfield was there to witness Clough’s…
It’s a familiar part of football history to every fan: Victorian and Edwardian Brits start up small football clubs to pass the idle hours in foreign climes, and before you can say A.C.Milan or Grasshopper Club Zurich… …or, in the case of Juventus, a club started by natives turned to good old Blighty for help…
We know little or nothing about the process by which Clough made his way into the Middlesbrough first team, but once he was there, what he did was memorable, and the imagination backfills something similar into his time in the reserves. It’s not the number of goals that Clough began to score that is most…