James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
One of the many subjects that come up for debate whenever the Ashes begin slipping away from England is the utility of the County Cricket set-up. Can it produce Test-level cricketers in sufficient numbers, does it work for its audience, is it dying? And all this in the reformed County set-up, one in which Mark…
Not that John Cameron; another one. But delighted etc. Our thanks to John Cameron, and our commiserations to Burnley. From the Penny Illustrated Paper of 2nd November 1912. He looks and sounds like Alf Ramsey, but he was right about baseball.
Burnley have history against them. But this is not another of those articles bemoaning the failure of promoted sides to establish themselves in the Premiership. Because if we’re going to be following their fortunes throughout the term, and alongside them, the fortunes of Burnley 1920-21 and Burnley 1959-60, it makes sense to put all three…
If we’re going to follow Burnley through the year, and throw their last Championship season up for comparison, I thought it might be just as well to involve their first title year as well – 1920-1. There’s what must be all of the surviving Burnley footage, save the 1940s pioneering colour film of Turf Moor,…
Fifty years separated Chelsea’s first League Championship from their second, and it’s hard not to notice that the half-century of Burnley’s last triumph is hard upon us. Stranger things have happened. But the strangest thing of all is that Burnley haven’t been back up since 1976 – they were a modern, progressive club with intelligent…
I’d like to thank Rob Marrs for putting me onto this particular story. I don’t follow European football particularly well, and the Deisler situation had completely passed me by. I doubt very much I can do more with it than rehearse the usual things, but here’s what I make of it nonetheless. Depression is “my”…
You’ll know that most of the Edwardian film footage of football that we still possess was the work of the northern firm Mitchell and Kenyon, and that they also produced travelling panoramas. Like this one: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpU4DgefFPo] I came across a more modern equivalent during an idle surfing session yesterday. Three films, on Youtube, taken from…
Co-author of the book behind the article that was the subject of yesterday’s post, Stefan Szymanski, has very kindly taken the time to expand on the subject for those of us yet to receive our copies of his and Simon’s new book. He did so in the comments to the original post, but I felt…
Dearieme points us to this Simon Kuper piece in the FT: Time to End Our Deluded Obsession with Club Managers. From it, we learn that Stefan Szymanski, economics professor at Cass Business School, studied the spending of 40 English clubs between 1978 and 1997, and found that their spending on salaries explained 92 per cent…
You get so used to false talk of heroism in football that you come to discount it. But occasionally, a real one comes to light, and when a real one comes to light it illuminates all the others. And heaven knows, at the end of the 1860s, Edinburgh’s impoverished and embattled Irish community were in…