James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
A lifetime separates Herbert Chapman’s death and the arrival on the scene of Simon Clifford: in that time, there was no innovation in British football. In fact, if you remove Chapman from the equation, the innovation-free period starts in 1888. So it’s vital to encourage innovation and risk-taking, the attempt to do something genuinely new,…
Go over and try Rob Marrs’s Xmas Quiz over at Left Back In The Changing Room? You might as well: it’s fiendishly difficult, and I reckon I can get about one answer in ten.The beauty of it is that the questions are skilfully crafted, and look and sound as though you should know the answers…..
Peter Watts’s recent visit to Whitgift showed a football returning by inches to being a true national game, involving, like cricket and racing, everyone regardless of income and background (the bulk of the 2005 Ashes winners were state-educated incidentally). What it wasn’t, and couldn’t have been, was a comment on the level of intelligence within…
The Football Star offices, Fleet Street, Christmas 1905: There is a silence in the office still as death. The seconds are ticking off, the minutes are creeping past, and men stand with telephones to their ear, and others are hanging over the “tape” machines which send out results. The nervous strain is almost unbearable. It’s…
Peter Watts has an article in the new FourFourTwo about private Whitgift School’s efforts to develop young footballers. It’s worth getting hold of a copy to read his piece in full, but there is a useful summary of the main points in Peter’s post at The Big Smoke: I met six of Whitgift’s schoolboy footballers,…
I’ve been asked to identify the faces in the new More Than Mind Games header image. Pleased to do so. From the left, they are: Arthur Kinnaird, the football pioneer and nineteenth century philanthropist Herbert Chapman, the manager of Northampton Town, Leeds, Huddersfield and Arsenal Brian Clough and Peter Taylor Canon Edward Hannan, the founder…
It’s the worst imaginable outcome for England. A group containing Algeria, USA and Slovenia is precisely what we didn’t need. Here’s why: We face a press avalanche of stupidity, bigotry and ignorance about the USA. This is where some of the ordinarily classy and intelligent bloggers will trip up too, as they did in 2006….
Truly, there is nothing new under the sun. This is from the Penny Illustrated Paper of Saturday, May 24th 1902: There appear to be plenty of agents prowling around to discover whom they can find to add to the already big stock of Welsh players who are assisting Northern Union clubs. Not only Wales, but…
Mentally, the 1920s will always be for me as they were in my early youth: fifty years ago. And Shanks’s arrival at Anfield, maybe twenty. And now there’s this sudden jarring sensation, a dull thump to the stomach, as the realization sets in of the passage of all those extra years. Even this glorious quotation…