James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
The argument over the ball at the 2010 World Cup has brought to the fore, once again, the fact that even otherwise well-informed fans don’t always know the laws of the game. It is a myth that the modern ball is lighter than the balls used in the past. Since 1937, the dry weight of…
Athletics, cricket and swimming have their blooper reels and ice hockey its fights. But only football has cock-up at its core. Only in football is savage and ridiculous public error key to so many significant moments and germaine to so many results. That’s down to the random element, of course, and (let’s get it over…
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,…
This isn’t a memorable game, but one rarely seen I suspect.
English football doesn’t obsess about 1966 as much as Scottish fans might like to think. My first post on this is here; Alex Massie here and Rob Marrs here have taken the subject further. Rob, being English, won’t shut up about 1966: Scots talk about the English bringing up 1966 far more than English folk…
The lack of English managers at the very top level has been well and truly noticed now: last night, Radio 5 devoted ninety minutes to discussing the situation with the likes of Tony Adams, Steve McClaren, Terry Venables and Sam Allardyce. The programme went out live, it’s not clear how much any of the participants…
A 1985ish Scotsport documentary on Alex Ferguson, the manager of Aberdeen, in three parts. It’s now ten years since the publication of Ferguson’s “Managing My Life” – if that doesn’t make you feel old, at the fag end of another year… Part One: Part Two: Part Three:
In 1981, Manchester City, a club in Salford whose big spending hadn’t brought results, allowed in the television cameras. Not entirely by coincidence, he chose the same period to sack championship-winning City coach Malcolm Allison in favour of John Bond, who’d take them to the FA Cup Final. Twenty years earlier, Bond had been a…
So many forward-thinking men in English football in the Fifties: Matthews and Finney after seeing Brazil in the 1950 World Cup, Malcolm Allison after watching Austrians train in Vienna in 1946, Joe Mercer and Don Revie in the wake of the Hungarians. It took England four years to go from the Magyars to once again…
Scotland drew the World Champions – and such World Champions! in their first round at their first World Cup. And played them off the park. Only Rivelino would have deserved a place in Willie Ormond’s side that day. Scotland could, if they wished, remember 1974 for this. Only the Netherlands, against the same opponents, would…