James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
It wasn’t so long ago when the English felt free to mock inhabitants of Her Majesty’s erstwhile and remaining possessions(start at 2m 16 secs)… ..and going further back still, most early histories of the Football Association refer to Scottish professional players in alienating terms: they were foreigners, come from outside to take the shilling and…
You may have read a BBC report about the police visiting the premises of Slanj Ltd, a kilt firm who also do a line in amusing t-shirts. In this instance, the police popped round on their own initiative, to warn the company that their “Anyone But England” shirts… well, read it for yourself! A company…
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…
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…
The mid-sixties brought a gentlemen’s agreement: Liverpool would do the music, and London would do the football. It might have happened earlier. Most capital cities dominated the football in their respective countries, and London had only missed out because we’d invented the game, and invented it north of Watford Gap. But by 1964, the English…
By 1963, England’s top players would have been well used to foreign travel. They were familiar with the routine and experience of flying, so Ramsey’s first fixture shouldn’t have posed a problem just because it was an away friendly. But it was an away friendly in Paris, that most unfriendly and unEnglish of cities. It…
My own pleasure at the appointment of Fabio Capello to the England manager’s post is largely down to non-footballing reasons. In England, there’s a sense that football is an acceptable interest for men, but more cultural pasttimes are suspect. Not so for the gastronome aesthete Capello. That’s not to argue that hinterland makes a manager….
Before I start my post-mortem, spare a moment for the British press. They didn’t want Owen Hargreaves. Will any of them now admit their error, or will they fall back on saying that he’s “won over the fans”? They didn’t want Crouch. And no other manager besides Sven would ever have picked him. Or stuck…
You’d have asked for anyone save Portugal. It’s one for the remaining band who believe that the lesser the opposition, the better our chances. For the rest of us, we can only hope that England stir themselves, and trust in something more interesting for the semi-final. Brace yourselves for a week of the following stories…
I’m not going to enter into any detailed analysis here, but these are some pointers as to why I think England have only one World Cup star on their shirts: England’s best teams have almost always peaked outside World Cup years – the 46-48 side, the 60-61 team, and the 75-78 side that Revie never…