James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? to say that English football managers just aren’t as intelligent as their foreign counterparts. In a comment left on an earlier post, John Sinnott said “I’ve done lots of interviews with overseas players and managers and invariably they were always smarter and brighter and more analytical…
I never meant it to be a central theme at this site. You can blame the press that it has been. It was their myth after all – that the kind of feelings fans experience watching football are the same feelings that the team needs to have on the pitch in order to win. It’s…
Football’s full of throwaway lines – and this is one of them: the game as religion, the grounds as cathedrals, the supporters as worshippers. Throw in Bill Shankly’s life-and-death quip and you have the perfect metaphor for a country that went from Vitae Lampada to Itchycoo Park in two generations. Like so many of these…
In the Netherlands, a Muslim football team and a gay football team played each other to prove that after all, it is possible for us all to just get along. (Hat tip: Norm). The Muslims won 4-0: The soccer tournament was organized as part of a conference on fighting discrimination against immigrants who come out…
What follows is a thinkpiece I created for IMGTV in relation to their August 2005 programme, “Being Jose Mourinho”. An attempt to answer three questions: what sort of man is JM? what sort of man does what he does? and how does he do it? Football is a game full of men who are motivated…