James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
Long-term readers will know that I’ve been searching for pre-War colour photography of English football. So far, I’ve found almost none. That “almost” refers to the Friese-Greene trip to Cardiff in 1924, which took in a visit to Fratton Park, where the Cardiff City captain was filmed standing motionless in the stands. The skipper’s baby…
London is waking slowly this morning to clear skies, fresh air, minimal traffic and a sinking feeling that there’s just no way we’ll be able to match that in 2012. Four years away, and municipal humiliation looks unavoidable already. Like everyone else, I think that that was the very best opening ceremony I have ever…
I can remember finding 1985 too modern-sounding a year for me to be alive in it. 23 years on… What would you have predicted about the next quarter-century of football, given 1985 as a starting point? The big theme of the year was hooliganism, even before Heysel. No one at the time had any clear…
I’ve now the greatest respect for those people on the Guardian or at the BBC who do those minute-by-minute text updates of matches: I tried to do the same thing with the DVD of the 1957 FA Cup Final and simply couldn’t keep up. So this isn’t a liveblogging of the 51 year old game,…
The journey to Edinburgh concertinas down into a short and minor series of motoring vignettes. Crowded Brum at 7a.m., the world weaving from lane to lane without lights. A stop for horrid coffee and a dreadful burger in a cafe at Knutsford Services. The mines of Wigan, the machine shops of Preston. Lakes, then a…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHLNjiTtshI] I’m off to Scotland in the morning. Not like this – who do you think I am? Chris Dillow? In my little car with its greasy windscreen and Vostock driving position, starting before sunrise.. a prelude to a later, nastier trip in a big white van full of books and booze and the odd…
It was a headline in the Independent, and my heart sank: “Beckham sees Capello’s passion as key to England success.” “Passion and commitment” were once an unwanted theme of this blog. Here’s a recap of two myths of British football that are wrong but effortlessly ever-present: “Passion outweighs skill and technique.” What we need is/are…
Note: if anyone cares to do their own version of this in the comments, I’ll turn it into a separate post here. Just because Desert Island Discs is old doesn’t mean it isn’t tight. Only eight records? And one book? One luxury? I never felt much like having a luxury, unless that be an unexpected,…
In this recent post, I said: After 1910, in any case, the Southern League and the Football League came to an agreement which regularised retain-and-transfer across both organisations. Had that not happened, it is interesting to speculate that a post-1918 Southern League might not have taken advantage of depression in the north of England and…
Thanks largely to the fortunate survival of the Mitchell and Kenyon archive, the British Film Institute now possesses many hours of Edwardian football footage. A large proportion of this has now been properly restored and the best of it released on two DVDs: Electric Edwardians and Edwardian Sport . Snippets of this material come and…