More Than Mind Games

As if to prove that absolutely everything is on the web these days, here are some extracts from a 1976 book of poems published by the current manager of Wales. Gosh! It’s Tosh The title’s harsh – some of this is perfectly serviceable verse, not pretending to be any more than it is. Return From…

It’s like that first real drink of the evening, England going out of a tournament. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd7HTlkzS28] All of that tension falls off your shoulders and the world rights itself. We hardly knew how bad we’d been feeling until it was over. And the football suddenly gets better. Remember Euro 2000? I caught this one in…

To them who wait. Mark Ramprakash is my direct contemporary, born in the fabulous late-60s sunshine and condemned to make his entry onto the scene in the dog days of the early ’90s. Now he has found second wind, and may be looking at a late-life call-up to the England Test team after many seasons…

George Szirtes: ..the rhetoric, the actual language of debate, employs a vocabulary determined more by the left than the right. The right has no rhetorical lexicon of any general moral value. The moral lexicon belongs to the left: the right can only argue by resorting to it. One has only to think of terms of…

Put together any list of the greatest British football managers: the same names always recur. Chapman, Matt Busby, Bill Shankly, Don Revie, Alf Ramsey, Jock Stein, Bob Paisley, Brian Clough, Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger.. and there’ll be one or two other names others would add to their own version of this list. I’d add Jose…

So often, seen only in retrospect. Take Busby’s Manchester United: a 2-0 defeat in the San Siro against Inter in 1969, in a European Cup semi-final, is followed by many, many years of entirely unlooked-for disaster, mediocrity and decline. Another 2-0 defeat, this time for Leeds United in the 1975 European Cup Final, spelt the…

.. in one of the least satisfying FA Cup Finals ever, 1957. This Final was filmed in colour, which you can see in full on DVD but not here. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sob0cvIK3p4]

Well, as it were. It was his first, and would prove to be his last, for all that he was 21 years away from a World Cup Semi-Final: Manchester City v Leicester City FA Cup Final 1969: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Ag47jTLlw]

It’s not the most prestigious award of its kind, and can’t match William Hill’s largesse, but our winner is not in, and is better than, the William Hill Long List. The William Hill Sports Book of the Year Long List is dominated by sport at the top end – professional, monied, unexperienced by normal people…

The last real footballing innovation that came from England was the W-M formation – the Chapman/Buchan third back game, invented in 1925 as a response to the mayhem inspired by a change in the offside laws. My previous post on this subject mused on some of the reasons why Britain ceased to be the engine…