More Than Mind Games

My tube train had been half empty right up until Embankment. Then on came the England fans. It took a couple of minutes for the platform to clear itself into our carriage. The carriage became packed, then quickly moved past that into being rammed. The doors closed – first attempt, surprisingly – and the train…

Not this season, silly. I mean 1954: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgqRBZMG4uQ]

Imagine the following: a soccer game, when Hungary played with England and won 6:3. There is a man who fall asleep and goes back to the 50’s, when the game took place. He knows that Hungary will win, but nobody believe him. He follows the game at different places: at a pub, at the barber,…

When it happens – some time late in September, probably – it will have to be at the Salisbury, St Martin’s Lane. Here’s why Since 1892? We can’t let that go on, now, can we?

Our school library had Wisdens going back to the 1890s. The yellow volumes, thickening as the decades passed, occupied one side of a narrow bay; the Georgian poets were on the other. This was where I spent my time over the golden autumn of 1985, holding the ancient print close to my eyes so that…

We interrupt your normal programming to bring the following announcement: Following on from the hugely successful BBC TV series The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon and the BFI’s first DVD volume Electric Edwardians, come two DVDs containing a new selection of films – Mitchell & Kenyon Edwardian sports and Mitchell & Kenyon in Ireland….

FIFA celebrated its centenary in 2004 by producing what in context might be the worst football DVD of all time. I refer to the horrible FIFA Fever, which contains “greatest goals, saves, bloopers and fouls.” I can’t recommend it even to rent. However, it does contain a silent film made by a British company, and…

.. against Borussian Moenchengladbach in the European Cup in November 1970: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8l8iLQAKXw] It all ends in a penalty shootout. The sound is out of synch with the picture, so you know what’s going to happen before it’s happened. A little like putting your radio on top of your television during a live match.

Football as an emergent phenomenon of urban industrial society again.. but really just an excuse to link to another of Geoff Plumb’s spectacular pictures of that almost vanished world. And another.

If you’re English, your first mental encounter with the Dutch club inspired visions of scouring powder. I was a small child when Cruyff provided the elbow grease, and no one in my all-female household was prone to put the football on. Or any sport: I only caught Test Match Special because my gran had fallen…