James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
The Field, that cozy, unselfish country gentleman’s magazine, bore the travails of 1918 well. Most of its sports reporting – and it covered association football with a generous spirit – was about dead and wounded friends, and now influenza had come in to interrupt what little real sport was still going on. Its correspondents kept…
New technology and the new sport of Association Football just seemed to go together in the last years of the nineteenth century. Not only was the modern game as we know it born in amongst cutting-edge manufacturing and mining in the English and Scottish industrial urban towns, not only did the arrival of telegraph, telephone…
(WARNING: this is quite long) I’d been casting about for months for an image that might effectively sum up the history of English football. A face, a stadium, perhaps a team lineup or training session. Perhaps a German airport, snowbound. It was a search for a picture that would say the most in the least…
What British football had become by 1905, the world game reflects now. League systems, knock-out cups, international matches, the basic rules, professionalism, the nature of the football club, football administration – they’re all British inventions dating from a hectic 42 year period beginning in 1863 with the formation of the Football Association. But in the…
Queen Victoria died in January 1901. A matter of months later came the first significant footballing appearance of the name Chapman. “Chapman H.”, once of Worksop, had trialled for Grimsby Town in 1898, but it was the inclusion of that name on a list of triallists at Sheffield Wednesday that marked his break into the…
Corinthian attitudes and coaching greatness don’t run together: all of the great managers seem to have an exhaust trail of money, questionable money. For Revie it was undenied allegations of bribery in the early 1960s, then the undercover contract from the Arabian peninsular that took him from the England job. For Venables, it was his…
One of television’s highlights for me in 2004 was the BBC series “The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon“. Mitchell and Kenyon were film makers in the early years of the twentieth century, and what looks to be their entire archive of footage has been rediscovered in amazingly good condition. It’s fasinating stuff. Imagine all…