Month: July 2007

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…

Without clicking through, see if you can identify the two teams involved here, and hazard a guess at the date. There are enough clues for most of you to “get it” before it finishes, but see how long it takes you. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b6cwubeSjw]

We’re not creative enough: we’re not positive enough. Sir Trevor Brooking, in the opening moments of this video: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96-zW2c8H2o] Perhaps the only good football song ever written that’s just about football. It says only good things about the Germans that they adopted it for themselves – but neglected to translate it in the process. Of…

More egregious copyright theft from Football Commentator. But it’s a good example of the huge quantity of high-quality footage to be seen on Freemantle Media’s superb multi-DVD production, The History of Football. Amazon list it for just under £18.00, which, for 7 DVDs of this sort of thing accompanied by intelligent commentary and interviews (e.g….

In today’s Telegraph, Jim White talks about the boredom of primary school children denied the joys of competition by their overly politicized headmistress. But too much emphasis on competition at too young an age, on promoting “winning” above all, can be just as bad. Mathew Annis of The Sixth Day Is For Football takes up…

In the old days, it was simple: you didn’t trust anyone who wore a tweed hat or a beard. But Jimmy Hill muddied at least the more saline of those waters. And you just don’t see tweed hats anymore, except in Norfolk. There’s nothing to rely upon anymore. Except that anyone who says Americans don’t…