James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
I’d gone to Blackwells – the old Broad Street one, using the original narrow entrance in preference to the wider swing doors – to get something second-hand from their top-floor department. It was mildly annoying to have to shoulder my way in – blast these tourists, coming in to gawp – and slightly more annoying…
Hope and damnation side by side in the People’s Game. The first film is of a Wartime International between England and Scotland, won handsomely by the team in white in front of the Royal Family at Wembley. Stanley Matthews and Matt Busby are just two players of the many ’40s talents on show here. Poor…
It was all about goals – about setting Italy an impossible target in their final World Cup Qualifier which would come against Luxembourg in Rome. Six goals for England was surely out of the question, but any number would help. If they got two, Italy would only need to win 1-0 in Rome; three would…
There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? to say that English football managers just aren’t as intelligent as their foreign counterparts. In a comment left on an earlier post, John Sinnott said “I’ve done lots of interviews with overseas players and managers and invariably they were always smarter and brighter and more analytical…
In 2003, Martin Johnson lifted the Rugby World Cup. His England were, without argument, the best prepared team in the tournament, a group who had spent 3-4 years working towards this ultimate goal. England lost their visionary coach and inspirational captain shortly after the World Cup, and have spent the subsequent years in the rugby…
Only in England can you be a prophet in your own country whilst still coming from abroad. It’s been a bad eighteen months for the people I’d call prophets. Martin Amis is being dragged backwards from the broadsheet pickup truck because of one 2-year-old line which contradicts a dozen others of his before and since….
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…