Month: February 2008

From here: “Soon after the kick-off,” he wrote in his autobiography, “[fog] began to thicken rapidly at the far end, travelling past Vic Woodley in the Chelsea goal and rolling steadily towards me. The referee stopped the game, and then, as visibility became clearer, restarted it. We were on top at this time, and I…

Ever get the feeling that you’ve been cheated? It seems relatively certain that Newcastle United’s latest, greatest fan, Mike Ashley, is intent upon selling the club just as soon as a bidder with £200m in their kick rolls along. DIC, Liverpool’s somewhat unScouse wooers and pursuers, have already said “no.” It’s all just a little…

The experts say the same thing about a top sportsperson’s background. They’ll have started young. You don’t often come across someone at the top level who took up their sport later than age 12-14. They’ll have something called “natural talent.” This will make them stand out from their peers. They’ll work incredibly hard, or at…

A sleepless night, not helped at all by the discovery that the entire British Movietone film archive is available to view free online. British Movietone were/are a newsreel company, competitors to Pathe News whose archive is already online. Naturally this means that the amount of historical football clips available on the net has pretty much…

No trouble naming the great years: 1946 (England’s greatest ever national side), 1953 (Puskas and co.), 1962 (Garrincha and Pele), 1966, 1970 (Pele and co again, this time in glorious technicolor), 1972 (Netzer’s West Germany), 1974 (total football) and 1982 (Brazil once again), 2006 for the Argentines. You’ll have your own candidates in spades. It’s…

In pursuit of something quite different, I came across the following. In New Zealand and Australia, “soccer” has been the most common usage since the early part of the twentieth century. In 2005, the game was relaunched in Australia as “football” and the nickname for the national side, the “Socceroos” was expected (by the relevant…

Newcastle United are going to owe Premiership survival to one thing come May. Their good start under Sam Allardyce. Indeed, that might look all very pollyannaish come the end of the season, because not a few of the clubs beneath them are better run and are capable of overtaking Toon with a little luck. As…

Most of you will have read the contributions to Danny Finkelstein’s Ten Greatest Mistakes in British History question in The Times. I found most of them dubious – the Chartists not arming the London masses? But it led me to think about what the top ten mistakes in British football history might be. In the…

This man went to the same state school as David Beckham: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOONhFutsrg&rel=1] Twenty years earlier, and in the north, these men were also products of ordinary backgrounds: ..whereas the man you see here was an autodidact: I was on my uppers during the last recession, and took comfort in the humble location of this man’s…

I came in just at the end of the first half: Jenas had given England a lead. Jenas? And, later in the second half, Gareth Barry came off. Barry? Match of the Day was refusing to tell johnny-come-latelies like myself who was playing, so it took some time to dawn on me that Capello had…