James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
What with Christmas decorations shouldering their way back into our malls and high streets, it’s obviously time once more to hand out the most prestigious award in Victorian sport today: The More Than Mind Games Victorian Sports Personality of the Year. The award goes to that sports person, active between the years 1837 and 1901,…
Until very recently, my brother-in-law ran a business that must have featured the world’s most charismatic workplace. It held Europe’s only indoor Mustang dynamometer – a rolling road for racing cars, essentially, which you could stand beside with your ear defenders strapped on tight watching whilst another warpainted drag racer clawed its way to 200mph….
In Scotland, the feed from Manchester went to the Sportscene studio, and at full time the viewer was duly delivered to an operating theatre emptied of everything but two chairs. Sitting on these were our host, with his comic horror-film expression and Vietnam War eyes, and John Hartson. Hartson was about twice his size, which…
No one’s a prophet in their own.. and, once again, England’s press have watched England in a manner reserved just for England. During the 2006 World Cup, I tried watching other teams play with that English press attitude, and found it an enlightening experience. Even in that extraordinary Argentina-Serbia game, the striped side put passes…
The interview over, I followed her out of the room, asking as I went, “Is everyone in Edinburgh English?” “Yes,” she replied, “But it’s different in Glasgow.” A Central Belt of two halves, then, and the Kris Boyd affair is another that splits neatly down the middle. Boyd’s always known his own mind. When he joined Rangers…
There was no way into Scotland v Norway: the Antiquary spilled guys out onto the street clutching radios, the Baillie was full to the doors and people craning for a glimpse of even one of their many screens. The Standard’s crowded front yard told a similar story, so we pushed on for the Cambridge and…
Jim White, according to his potted biography, went to Manchester Grammar School and then chose Bristol University. And here’s the consequence of that: a man in middle age still completely and utterly at home with being a complete fan, uncaring, if not unaware, of the dignity-stripping absurdity of the fan’s prostration and snowblindness. A bad…
It was one of the most exciting endings I’ve seen to a game: brave, desperate defending from the Saints, against ten-man Rangers attacks that seemed certain, certain, time after time, to nail an equalizer that astonishingly never came. 1-0 it remained, however, and then the big screen next to my table in the Standard switched to Everton…
I was here, briefly, in today’s early sunshine. Not for any footballing reasons: I’d ebayed a bike, which refused to fit into the back of my car until I let its tyres down. Recreation Park was just over the road. A friendly face called down from a window. I couldn’t hear; asked him again. “Take the front wheel off!” “No, no. I’ll just give it another push”. (Embarrassed now, and…
I hadn’t known that it had been filmed: the shockingly violent moment when Sam English’s knee caught Celtic goalkeeper John Thomson’s head in a 1931 Old Firm derby. But there the whole terrible incident was, played out in front of a vast Ibrox crowd, and replayed now in commemoration of Thomson’s entry into the Scottish…