James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
I sat up all night when Columbia broke up, following the news via Samizdata’s Dale Amon. I’d seen the Challenger disaster live, too, but at the age of eighteen, which is different. Of course, NASA had carried forward an awful lot of ill fortune that really belonged to Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. But there’d been…
“Football and Television in Edinburgh” : I didn’t say “Scotland” as it might be different elsewhere. I was prompted to this by my struggles yesterday afternoon to watch ITV’s live coverage of the FA Cup Fourth Round tie between Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur, a suburban London side. Scottish ITV weren’t showing it. Anecdotally, I…
This is MTMG’s 600th post. I wanted to reflect for a moment on the privilege of living through a time in which, for the first time in history, there are things more exciting than war. International professional sport is the first: it’s better than politics, too, and these days Sky Sports News has become a…
Biased analyses of fMRI studies call into doubt some of the remarkably high correlations found between localised areas of brain activity and specific psychological measures. In other words, researchers have been seeing what they wanted and expected to see, and they’ve been unconsciously creating the experimentational circumstances in which their hunches are confirmed. I’d long…
(What follows derives from research for a fiction project) By 1979, English football was clapped out. Decaying stadia, violent fans, and the fading away of the post-War talent boom left most lovers of sport with little to cheer. There had been eighty years of the Football League. For most of that time, the League had…
Haruki Murakami, interviewed by the Paris Review, passes on some trade secrets: When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to…
Courtesy of Mark Holland, an interesting piece in the Black Country Bugle about a 1940s Bible class photograph taken in Dudley. Of the thirty or so well-turned out lads present, only one has been identified: Duncan Edwards of Manchester United and England. Mark points out that it was a Methodist class and that this was…
Footballers in the 1960s walked and ran differently. There is a tautness and purpose to the Ramsey England of ’66. It’s best seen in games other than the World Cup ones, simply because the matches with Argentina, Portugal, West Germany et al are so familiar. This is pretty much the post-Greaves side. Talk of “wingless…
Iain Dale commented not long ago that British political blogging hadn’t “yet” made the inroads achieved by its counterparts in the United States. That left some of us muttering to ourselves about how that was because British political blogging wasn’t actually terribly good, and that the bloggers who did show any talent were already writers…
Derby’s victory over Manchester United at Pride Park last night was probably the most cheerful thing to have happened in any field in 2009. How dumb, dull and depressing if United had put on an expensive show and humiliated an already low County side in front of their new manager, the man with the magic…