Month: September 2009

Just like its Denis Law equivalent, it’s accompanied by the Beatles: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKBEL29P2Lc] Enjoy. I particularly like the Rodney Marsh/Best interchanges towards the end. In the early ’90s, my lunchtime pub was the Phene Arms in Chelsea, which happened at the time to be Best’s local too. I have three principle memories of Best there, and…

Home by teatime, actually: here we go! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcKAlEPPSsM]

Because I know less than you do about electricity and electric lighting, I’ve always been guiltily confused about the three or four 1878 experiments in football floodlighting. These took place, as you’ll recall, in London, Sheffield and Edinburgh. Two aspects of the experiments had me puzzled. On the one hand, they took place just before…

The 1990 World Cup was both awful for England and wonderful. I watched most of it from between my fingers. David Platt (whose squad inclusion was contested by the press every bit as fiercely at first as Peter Crouch’s or Owen Hargreaves’s) robbed Belgium, and then came Lineker’s goals against the run of play versus…

A great story from Owen Slot of The Times: ..spent two weeks in Sierra Leone. He went there because two mates of his were in the timber business there and advised him that it was a fascinating country. So he took them at their word, arrived unheralded with no fanfare, no media welcome, nothing apart…

In September 1970, an experimental German film maker brought eight 16mm film cameras to Old Trafford and Manchester United v Coventry. He trained them all on George Best. Matt Busby had retired 15 months earlier, leaving Wilf McGuinness with a mix of old men, also-rans and George. The German effort was wasted: Best clearly doesn’t…

I’m extremely excited to find that the book written by the man who to me most epitomizes the history of British football is available free online. John Cameron was a Scot who began his career playing for the great amateur side Queens Park. He went on to star for Everton, then won the FA Cup…

This is, strictly speaking, Georgian – as in Poets – colour film, but the correct term isn’t often used, and “Edwardian” has come to mean everything between Victoria and the Miracle on the Marne. There are quite a few examples of colour moving pictures from this period in fact, and there was a great deal…

I forgot to include a couple of pieces of local detail yesterday. STV News on a Saturday evening goes through the Shinty results in detail, but completely ignores anything English lower than the Premiership. The Camanachd Cup final is being broadcast live on BBC2 Scotland. The core website for all this – Shinty.com – is…

I don’t know whether the village of Kinnaird (a little way south of Pitlochry and not where the AA Road Map 2006 puts it) is anything to do with Lord Alfred Kinnaird, late ragged-school teacher and President of the Football Association. But as I could combine getting this shot with avoiding the A9 roadworks tailback,…