James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
Before the FIFA World Cup of 1930, the Olympic Games football tournament represented the first organized attempt to stage a world championship. Even as early as 1908, that’s precisely what it was, featuring the United Kingdom, France, Holland, Sweden and Denmark. Only the withdrawal of Hungary and Bohemia before the tournament started prevent 1908 from…
There has been no better time to watch pre-1960s football than now. Most of the FA Cup Finals are available, in full, on DVD, and one of these (1957) is the only complete game I know of to show the Busby Babes in full flow. The 50s finals accord with every cliche about the good…
We seem to be entering upon an era of dirty play, and Glossop has the unenviable distinction of being concerned in the latest row. It occurred in the match between the Bolton Wanderers and Glossop, both of whom are striving for promotion to the Second League and are well in the running. No fewer…
In Holland, football is a thinking man’s game. When the Dutch talk about it, the concepts to which they always return are ‘techniek’ and ‘tactiek‘. ‘Passie‘, or passion, was a quality they associated with unsophisticated footballers from other countries. In Korea, Hiddinck learnt that it was actually pretty important. Even when speaking Dutch, he tends…
Here’s an astonishing Pathe lineup of – almost entirely – Victorian English streetscape. Because the bulk of this was shot in 1896-7, the camera was too bulky to manouvre but too new to be recognised for what it was, lending these scenes an intimacy, almost an anonymity, that Mitchell and Kenyon would neither seek nor…
Interesting unused rushes from the Depression era are rare, so I thought I’d post these five minutes of them here despite their lack of sports content. Pathe don’t know when or where: visual clues suggest to me South Wales c. 1937-9. At any rate, the lack of post-War cues is glaring enough, and those are…