James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
Metatone raised three questions in comments on my earlier post here : 1. Is the common factor in talk therapies that work the regular contact with a relatively non-judgemental/sympathetic person who seems to be paying attention? 2. Is the common feature of all the talking therapies that they represent a process (thinking of process over…
This post is in response to part of Metatone’s comment on my earlier post here Sport got there first, of course, and got there many decades earlier. Even before Freud and Kraepelin had begun constructing their contrasting disease models of mental illness, athletes and footballers had come to a basic conception of positive psychology. It…
Usually, it starts with an email: “James/Hi James/Dear James: I’ve been reading some sport psychology textbooks and it’s all rubbish. Please could you point me to the real deal?” These emails are hard to answer. Because what my interlocutor has noticed is that the content of sport psychology is unacademic, unproven, shallow, and all too…
I’ve just been groping through piles of statistics and have come across a thoroughly melancholy fact, namely that there are no survivors of England’s pre-War internationals. The earliest international match for which we have a living English representative is Northern Ireland v England on 28th September 1946: Sir Tom Finney (b. 5th April 1922) scored…
This isn’t a memorable game, but one rarely seen I suspect.
Tim Vickery is as always worth reading in full on Brazil’s preparations for South Africa 2010, but I wanted to draw your attention to the three crucial paragraphs. Because this is what Simon Clifford and Sir Clive Woodward have been saying for years, and this is what the English in particular have been slow to…
Beckham out. Thus passes a generation of English players who came to prominence at the very end of my twenties. This is how the story ends, then: that group have indeed passed on without winning an international trophy. What Gary Neville feared, and perhaps expected, has come true. Truth to tell, England’s teams since 1998…
Anyone with an active interest in the history of sport will be glad for an introduction to the Sport in Modern Europe research network. It’s being led by Dr. Chris Young at the University of Cambridge assisted by Professors Alan Tomlinson of Brighton and Richard Holt at De Monfort. Chris summarizes the goals of the…
The market at London’s Petticoat Lane, 1903: So many people, and so many of them young. The market is every bit as crowded today, but the age mix is quite different. In 1903, Petticoat Lane was no longer towards London’s eastern edge. Beyond it now lay mile upon mile of Victorian brick terraces, still new:…
In some senses, this film is not for the football historian: the A1 Great North road is a cyclist’s route, going through rugby country. The large conurbations and urban industrial centres that gave birth to professional football were in the west of England and Scotland – Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Preston, Blackburn and Bolton. But this…