James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
A few days after her death, my grandmother comes in through my bedroom window after lights out. I am six years old. She does so again on other nights. The dream always follows the same path. Malevolent twilight and her body framed against it, her back turned to me. The head slowly coming round; and…
Say this for David Pearce’s novel The Damned Utd – it was the first really unembarrassed cultural treatment that the national game has ever had. Fever Pitch broke the ground. But Fever Pitch was gauche, blushing, unsure of its reception. It was essentially uncontroversial, and that is what has set The Damned Utd apart: the…
UPDATE: I think the phrase is “overtaken by events”! I’ll leave this here as a period piece, but as things stand, O’Neill won’t ,after all, be going to West Ham. It’s unlikely that Grant will hang on regardless, but no subsequent appointment will hold half the interest of Martin O’Neill’s. This is harsh on Avram…
Following on from our look at Billy Graham’s 1955 address to the BWA at Highbury, Phil Wilson (Doveson2008 of Flickr) sends word of colour FILM of Highbury in the form of a British Pathe newsreel from 1956. FOOTBALL BALL MANUFACTURE (aka FOOTBALL STORY) <p>Your browser does not support iframes.</p> <p> Also featured are Webber Bros…
UPDATE: Doveson2008 kindly returned to the original slide, rescanned it and provided a great deal of additional information besides. Armed with that, Matthew and I have been able to pin down the exact time, date and occasion on which this photograph was taken. It’s c. 6.30pm on Friday, 22nd July 1955. The Baptist World Alliance…
In his analysis of eleven turning points in English football history, Rob Marrs has this to say about the Munich Disaster: Like 1966, I won’t write too much here. That terrible day robbed football (not just English football) of great players like Duncan Edwards. It is a point of conjecture to wonder what England would…
In 1929, pioneering firm British Talking Pictures Ltd went to Wembley and made a – talking picture! of the FA Cup Final. It was what Mitchell and Kenyon would have done, but by 1929 new tech chose other, newer vehicles. Considering its subject, this film is astonishingly early. You can watch, and listen, to the…
In 1981, Manchester City, a club in Salford whose big spending hadn’t brought results, allowed in the television cameras. Not entirely by coincidence, he chose the same period to sack championship-winning City coach Malcolm Allison in favour of John Bond, who’d take them to the FA Cup Final. Twenty years earlier, Bond had been a…
There was a period in the early 1980s when the great clubs of England’s industrial cities gave way to smaller clubs from quieter places. Southampton, Ipswich, Norwich, Watford and Luton all had their great days between Clough’s first European Cup and the end of the Falklands Conflict. To this south-eastern boy, they were home teams,…
It would prove to be a saving grace: the threat of a players’ strike in 1961 finally brought an end to the maximum wage in English football after 60 years. (You can read a superb discussion of the issue and its history here). At the same time, Clough became a leading player at a leading…