James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
Before I start my post-mortem, spare a moment for the British press. They didn’t want Owen Hargreaves. Will any of them now admit their error, or will they fall back on saying that he’s “won over the fans”? They didn’t want Crouch. And no other manager besides Sven would ever have picked him. Or stuck…
You’d have asked for anyone save Portugal. It’s one for the remaining band who believe that the lesser the opposition, the better our chances. For the rest of us, we can only hope that England stir themselves, and trust in something more interesting for the semi-final. Brace yourselves for a week of the following stories…
The news that Brazil’s excellent holding midfielder, Edmilson, is out through injury, constitutes the second major blow to the tournament. Wayne Rooney – not entirely out yet, but definitely hampered in making any sort of impact in Germany, was the first. There are two ways of looking at these things. You can either celebrate the…
Judging by some of the press reports – well summarised by Football365 as “Panic Mode” – on England’s 3-1 victory over Hungary last night, we can more or less forget about our winning in Germany this year. It’s for all the usual “reasons”, most of which I think are bunk: “Eriksson is an over-cautious manager…
In the end, I spent two hours being interviewed to camera by the team from Mentorn TV for their forthcoming drama-documentary “The Real Sven.” Although some of the questions referred to the points I’d raised in my earlier interview, there were new ones that were to do with the Sven outside football – his love…
For the thirty-one years that divided England’s narrow loss to Brazil in the 1970 World Cup Finals and the 5-1 victory over Germany in Munich, there were three kinds of England international. The first kind were against minnows, nations with little football history or few players to call upon. England almost always won these matches…