James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
English football doesn’t obsess about 1966 as much as Scottish fans might like to think. My first post on this is here; Alex Massie here and Rob Marrs here have taken the subject further. Rob, being English, won’t shut up about 1966: Scots talk about the English bringing up 1966 far more than English folk…
It wasn’t so long ago when the English felt free to mock inhabitants of Her Majesty’s erstwhile and remaining possessions(start at 2m 16 secs)… ..and going further back still, most early histories of the Football Association refer to Scottish professional players in alienating terms: they were foreigners, come from outside to take the shilling and…
You may have read a BBC report about the police visiting the premises of Slanj Ltd, a kilt firm who also do a line in amusing t-shirts. In this instance, the police popped round on their own initiative, to warn the company that their “Anyone But England” shirts… well, read it for yourself! A company…
We’ve done it, at last, haven’t we: taken the silent and unanimous decision that Brian Clough matters. He’s made the step up: Brian Clough’s cultural now, gone from the close, sweaty barracks of football because he stands for England like Elgar and Dickens. The news about Clough isn’t in the tabloids anymore. It’s strictly broadsheet,…
Gerry Hassan has expanded, generously to say the least, on my earlier post about the place of the Scottish national team in the minds of Scots. I’m going to begin my response by considering some of Gerry’s points. But his fasinating post has attracted exactly the kind of in-depth, thoughtful, informed comments that I’ve found…
The lack of English managers at the very top level has been well and truly noticed now: last night, Radio 5 devoted ninety minutes to discussing the situation with the likes of Tony Adams, Steve McClaren, Terry Venables and Sam Allardyce. The programme went out live, it’s not clear how much any of the participants…
The tragedy of the 100+ Mitchell and Kenyon films is in their length, or lack of it. Getting a real idea of what an Edwardian soccer match was like from any one of them or all of them is next to impossible. This example, Newcastle United v Liverpool at St James’s Park in 1901, is…
This post is in memory of Willie Logan, supporter of both our friends Dunfermline Athletic and our charity Brain Tumour Action. Willie died in 2009 at the age of 45, two years after his own brain tumour was diagnosed. He leaves his wife, Karen, and son, Ewan, and a host of others who miss him…
We end the year in darkness. Or on a dark topic, at any rate. In Glasgow and Edinburgh, 1909 began with the outbreak of “smog” – the sticky, intrusive and often lethal combination of coalsmoke and fog – that led not only to the coining of the term, but to an estimated 1,000 deaths. The…
If you’ve come across Humphrey Spender’s "Worktown" series of Bolton photographs from the ’30s (see his Bolton Wanderers sequence here) then you’ll enjoy this multi-part documentary about Tom Harrison, whose fault the whole Mass Observation thing ultimately was. Nosiness will never be the same again: Part One: Part Two: Part Three: …