James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
Peter Watts’s recent visit to Whitgift showed a football returning by inches to being a true national game, involving, like cricket and racing, everyone regardless of income and background (the bulk of the 2005 Ashes winners were state-educated incidentally). What it wasn’t, and couldn’t have been, was a comment on the level of intelligence within…
The Football Star offices, Fleet Street, Christmas 1905: There is a silence in the office still as death. The seconds are ticking off, the minutes are creeping past, and men stand with telephones to their ear, and others are hanging over the “tape” machines which send out results. The nervous strain is almost unbearable. It’s…
Peter Watts has an article in the new FourFourTwo about private Whitgift School’s efforts to develop young footballers. It’s worth getting hold of a copy to read his piece in full, but there is a useful summary of the main points in Peter’s post at The Big Smoke: I met six of Whitgift’s schoolboy footballers,…
I’ve been asked to identify the faces in the new More Than Mind Games header image. Pleased to do so. From the left, they are: Arthur Kinnaird, the football pioneer and nineteenth century philanthropist Herbert Chapman, the manager of Northampton Town, Leeds, Huddersfield and Arsenal Brian Clough and Peter Taylor Canon Edward Hannan, the founder…
It’s the worst imaginable outcome for England. A group containing Algeria, USA and Slovenia is precisely what we didn’t need. Here’s why: We face a press avalanche of stupidity, bigotry and ignorance about the USA. This is where some of the ordinarily classy and intelligent bloggers will trip up too, as they did in 2006….
Truly, there is nothing new under the sun. This is from the Penny Illustrated Paper of Saturday, May 24th 1902: There appear to be plenty of agents prowling around to discover whom they can find to add to the already big stock of Welsh players who are assisting Northern Union clubs. Not only Wales, but…
Mentally, the 1920s will always be for me as they were in my early youth: fifty years ago. And Shanks’s arrival at Anfield, maybe twenty. And now there’s this sudden jarring sensation, a dull thump to the stomach, as the realization sets in of the passage of all those extra years. Even this glorious quotation…
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…