Jon Hotten on the small but long-lasting humiliations of playing sport... It's funny how a small and insignificant incident in a game can send you off into a reverie, a time-trip back into the long-lost, half-forgotten past to a moment when something similar happened, a distant event that somehow triggers another ... Read More...
Row Z
Dabbler sport
Jon Hotten looks back at one of cricket's most unusual, and possibly slightly grotesque, games... There are several candidates for the match of the year 2011 - mad collapses, last-ball draws, you know, the usual - but there can be only one winner of the award for the year of 1848, ... Read More...
Nige looks at the historical but by no means dead sport of 'pedestrianism'... Back in 1773, at about this time of year, one Foster Powell (below) had just completed an epic walk, from London to York and back (396 miles) in less than six days, that won him a hefty bet and made ... Read More...
Jon Hotten pays tribute to the writing of controversial cricketer-turned-journalist Peter Roebuck, who died after jumping from a hotel window on Saturday... In front of me is It Never Rains, Peter Roebuck's diary of his 1983 season with Somerset. It's waterstained and foxed, the page edges an uneasy shade of yellow ... Read More...
In a post of extraordinary sweep and scope, James Hamilton looks at how the World Wars robbed Britain of its sense of future, symbolised by the eternally backward-facing game of football... My last post about the relationship between the Great War and football generated a debate about the extent to which causualties robbed ... Read More...
Of course, now that all the other home nations have been knocked out of the Rugby World Cup, we Brits and Irish are all Welsh as far as rugby's concerned. It therefore behoves all of you out there to learn more about the unpredictable opposition we'll be facing in Saturday's semi-final... Wales's defence coach, ... Read More...
Brit considers the epistemological implications of England's exit from the Rugby World Cup... On Saturday morning England were knocked out of the 2011 Rugby World Cup, at the quarter-final stage, by France. It was, of course, inevitable. England lacked skill, organisation, calmness under pressure. They didn’t have enough in them to fight ... Read More...
As the Rugby World Cup hots up Gaw considers why Wales backs youth and admires craftiness. This Saturday Wales play Ireland in one of the Rugby World Cup quarter-finals and look an exciting prospect. The credit for how they're playing is going to a talented group of young players: Teenage wing George North, fly-half ... Read More...
James Hamilton celebrates the old English football stadia, remarkable but unappreciated national treasures, through the story of gem-in-the-rough Burnden Park. They were built in a 30 year goldrush, the old English football stadia, and when they were new, there'd been nothing like them in the world since Byzantium. Fifty years after ... Read More...
James Hamilton, the Dabbler's great sport-theory iconoclast and destroyer of accepted wisdoms, looks at some footballing 'Golden Ages'... I've been following football for thirty years - since the days of Ron Greenwood's England - and one minor consequence of that is that a younger generation now accuse me of having lived through ... Read More...
