Gary Neville's first England cap coincided with John Major's "put up or shut up" Rose Garden challenge to his party critics early in the blistering summer of '95. I was a young man myself then, flatsharing in central London with friends. It was the fiftieth anniversary of VE-Day, the economy ... Read More...
Row Z
Dabbler sport
James Hamilton examines the oft-repeated comparison between football fandom and religion... England's football stadia were the last major addition to our great Victorian cities in their original form: it follows from that that, like so much about our great Victorian cities, by the 1970s they were clapped out and unfit for ... Read More...
I'll say this for C.S.Lewis: he knew how to coin a memorable book title. The Screwtape Letters. Surprised By Joy. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe... but my personal favourite was Till We Have Faces, the title of a short novel about the battle between sacred love and profane. ... Read More...
John Arlott called him 'the most variously gifted Englishman of any age,' and Arlott, conjuring his musty magic from an old typewriter set next a glass of something good and red, was probably right. The sheer unlikeliness of CB Fry continues to astonish, more than half a century after his ... Read More...
On a wet afternoon in June 1909, Tottenham Hotspur played Everton in front of 8,000 spectators. One of the Spurs players on show was Walter Tull. He was black, and the abuse he'd suffered from hostile audiences had appalled the British press, but today he would score one of his ... Read More...
Bobby Charlton's at the airport, and out in the night somewhere my father's car combs the wet roads. I've slid my body into the back seat footwell and I'm shaking and sobbing with homesickness: at the airport, Bobby Charlton is dressed in a suit and tie and smoking. There's a ... Read More...
This 1950 film from the British Council, entitled simply ‘Cricket’ opens with actor Ralph Richardson announcing: “My name is Richardson and I happen to have been born in Britain” and maintains that level of excellence for the duration. In between bursts of Richardson, we get the unmistakable Hampshire tones – the ... Read More...
Following his look at violence on and off the Edwardian football pitch, James Hamilton now looks back to at two remarkable figures of the Victorian era of soccer... It’s impossible to scan any list of Victorian and Edwardian footballer’s deaths – like this one... - James Dunlop, St Mirren -- 1892 (tetanus from ... Read More...
Following his look at Edwardian football hooligans, James Hamilton continues his latest Row Z series on the reality of vintage soccer by turning to the violence and bad behaviour on the pitch... Two things get in the way of many otherwise decent attempts to write football history. Cloying nostalgia, that polyfillas ... Read More...
Having recently demolished some of the most popular football myths, James Hamilton begins another three-part series for our Row Z feature, this time looking at death and violence in Victorian and Edwardian football. The first part reveals that football fan violence was far from an invention of the Thatcher years... It’s ... Read More...
