Much praise has been righteously showered on Out Of The Ashes, Tim Albone and Lucy Martens’ film about the Afghan national cricket team, screened as part of BBC Four’s Storyville this week (Catch up with it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ydj1r). All of the big and obvious themes are there, but what makes it ... Read More...
Row Z
Dabbler sport
James Hamilton continues his 'The Football Fan Delusion' mini-series by recalling the 'Golden Age' of the 1970s with rather less fondness than the average English football fan... Even in football, there’s almost always been a golden age. In 1919 the FA Committee – mourning the Great War deaths of sons and ... Read More...
James Hamilton continues his 'The Football Fan Delusion' series by exposing the working class myth of Professionalism... Most of the current fan myths about British football are of fairly recent origin, but versions of this one have been circulating since the Edwardian era: that the coming of professionalism marked a terrific ... Read More...
In a special mini-series which we're calling 'The Football Fan Delusion', sports psychologist and blogger James Hamilton challenges some of soccer's most popular assumptions. This week he tackles the English myth of Passion and Commitment... I’m not sure when or where I first heard the phrase “passion and commitment.” Sometime after ... Read More...
As the Ashes get underway with the first Test in Brisbane, here are some selected quotes illustrating the rich history of Anglo-Aussie cricket relations... Us on them “The aim of English cricket, is in fact, mainly to beat Australians." Jim Laker in his autobiography, 1960 "The Australian temper is at bottom grim. It is ... Read More...
“I play tennis for a living even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion and always have", wrote Andre Agassi in his autobiography Open. It seems that many top sportsmen hate the only thing they’re good at. Stan Collymore used to say he didn’t like ... Read More...
Sport has innumerable social functions. Joseph O’Neill’s book Netherland described the rough-and-ready New York immigrant version of cricket. But what about cricket as a duty for public schoolboys, as necessary and unavoidable as end-of-term exams and places at Oxbridge? Here Jon Hotten - who also blogs as The Old Batsman - ... Read More...
Today's Row Z feature is provided by James Hamilton, a writer and former sports psychotherapist who blogs at More Than Mind Games. For his first Dabble, James examines a question we must all have pondered, shaking our heads in disbelief at the post-match witterings of coaches from Ron Atkinson to Steve Bruce, ... Read More...
Joseph O’Neill’s much praised (and, Gaw and I agree, pretty overrated) Netherland pitches into the crowded market of self-consciously literary psychological post-9/11 novels with an interesting ‘USP’, namely New York cricket. But the cricket played in NY little resembles the gentle, gentleman’s game that some, especially Americans perhaps, might envisage. It is a ... Read More...
The above picture shows a solitary peregrine falcon sending a flock of starlings into turmoil. It won the 2005 Wildlife Photographer of the Year award for Manual Presti. When I first saw it I was oddly reminded of my favourite sports picture - this one below of Maradona playing against Holland ... Read More...
