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...
Sport
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...
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...
This time next year it will already be over. So how will we keep our memories of the 2012 Olympics alive? By shopping for souvenirs, of course. On visiting the Museum of 1951 at the Royal Festival Hall recently, I was struck by the high quality handiwork and timeless design ... Read More...
A few months ago I was sitting in a boat during Antigua’s ClassicYacht Regatta, a little too close to the racing for comfort. Many of the sleekly designed sailing craft had been fitted out with sails made from a new type of go-faster fabric. The aesthetic effect wasn’t that appealing, ... Read More...
Dabbler reader Steve Buckley recommends a cricket classic, sometimes described as "the greatest sports book ever written"... In his 1965 article ‘How to Build a Cricket Library’, John Arlott had Beyond a Boundary by CLR James as one of his essential twenty books on the game. Does anyone read it anymore? You ... Read More...
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...
