Author: James Hamilton

(This post was first published by The Dabbler in July 2011) 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 purpose. In truth, attendances…

(This post was first published by The Dabbler in July 2011 under a different title, illustrated with a photograph of Bobby Charlton wearing, unusually for him, a malicious grin – ) 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…

(This post was originally published by The Dabbler in April 2011 under a different title) 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…

(This post was originally published by The Dabbler in April 2011) 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…

(This post was originally published by The Dabbler in March 2011 under a different title) It’s impossible to scan any list of Victorian and Edwardian footballer’s deaths – like this one – – without concluding that tetanus and the absence of modern ER were chiefly to blame for most of them. Undiagnosed heart conditions are…

(This post was originally published by The Dabbler in February 2011 under a different title) Two things get in the way of many otherwise decent attempts to write football history. Cloying nostalgia, that polyfillas the writer’s ideal of a working class society all over the past until all the messy lumps and cracks are gone….

(This post was first published by The Dabbler in February 2011 under a different title) It’s one of the most extraordinary and tantalizing facts of our time. Take out all the estimated-to-be-drug-related activity out of the crime figures, and what you are left with are the gentle, pacific, Marpleian levels of fair-cop crime enjoyed in…

(This post was first published by The Dabbler in January 2011 under a different title) Even in football, there’s almost always been a golden age. In 1919 the FA Committee – mourning the Great War deaths of sons and nephews – harked back to their own youth in the 1860s. In 1933, Herbert Chapman thought…

(This post was first published by The Dabbler in January 2011 under a different title) 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 victory for the working man over…

(This post was first published by The Dabbler in January 2011 under a different title) I’m not sure when or where I first heard the phrase “passion and commitment.” Sometime after 2002, probably: most football myths are newer than you might think. This myth, the idea that players have to display the same emotional engagement…