Tag: Dabbler

This review was first published by The Dabbler in October 2011 United’s peaks and troughs over the past fifty years have coincided with the peaks and troughs, not only of the game itself, but also of the city of Leeds and its Jewish community. The Leeds United story is intertwined, in my mind at least,…

(This post was originally published by The Dabbler in October 2011) My last post about the relationship between the Great War and football generated a debate about the extent to which casualties robbed the game of skills and expertise, and it prompted me to look at FA Cup Final teams from 1900 to 1915 and…

I think we 40-to-60-somethings are unforgetting this now, the way we grew up with the threat of nuclear annihilation. I can crane my neck around and see myself, aged eleven or twelve, awake under the duvet and contemplating the SS-20 and Pershing Cruise, wondering what it was all for, and wondering why everyone couldn’t just…

(This post was first published by The Dabbler in October 2011) One of the joys of sports history is that you get to involve yourself in the work of media pioneers: the first men and women to record sound, take colour photographs and make films. And the beauty of doing it now is that over…

(This post was first published by The Dabbler in September 2011) 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 London tooled-up in preparation for the great Chartist meeting on Kennington Common, England…

(This post was first published by The Dabbler in August 2011) 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 the Golden Age of Real Football, namely, the Seventies. Some…

(This post was first published by The Dabbler in August 2011. I have made minor amendments to the 2011 text) I’ve never had it: the lightly held, easily tossed-off belief that the past was “simpler” or “more innocent.” And little wonder. I spent most of my childhood obscurely but thoroughly scared; even now, many years…

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

(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…