Give Us Tomorrow Now: Book Review & Interview with author David Snowdon
Give Us Tomorrow Now: Alan Durban’s Mission Impossible (Pitch Publishing, 2018) by David Snowdon reconstructs Alan Durban’s managerial reign at Sunderland with a wealth of detail, from his appointment in the summer of 1981 to his untimely sacking in March 1984. The background to the book is a very different era of English football, with…
Andy Leeder: Roots to the 92 Interview, Part Two
Andy Leeder continues our conversation around his book Roots to the 92, and the changes in English football that it documents – Part One is here. Part Two You saw the first hospitality boxes and corporate entertainment coming into football grounds – is this at the expense of so-called ‘legacy fans’? I don’t mind the…
Roots to the 92 Book Review & Interview with author Andy Leeder
Roots to the 92 charts five decades of travels to English football grounds. Before ‘groundhopping’ was even invented, Andy Leeder was groundhopping. Starting at his local side Southend United’s Roots Hall, he eventually covered the country. Over the decades it became a quest to ‘do the 92’, but with clubs moving grounds and promotion/relegation from…
Post-War London – Villains: The Football League on Film
London football grounds were an ideal location for post-War film and TV drama, their stands and terraces the perfect setting for crooks, spivs and villains. Orient’s Brisbane Road was used for a key scene in 1967’s Robbery. Based on the Great Train Robbery, Stanley Baker leads the gang planning an audacious armed robbery, who meet…
Jock Wallace and Pre-Season Training
Jock Wallace was appointed as Leicester City manager in June 1978, a surprising move shortly after winning his second treble with Rangers in Scotland. Leicester had been relegated from the First Division, and Wallace soon introduced his players to a new training regime. Part One: Wanlip The first section of the film shows the recently…
Wool City Rivals: A History in Colour by George Chilvers & John Dewhirst
Wool City Rivals is a photographic history of Bradford football from the turn of the nineteenth century. It offers a glimpse into the lost world of early football, when Bradford boasted two top-flight football clubs immediately before and after the First World War. It covers over half a century of images from the years when…
Mud, Poor Pitches and the FA Cup
The state of the playing surface – and specifically, mud – has been a concern of English football since its earliest days. Many clubs spent their formative years using makeshift pitches on public or private land, in conditions which did not encourage ‘the beautiful game’. Even by 1888 and the founding of the Football League,…
Festive Football in Great Britain
Festive football was a tradition of the British game, introduced even before the very first seasons of the league. While Boxing Day (St Stephen’s Day) fixtures continue to the current era, Christmas Day matches fizzled out in England during the late 1950s and lingered a few years longer in Scotland. Britain’s last Christmas Day football…
Old Trafford: The Football League on Film
Manchester United’s world-famous Old Trafford stadium was opened in February 1910, laid out by Archibald Leitch as “a palatial ground”. The stadium suffered bomb damage in the Second World War and only re-opened in 1949. As location filming expanded in the post-War years, various grounds were used as a setting for football-related feature films. Old…
English Winners of the European Cup
The first English winners of the European Cup were Manchester United in May 1968, when they defeated Portuguese Champions Benfica at Wembley. Their victory was followed by a run of six successes by English clubs in the late 1970s and early 80s. The Wembley win was an emotional triumph for manager Matt Busby and players…
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