Having decided they prefer cough drops that have a narrative, magazine editor Andy Lyons, writer Harry Pearson and host Daniel Gray discuss Celebrity Fans, from Tommy Trinder’s Johnny Haynes infatuation to Judi Dench’s Brett Angell misery. Magazine Deputy Editor Ffion Thomas previews WSC issue 436, Record Breakers brings us a Sheffield song, and we continue our sprightly feature The Final Third, in which a guest contributes a match, a player and an object to the WSC Museum of Football. Joining Dan as our visiting curator this time photographer, writer and WSC stalwart Colin McPherson.
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Stories
Pitch Publishing, £18.99
Reviewed by Neil Hurden
From WSC 369, November 2017
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Jon Spurling goes back to Boxing Day 1963, when 66 goals were scored in the First Division
As Christmas 1963 approached, weathermen warned a shivering nation to expect a recurrence of what had happened 12 months previously. The winter of 1962 was the worst since the big freeze of 1946, when the snow began on Boxing Day and wiped out football for virtually the next two and a half months. The occasional game was played here and there, but most were played out in the minds of the newly created Pools Panel, who met each weekend in a secret London location and guessed what each result might have been.
While Fulham are now established in the Premier League, Neil Hurden has fond memories of older matchday customs, despite the prevailing chaos at the club for much of the 1980s and 1990s
Happiness is such an awkward bastard to pin down, isn’t it? We are told that think-tankers, politicians and philosophers spend countless hours of valuable research time pondering why we’re not as happy as we were in 1948 when we now have about ten times more food to eat, infinitely more sources of entertainment to occupy us and clothes that are startlingly less beige.