Search: 'Sportspages'

Gaustad also created the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award

7 June ~ John Gaustad, the founder of the influential bookshop Sportspages, died over the weekend. The first Sportspages was opened on Caxton Walk, just off Charing Cross Road, in London in 1985 and became hugely important in the rise of sports literature, offering fans and journalists a dedicated place to go to find writing about football. The shop was also one of the early stockists of WSC, as well as many other fanzines at that time. Gaustad went on to co-found the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award in 1989 and opened a second branch of the shop in Manchester in 1992.

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Groundtastic, now in its 50th edition, has documented the huge change to British stadiums at all levels over the past 12 years. The fanzine’s co-editor Vince Taylor explains the motivation

For those of us whose pulses quickened at the sight of floodlight pylons towering over neighbouring housetops, and whose idea of bliss was to be stood in the middle of a crowded concrete terrace, the publication of The Football Grounds of England & Wales by Simon Inglis in 1983 was a moment of epiphany. Though it wasn’t quite “the love that dare not speak its name”, nobody before Inglis had articulated this fascination some of us have for football grounds as entities in their own right. He introduced us to Archibald Leitch, the Scottish civil engineer who more or less invented the British football stadium as it existed before the Taylor Report, and also demonstrated that every football ground, no matter how great or humble, generally has an interesting tell to tale.

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Players are moving from the sportspages to the style sections in expensive trousers

Footballers have had a long and sometimes painful relationship with fashion. The default position has always been that they’re basically a bit of a joke when it comes to this kind of thing. The nature of the joke may have changed over time – from terrible slacks, bad hair and nylon blazers to the current blizzard of conspicuous consumption – but it’s never really gone away.

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When Hungary visited in 1981, England hadn't got to the World Cup finals for 11 years. Cris Freddi went with his heart in his mouth, which improved his singing

Call this our culmination. England’s last qualifying match. We’d been to all the others at home and reck­oned we’d suffered enough. They hadn’t been convincing in any of the others, even the 4-0 opener against Norway. It took them most of the first half to score, the third goal was a penalty, and the fourth was three min­utes from time. I’d missed that one, Mar­iner’s only good goal for England, because I was swapping nips of rum with two Norwegian fans. There was also the most beautiful woman ever seen at Wem­bley, a classic white-haired ice goddess. Drifting involuntarily towards her in the coach park, I found myself shaking hands with her equally stunning boy­friend, straight out of the Thor comics. Oh well, who needs the perfect woman when you’ve got two World Cup points?

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Scotland's trailblazing fanzine The Absolute Game is making a comeback. But, wonders Tom Davies, has the printed word had its day as a tool for fans?

The welcome return of The Absolute Game seems bound to induce bouts of premature nostalgia in fans of a certain age and attitude; a throwback to the days of co-ordinated campaigns against ID cards and dodgy policing, to when the floor of Sportspages bookshop in London would be covered in inky outpourings of anger and calls to arms; to the days when jokes about haircuts and bad away kits really did seem like the cutting edge of radical humour.

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