The Archive

Passion should go out of fashion 

A genial old man called Stanley Green used to parade up and down Oxford Street wearing a sandwich board, now preserved in the Museum of London, that warned of the dangers of “passion”, which he believed could be brought on by consuming too much protein. The small pamphlets he handed out to passers-by didn’t make any reference to football being afflicted with this dangerous tendency, but the game would have provided him with enough material for a book, possibly even an encyclopaedia.

Read more…

While Lilian Thuram has made some notable left-wing gestures, one of his black predecessors in the France defence has made a sudden switch to the right. Andy Brassell reports

Basile Boli’s appointment as national secretary for ­co‑development with President Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP party has been on the cards for a while. It may seem surreal to those who remember the robust defender scoring the winner in Marseille’s 1993 Champions League final win over Milan, getting away with headbutting Stuart Pearce during Euro 92, or indeed helping his mate Chris Waddle reprise his recording career post-Diamond Lights (with the Anglo-French duet We’ve Got A ­Feeling). Yet though Boli’s career since playing retirement – which came in 1997, at the tender age of 30 – has included media work for the TV channel France 3, it has otherwise been quite atypical for an ex-pro.

Read more…

Johan Cruyff’s title-winning final season, putting one over Ajax. By Ernst Bouwes

The long-term significance
This was Johan Cruyff’s final season as a player. Ajax, whom he rejoined in 1981 after eight years in Spain and the United States, declined to extend his contract for another year because they doubted his crowd-pulling abilities at the age of 36. So, out of spite, Cruyff went to bitterest rivals Feyenoord. Incredibly he was to take them to their only title between 1974 and 1993, but their fans never really knew what to make of the move – Cruyff grabbed all the headlines and it seemed more his title than Feyenoord’s. Most of their away games were sold out, but home attendances went up by only a couple of thousand per match.

Read more…

Live non-League coverage bemuses Cameron Carter

Setanta, having promised its subscribers that it will bring them closer to football with its coverage of the Blue Square Premier League, has proceeded to zoom in so close as to make its subject almost unrecognisable. Encountering affairs such as Halifax Town v Grays Athletic (Setanta Sports 1) transports the day-tripping mollycoddled big-game viewer to the unnerving world of football stripped of its usual lush soundtrack. Here one is exposed to the individual bellowing of team coaches – be it the complex polysyllabic cry of “Give it wide!” or the beautiful rhythmic simplicity of “Ben! Ben! Ben! Ben!” – as we become eavesdroppers on this raw, pitch-perfect reality.

Read more…

Why rugby is reckoned to be better than football

“I am probably attracted to rugby because it is a man’s game.” So the Sun reported “the shock conversion” this month of Jimmy Greaves from football to rugby. “Football has been part of my life… but I no longer regard it as a passion,” Jimmy confided in the paper’s news section, writing of his admiration for “the fighting sprit, which is missing in football”. This has been a common theme. As it did with the last Rugby World Cup in Australia, the oval‑ball code’s four‑yearly hijacking of front and back pages provoked a particularly vehement reaction against any and all things associated with football.

Read more…