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Stories
Simple or sublime?
by Jack Rollin
Soccerdata, £18
Reviewed by Roger Titford
From WSC 351 May 2016
What a curious book this is. At first I thought it was a reprint but it is a new offering from Jack Rollin (of Rothmans Football Yearbook fame) and published by Soccerdata, the imprint of another revered statto, Tony Brown. It may have taken as its model and inspiration Geoffrey Green’s classic Soccer In The Fifties but it reads rather less fluently. Imagine a decade’s worth of the Rothmans Yearbook condensed and set to workaday prose. It’s hours of fact, the whole gamut of the game – internationals, England, Scotland, Amateurs, the Army Cup and the Varsity match – comprehensively covered. If you are about 95 years old you may well get some of those “Ah, I remember that” moments.
With declarations of superiority and personal messages from leaders, Jon Spurling looks at why the 1934 meeting of England and Italy was as much about politics as football
In November 1934, world champions Italy arrived at a packed Highbury to face an England team containing seven Arsenal players: Wilf Copping, Ray Bowden, George Male, Frank Moss, Ted Drake, Eddie Hapgood and Cliff Bastin. Benito Mussolini had claimed “Good kicking is good politics” and described Italy’s World Cup victory the previous summer as a “triumph for fascism”. Although tempting to suggest that Italy were little more than a collection of 11 sporting soldiers, the England players were also expected to demonstrate the superiority of the Britisher.
Steve Menary on how the Great Britain team will have a past triumph to live up to when they take part in the Olympics this summer
A century is a long time for any side to wait to reclaim a trophy that once seemed their own. But should Great Britain’s controversial Olympic team win gold in London this summer, that will be the gap between their titles. Great Britain won the first proper Olympic football event – and the first proper international tournament – in 1908. They had home advantage and faced mostly weak opposition in the six-team tournament. Holding on to the title four years later was surely the GB side’s finest achievement.
Amateurs played a major role in professional football well into the 20th century, argues Peter Bateman
Blackburn Olympic’s FA Cup final win over the Old Etonians in 1883 is often seen as a watershed in the game’s history. The Cup was never again won by the amateur ex-public school teams who had dominated the first decade of the competition. In 1885 the FA bowed to the inevitable and sanctioned professionalism. Three years later the formation of the Football League by professional clubs from the midlands and north confirmed the exclusion of amateur clubs from the highest level of the game.