Search: ' 1930s'
Stories
Pitch Publishing, £9.99
Reviewed by Si Hawkins
From WSC 360, February 2017
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In WSC 131 Olly Wicken’s Grandad explained why a feast of goals on Christmas Day was far from the perfect present for the match-going fans
Badge of the week ~ Jalgpalliklubi Sillamae Kalev, Estonia
The crest iconography here centres on two performing bears, specifically, Bodo and Mr Polyokoff, the music hall act of two Estonians dressed as bears that rose to national fame in the 1930s. A typical performance would start with the compere introducing the pair, before running off stage as the two “bears” came on, shouting: “I have no news, I have no news!” (The joke here was that the two “bears” were ravenous for current affairs and would kill for a newspaper.)
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.