..and from a proper country this time. Alex Massie’s right: it’s better than Sam Bartram’s from yesterday. Read and enjoy.

From here:

“Soon after the kick-off,” he wrote in his autobiography, “[fog] began to thicken rapidly at the far end, travelling past Vic Woodley in the Chelsea goal and rolling steadily towards me. The referee stopped the game, and then, as visibility became clearer, restarted it. We were on top at this time, and I saw fewer and fewer figures as we attacked steadily.” The game went unusually silent but Sam remained at his post, peering into the thickening fog from the edge of the penalty area. And he wondered why the play was not coming his way. “After a long time,” he wrote, “a figure loomed out of the curtain of fog in front of me. It was a policeman, and he gaped at me incredulously. “What on earth are you doing here?” he gasped. “The game was stopped a quarter of an hour ago. The field’s completely empty”.’

(Bertram retired in 1956, before the Football Association permitted floodlighting, a technology that had first been tested in Sheffield in 1878..)

Ever get the feeling that you’ve been cheated?

It seems relatively certain that Newcastle United’s latest, greatest fan, Mike Ashley, is intent upon selling the club just as soon as a bidder with £200m in their kick rolls along. DIC, Liverpool’s somewhat unScouse wooers and pursuers, have already said “no.”

It’s all just a little bit confusing at first. After all, how much more could Ashley put into things than he already has? Not only is there all the shirt-wearing nonsense, all that riding to games in white transit vans and sitting in the away end at the Stadium of Light. There’s the constant liaison with fanzines and supporters’ groups, pledging stability and the long-term view. And of course, the injection of Keegan and Dennis Wise. The investment in youth and reserves. How does a quick sale add up to all that?

Little did I know it then, but I think I saw the answer a couple of years ago, and I saw it in London, in Piccadilly Circus to be exact. I’d given myself the excuse to escape Sutton for “town” for a day, ostensibly to buy some running shoes. Lillywhites, the old warhorse of sports shops, seemed like my kind of place, and if it wasn’t, well, the Sainsbury Wing was but yards away. One of those lovely big old London shops that Richard Curtis might send Hugh Grant into, that Woody Allen assumes are typically British.

I was expecting something with the atmosphere of the changing rooms in “Chariots of Fire”: what I got was one of those fly by night shops that open for six weeks on Oxford Street before the big boys move in. Everything was being sold out of crates or plastic buckets. The prices, when there were any to be seen, had been applied directly to the packaging in marker pen or else with the kind of stickly label that never really comes off no matter how gentle you are. There were no clear departments - I recall a rangle of cheap plastic swimming goggles in amongst some dusty tennis rackets next to a nest of vinyl footballs.

This was Mike Ashley’s Lillywhites. On the outside, the building made out to the others that nothing had changed. Inside, it had been trashed by chavs.

It’s about what you can do with a brand. It’s not nice, but it seems to work: Ashley’s spent £120m+ on Newcastle, and it’s a drop in the ocean. One alleged tactic is that of the closing-down sale: reopening shortly afterwards at a similar nearby site under a slightly different name. Another is to offer e.g. Nike at just above cost price, relying on related sales of own brand produce (which will have a hefty mark-up) to bring in inflated profits. All quite legal, and, one imagines, quite exhausting to operate.

You can’t quite do that with a football club, which is a different kind of brand. What you can do is make it look more like itself: more like Toon. So, get in a Toon manager. Play being the kind of chairman that fans would pray for. Appear to set up a proper management structure. It’s like restoring a house for resale: get the cosmetics right. Patch up the structure so it can hold together long enough to convince a buyer.

If this is what’s happening in the minds of Mort and Ashley, then it would explain some of the more mysterious decisions. Dennis Wise, for example. Or not keeping Sam Allardyce, which surely any chairman who was really thinking long-term would have done. Certainly Keegan. I don’t like phrases like “real football man” but these were not “football decisions.”

How could they be? Ashley’s shown no interest in football whatsoever in his life up until now, unless it’s been to sell shirts. And he’s bought the Premiership club furthest in geographical and cultural terms from his own background and upbringing (he hails from the football hotbed of Burnham in Buckinghamshire, and still lives in the Home Counties: he’s rumoured not to get on too well with other denizens of the north-dominated cheap sports gear industry).

No, something else is going on, and all the Keegan stuff is a smokescreen. Nothing illegal, and, frankly, it hardly represents a descent from the good old Freddie Shepherd days. But something else nevertheless.

Many thanks to the inimitable Mr Eugenides for this, and sorry for making his link out of date almost immediately!

For ten points, identify the link between this picture and League season 2003-4. Googling is permitted:

Picture courtesy of Miss Retro Modern

“Life On Mars” was bungled at the end, and “Ashes to Ashes” has been bungled at the beginning, but whatever the quality of the thinking behind the screenplay it’s been the best fun to be had on television and the underlying idea is fascinating. I’ll keep the image of Sam Tyler sitting up into the world of my early childhood with me for the rest of my life.

Only the most humourless kind of Guardian hack could begrudge another eight episodes of Gene, Chris and Ray. But the eighties, and policing, press none of the questions that the first series could, and anyway, the eighties of “Ashes to Ashes” thus far is that of a very young version of said hack who doesn’t remember the reality. What a jukebox it is, too: the product of minds who sincerely believe that pop music changes the world. Never mind. We’ll all have a good time watching it. But I can’t help thinking that they’ve missed a trick.

You see, they should have abandoned policing for football.

Really. Imagine the following. A young Manchester United star, wealthy at an early age and world famous, is playing late in the season in a home game at that intimidating high-tec arena. He’s involved in a clash of heads, and goes down like a sack of potatoes, knocked cold.

He comes to, to find his face being swabbed in freezing cold water. As he sits up, he doesn’t recognize the wizened ancient wielding the sponge. And the air smells of cigarettes.. cigarettes, and more deeply smoky besides. His kit hangs on him, heavy suddenly, and soaked in sweat and a little blood. His hand, touching the pitch, finds itself in a bare patch - no grass, just dust and dried mud. Other players are gathering around. That’s not the right strip they’re wearing.. and this isn’t Old Trafford! Everyone’s standing up - and where are the stewards?

His head is aching heavily, and he looks to the touchline, expecting to see a sub warming up. No sub? and hands are hauling him to his feet, pushing him towards the wing: a northern voice yells at him to play wide until he feels better.

You can see where this is going. I have in mind the Manchester United of season 46-47. Old Trafford is bombed out, and Manchester full of other Luftwaffered sites. The young Busby is in charge, but new and finding his feet under impossible circumstances. Our hero doesn’t know where he is - he knows nothing of the era, but boy, is he ever going to find out. And when he asks why he’s here, he’s told that he put in for it. People don’t understand: he could have gone to Arsenal. A strange choice he’s made there. And there’s something people are keeping from him, mentioning only in whispers behind his back, something about his war record…

He’ll play the last game of the season out in his heavy boots and his scratchy kit, and spend most of it on the ground being kicked. Referees will allow this to happen, and his team mates will show no sympathy.

And the season will end, and he’ll go onto close season pay. Ah, yes, close season pay: and there’s no going elsewhere for more money, not without the gaffer’s permission. The club hold his registration. Retain and transfer keeps him there as effectively as bars on a cage. Then there’s the question of the maximum wage.

His huge footballer’s house in Southport is exchanged for frusty digs run by an exhausted woman who has spent the war in queues with a ration book in hand by day and underground by night waiting for the bombs. Her husband and son have not come home. There are other players there - members of what looks like a huge professional squad, far bigger than he’s used to. Across the road from the digs is a huge railway marshalling yard, which shrieks and clangs 24 hours every day; in the next street, a factory that makes the ground tremble and hum. 30s and 40s cars kick up their own kind of row. There is an entire industrial soundscape to be recaptured. And the perpetual smoke from factories, railways, home fires, for this athlete to deal with.

Our hero has one of the treasured starting places in the first team, and his “colleagues” want it off him. There is no coaching, no training as he understands it, no development. In fact, everyone smokes and drinks, especially the trainer.

But there is the young Matt Busby, and he’s quite another thing. Especially for someone who has become used to Sir Alex.

Outside is a seedy, smashed grey-and-redbrick world with nothing to buy, hours needed to buy it, and little to do besides pile into the cinema. Our hero shares a radio, but there are only BBC stations, and nothing he would think of as music. Travel to away matches is a vile experience: overnight train journeys on a broken network, packed in with everyone else, with only cheap hotels and bad food awaiting at the other end before a similar journey back.

The war is over, but things are not getting better, and tempers are frayed. Rationing is tightening further. And then comes winter 1947…

But when everything is a struggle, and everything is a struggle for everyone else too, there is little time to be depressed and genunine camaraderie has a habit of breaking out. Although the binge drinking he’s used to seeing isn’t present - the men in Salford pubs drink beer by the half pint (fact! “Mass Observation” in nearby Bolton..) - there’s a social life and a warmth to just lean back and disappear into.

Why is he there? How does he get back? I don’t know. But then, neither did Sam Tyler’s scriptwriters. And my man isn’t jumping off any tower blocks any time soon.

Does he want to get back? when he finds himself alongside Matthews, Finney, Lawton, Carter, Mannion, Mortensen and Franklin in the greatest ever England squad? Or in a United side who are improving fast and heading for the 1948 FA Cup? Or when he finds his landlady’s daughter to be a very different kind of woman to the ones he met in 2008.

Perhaps, little by little, his memory of 2008 fades. A cartilage injury ends his career before the Cup Final; he marries and runs a pub. When Cristiano Ronaldo joins United half a century later, people scratch their heads and say, wasn’t there another one like him at United, briefly, years and years ago? What was his name? Something shady during the war, never talked about it.. salt of the earth, though, salt of the earth, his grandson’s just been sacked by Chelsea, and they don’t know a good thing..

(By all means have Gene, Ray and Chris in the eighties, but at least have it that Sam finally convinced Gene of his story. So that Drake, who really is deranged, who really doesn’t come from the future - you know in your heart that it’s better that way - causes REAL confusion. Odd rather to have her behaving so strangely, as they’ve set it up, and yet have the heroic trio acting as if nothing bizarre is going on. People call us mental constructs all the time..)

By the way, this is the best FA Cup in living memory, surely?

The experts say the same thing about a top sportsperson’s background. They’ll have started young. You don’t often come across someone at the top level who took up their sport later than age 12-14. They’ll have something called “natural talent.” This will make them stand out from their peers. They’ll work incredibly hard, or at least play their sport all of the time they can. In a lot of cases, the parents will have leaned hard on their child or on their children.

Those of us who didn’t start young, who don’t have huge talent, and who, up until now, couldn’t really be bothered to go outdoors, might well ask if this is the only way. The answer is, it’s the only way that’s really been tried.

Natural Talent vs Training

I’ve had one time in my life when I found myself up against a natural talent in something that I was attempting to do. On my first night at Oxford, I tried to break out onto the college roof. I didn’t know the place well enough to know where to try. But I had the company of a couple of girls in the attempt, one of whom became a lifelong friend.

I found out later that she wrote poetry. I’d grown up in the East Midlands, and Oxford was the first place I’d lived where such people allowed such things to be taken seriously, to be considered worthwhile and important. It was the last, too, as I’d discover later. But I could try to write in that atmosphere. I say try.

My friend had just won a university prize for a poem sequence. I loved it: she’d used form well, she’d written in a clear voice and not the cluttered diction of much modern poetry. She’d written something moving and genuinely funny. It impressed me and intimidated me.

I took twenty or so painful drafts to produce the kind of thing that would be handed back to me by my reader with pursed lips and a shake of the head. I’m stubborn, always have been, and kept on, assuming that I’d learn and that it would come in time.

The day came when I heard the rumour that my friend had won the National Poetry Competition before coming up to Oxford. I asked her about this. No, she hadn’t won. She’d come third or thereabouts. It had been her first real attempt at a poem, and she’d shown it to her English teacher. He’d seemed to think it was OK, and implied that she might as well enter it for the Competition.

I’d thought that she’d started much earlier than I had, and worked up to the point where she was as good as she was. Now I had to take on board that this wasn’t so. She hadn’t improved upon her first poems to get here: these were her first poems and the world was her oyster, not least because she’d always have a better metaphor than that on hand. That she’d freshly minted. If you see what I mean.

But what I shouldn’t have done was ask her about her drafts. How many did it take before she was happy, before she called time on a poem? One, with corrections: and then I knew that I would always be a scrabbler in the poetic undergrowth. The news hurt and humiliated me.

Natural talent. But she worked hard too. She would shut herself away for at least one entire day a week, just to write, and that would be on top of the 2-4 daily hours it would also receive from her. She felt that the restrictions on her social life were justified by the satisfaction she drew from it. This has all paid off. Her third book was published a few days ago.

She took the talent road, and I took the training road, and she was in Scotland afore me. By the spring of that year, I’d pushed out more and more dreck, and had more and more shaking heads and pursed lips..oh, those pursed lips. But then it happened: early one afternoon, which found me bunking off what I was meant to be doing in order to write, three perfect lines appeared in my head as though summoned. I wrote them down, then found that the rest of the poem flowed out of them with almost no effort at all. I made some slight corrections, then found myself a reader.

It’s the classic creativity clichee: absorption, concentration, meditation, creation, natch. It didn’t happen often after that, but it did happen from time to time. The results were always better than the poems I wrought through pure sweat. But I had to churn out the waste to have any chance of something better happening.

(Virginia Woolf said that you did your reading at 14-18. I was 22 when I read that, my reading hardly begun, and hated her for it. Always too old, always too late, always playing catch-up).

When I taught myself to draw and to paint in oils it was the same story. If I could create myself the perfect conditions, and cordon off for myself a lot of time, then my results wouldn’t embarrass me. I was happy with this. Then I met the man on the bus. And what a bus, pitching and rolling its way into the pit of South London, belching like a fat man in a dirty public bar and going into spasm whenever the driver changed gear. The man on the bus had propped a bit of scrap paper on the back of his redtop paper, and was drawing on it in biro.

I noticed the rhythm of his pen first. Then I saw the wonderful result. My god, it looked like silverpoint. A landscape, hatched in early renaissance style in two-point perspective. He drew quickly and effortlessly. It looked almost as if he was merely scratching off the foil to reveal the picture beneath.

My uncle is a watercolourist of huge talent. He’s apt to compare himself unfairly. Fifteen years ago, we toured the Royal Academy’s exhibition of British nineteenth century watercolourists. I was inspired by it. He came out enormously depressed, by a gulf he’d seen between them and himself, a gulf quite hidden from my eyes.

I believe that these are typical talent vs training experiences, and I think you can map them directly onto sport.

I am a sporting autodidact. This isn’t because my schools had no opportunity to provide training. Back in the days of Jim Callaghan, my state middle school provided soccer, rugby, hockey, cricket, athletics, tennis, basketball, gymnastics and swimming. But my teachers preferred the natural sportsmen. Either you “got it” with a sport straightaway, or you didn’t.

I learned my football from a cartoon strip on skills, allegedly and probably by Trevor Brooking. Brooking said practice against a wall with a tennis ball. I did. Brooking taught me how to balance, how to strike the ball with follow-through, how to trap the ball, how to head the ball and control the ball on my chest. He taught me everything, just by showing me how and allowing me to copy and to practice.

I did the same with darts, using a book by John Lowe, and became good enough to beat pub players by the time I was old enough to get into the pub.

I did the same with rugby. This time, the book was of 1930s vintage, and it had sat unread in the school library since the 1950s. But it had everything. How to hold and pass the ball accurately even at speed. How to tackle (that was fun the first few times, when no one was expecting me to stop them - I’d lift them slightly so they’d javelin painfully into the icy turf..) and how to sell a dummy. Within months, I’d gone from the bottom group to the 3rd XV reserves. Had my eyesight been better, I’d have gone further.

I learned, above all, that with the right advice, you can improve straightaway, and that practice takes you further still.

But how far? And what if you’re not starting young?

The neurological evidence is clear: you can learn most easily and have muscle memory most easily when you are young. But there is no evidence that you can’t do so later in life. None of us would pass driving tests if that were true. Nor would Larry Nelson have won the US Open - he didn’t pick up a golf club until he was 21, a full 19 years later than Tiger Woods.

The difference is just time. I spent hundreds of hours playing darts as a 12-14 year old: entire summer holidays. But I was academically able, and the time I had available for darts went down. Then I took up cycling; then I fell in love.

As an adult, I’d have at most 2-3 hours per day available outside my work commitments. That’s not enough to master anything. When I was a psychotherapist, I thought and read about the subject all the time. I spent my weekends at seminars, or writing about it, or training with mentors. I worked every hour I could get. My first practice was a three hour journey from my home. I spent the time studying.

How good would I have been at football if I’d devoted 12 hours per day on skills training as an adult? I don’t know, but I suspect fairly good. But football has no structure to deal with late arrivals. I’d have to choose between one Sunday league and another. I’d have come up against the fitness/age barrier: not everyone can be Gary Speed or Teddy Sheringham and keep up with the kids.

What about golf? Golf is a different story. By comparison with football, it’s an ageless sport. And it has handicapping.

Michael Oliff took a year out of his career aged 43 and devoted his time to golf. He trained for 12 hours a day for six months, under the best teachers he could find. He trained eight hours per day for the following six months. In the first six months, he took one day off per week.

He went from a hacker’s handicap of 26 at the start of the year, to scratch. It can be done.

That still doesn’t put him amongst the world’s top golfers, but it means that he is competitive at a very high level. The difference in average score between the top player and the 100th player is only 3 strokes across an entire year. That’s a psychological distance, measured in mental strength, not one of skill or ability.

But no one, to my knowledge, has taken a year, or five years, out of their adult life to begin with football and to discover how good they could become.

The best footballers are also the players who practice the most. Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Eric Cantona, David Beckham, George Best and the goalkeepers Peter Shilton and Gordon Banks were/are renowned trainers. We know that not every naturally talented footballer - and you have to be one to get into the professional game because the training isn’t there in the schools to get you there any other way - is interested in football. For many, it’s just what they happen to be good at. Not every player “misses the buzz” when they retire. Not every player wants to train. Lee Trundle said as much when he was at Swansea City; Robin Friday at Reading might have agreed.

But there are limits to what you can achieve. During a league season, most players will spend a huge amount of time travelling and getting ready to travel. Most of them will have some kind of community work to do on top of that. Then there’s the danger of overtraining. There’s a delicate balance between match fitness/sharpness and fatigue. Extra skills practice and training is still additional physical work.

But in theory, at least, a one-footed player can become as two-footed as makes no difference. A player who can only pass to a team mate who is in three yards of space can learn to find one who is in only one. It’s a matter of finding the time, finding the opportunity within existing structures to do that.

In theory, someone might take up football at 35 and devote themselves to it full-time and become a match for, say, Conference South players. If they have natural talent, higher than that, taking fitness levels into account. “Masters” level, perhaps. It’s all about finding the time to try: and it’s the one thing the kind of adults who might be interested just don’t have.

A sleepless night, not helped at all by the discovery that the entire British Movietone film archive is available to view free online.

British Movietone were/are a newsreel company, competitors to Pathe News whose archive is already online.

Naturally this means that the amount of historical football clips available on the net has pretty much doubled immediately - the pre-WW1 stuff is particularly good, and there is what amounts to near full coverage of the great 46-48 England team, who were poorly served before.

Start with England v Scotland 1930 - with sound, but no commentary.

No trouble naming the great years: 1946 (England’s greatest ever national side), 1953 (Puskas and co.), 1962 (Garrincha and Pele), 1966, 1970 (Pele and co again, this time in glorious technicolor), 1972 (Netzer’s West Germany), 1974 (total football) and 1982 (Brazil once again), 2006 for the Argentines. You’ll have your own candidates in spades.

It’s harder to work out the “worst” years. Worst in what respect? No one could be interested in rehearshing a list of dull, uninspired seasons or the tedious likes of the ‘90 and ‘94 World Cups. Some guidelines are required, and I offer the following:

• Years in which football culture changed for the worse in some tangible way
• Years in which politics and war did football real and lasting damage
• Air disasters
• Individual tragedies

I’m going to leave out stadium disasters, as they turn into rather unpleasant numbers games when put into lists. In 1988 I was shown the Fire Brigade video of the Bradford City disaster, and what’s in it still invades my dreams from time to time.

It’s all very grim.

Here are my nominees:

1. 1883: Blackburn Olympic become the first professional side to win a tournament, beating Old Etonians in the FA Cup Final. They were among the first teams to be specifically coached, by a former international called Jack Hunter who introduced them to the Scottish passing game and took them away for a rest break in Blackpool before the Final.

   The football codes in Great Britain bungled professionalism, in the end. Within thirty years of that Final, both rugby and football had ghettoized themselves along class lines, to their enduring detriment. As for Olympic, their advantage became their undoing. Local rivals Blackburn Rovers received better financial backing, and tempted the best Olympic players away. Their ground is now buried beneath a local school.

2. 1925: the Offside Law changes, allowing only two defending players to come between the last attacker and the goal, instead of three. Right away, it took less thought and skill and guile to score. Within a year, George Camsell of Middlesbrough scored his 59 goals in a season, immediately followed by Dixie Dean’s 60. Both had enormous talent, both benefitted from a period of defensive chaos. Herbert Chapman, writing at the start of the 1930s, complained that the game had lost its quality and subtlety, that the new rule favoured physical strength and the hopeful long punt upfield. He and Charles Buchan pioneered the third back approach - a defensive measure seen as boring at the time. In the long term, the South Americans didn’t, and by 1950 the difference was beginning to tell.
3. 1931: the death of John Thomson, Celtic goalkeeper. Before World War I, the deaths of players in action was far from uncommon, even in soccer as opposed to rugby (although neither on the scale of American Football, some of whose Edwardian tactics were intrinsically lethal). But Thomson was the greatest keeper in Scottish football, a capped international, a trophy winner and a star. Colliding with Sam English, a Rangers forward, Thomson fractured his skull and died later that afternoon. The event was captured in a thankfully blurred press photograph. Thomson’s death came as a shock and a body blow: his home town is still a place of pilgrimage for Celtic fans and Scottish football enthusiasts in general. Coming as it did at the time of Scotland’s greatest economic peril, it can only have deepened an already dark national mood.
4. 1938-9: the Anschluss and the annexation of Czechoslovakia. Austria and Czechoslovakia were the true European powers in football before World War II. The events of the 1934 World Cup, in which a bent referee muscled Italy past the pair of them at the tournament’s climax, rankle still, and some Czechs regard themselves as the tournament’s true winners. Germany was not so football-orientated, and the first thing annexation did was to kill off a vibrant, growing football culture. It wouldn’t grow again in quite the same way. It was also the real end of the Mitropa Cup, a real European club tournament, best imagined as a mix of European and UEFA cups. And it led to personal tragedies. For a long time, the death in 1939 of Austria’s greatest footballer, the “Man of Paper” Matthias Sindelaar, was thought to have been accidental - carbon monoxide poisoning from a blocked stove. It’s now thought to have been suicide. Sindelaar had refused to play along with Nazification, continuing in fellowship with Jewish colleagues in the face of demands that they be ostracized. He couldn’t live under the Nazis: but in preWar Austria, suicide was illegal, and his friends wanted to spare him the posthumous ignominy.
5. 1949: The Superga plane crash wipes out “Il Grande Torino”, the last flowering of Italian football’s first golden age. They still hold an astonishing array of Serie A records, and the team made up the overwhelming bulk of the Italian national team. The only scar on their record is an unfair one: a 4-0 home defeat to an England side whose like we have never seen again. It must have been one of the matches of the century. The accident crippled the Italian team in the World Cup of the following year, and it would be over a decade before Italian football found itself back at the cutting edge of the game.
6. 1958: the Munich Air Disaster. Little more need be said.
7. 1971: the creation of a single state championship in Brazil. Brazil was the last of the great footballing powers to institute a countrywide football league. The sheer size of Brazil, and the relatively undeveloped transport system, had ruled out such a development before, and not enough had changed to make it a success by 1971. Instead of raising standards, it triggered the foundation of many new clubs, spreading the available talent too thinly, damaging the finances of the likes of the famous Santos and bringing a partial end to the production line of outstanding talent that had been Brazilian football since the 1930s. Enough momentum remained to bring forth the 1982 Brazilian side, but nothing remotely comparable since.
8. 1989: Surinam Airways Flight PY764 crash wipes out the “Colourful 11″ from Surinam. The Colourful 11 were an exhibition side made up of Surinamese talent playing in the Dutch leagues. Amongst their number were names such as Ruud Gullit and Bryan Roy. On this occasion, prior commitments held the famous names back in Holland, and it was the second string who perished. Football can distort thinking to the extent that one might almost regard this outcome with relief.
9. 1993: Gabon air crash wipes out the Zambian national side. We are still waiting for the African World Champions. This Zambia team were a very serious candidate to make an impression at the ‘94 World Cup. Because of the crash (and some bent refereeing) they didn’t qualify. Zambia have yet to fully recover, in footballing terms. In human terms, the families of the dead, who lost major breadwinners, have yet to be properly compensated.

Time to do something more cheerful…

In pursuit of something quite different, I came across the following.

In New Zealand and Australia, “soccer” has been the most common usage since the early part of the twentieth century. In 2005, the game was relaunched in Australia as “football” and the nickname for the national side, the “Socceroos” was expected (by the relevant bureaucrats, of course) to fade away. Naturally, that hasn’t happened, and the nickname is once more appearing on official websites, merchandize and so on. In May 2007, the governing body of New Zealand football, “New Zealand Soccer”, was renamed “New Zealand Football.”

In the United States, however.. the “US Football Association” didn’t include the word “Soccer” in its title until 1945, and didn’t drop the “Football” until 1974. Early US associations overwhelmingly used “Football” e.g. the American League of Professional Football, which was founded in 1894. Some regional leagues did use “Soccer” before World War II.

(This came about as a result of musing over how Commonwealth countries picked up some of our sporting inventions - cricket, rugby, tennis - but it was south and central Europe and America that picked up football. There’s no single answer to why this should be, although it evidently is. Football was actually quite a late developer - recognisable rugby had a 10-20 year head start, and cricket much more: the sports picked up by Commonwealth countries seem to relate to what was popular in Britain at the time of first colonization. And, football seems to have favoured areas experiencing the growth of heavy industry and mining specifically).