The unveiling of a new statue of Brian Clough in Nottingham last week seems like as good a time as any to to take a quick look back at the career of arguably English football's greatest manager. It's probably fair to say that the managerial achievements of Brian Clough will never be repeated again. He [. Click to continue reading...

When people grapple with the ultimately unneccesary but nevertheless fascinating topic of the greatest football players ever, hardly anyone would even mention Josef "Pepi" Bican.  This very fact alone has always made him a figure of particular interest to me.  According to RSSSF, he's the all-time most prolific goalscorer in world football, with 804+ goals in [. Click to continue reading...

Football has changed in many ways over the last twenty-five years. If you were to put the average twenty-five year old in a time machine and transport them back to 1983, the first thing they'd ask would be probably be, "where is the football"? Confined on the television to an hour on Saturday nights and [. Click to continue reading...

I'm not much of a one for merchandising. I mean, I'll stop and look at it when it's on sale, and I love football shirts, though I suspect that I am now too old to be able to wear them in public. I don't much like the idea of being "identified" as a football supporter [...] Click to continue reading...

You have to have some degree of sympathy for David Fairclough. Hamstrung from the start by the "Supersub" nickname that he acquired when he first appeared for Liverpool, everything he did seemed to be overshadowed by something or someone else. So it was with his hat-trick for Liverpool against Norwich City in February 1980 - [. Click to continue reading...

It seems almost difficult to believe now, but there was a time when, if you saw the football on the television, that was it. You'd see the goals once, maybe twice, and then they'd disappear into the vaults of the BBC and ITV, only to resurface once or twice at random intervals on the likes [...] Click to continue reading...

This piece has been written with due deference to an article in the Guardian Sport Blog this morning, reappraising the career of the BBC football commentator Barry Davies. I felt that this was an appropriate time to add my thoughts on a legend of British sports broadcasting. There has long been a strand of anti-intellectualism [. Click to continue reading...

As I pondered the smoking ruins of England's match against the Czech Republic last week, my mind turned back to Matthew Le Tissier. Matthew (and it seems somewhat wrong to reduce his first name to the monosyllable of merely "Matt") was the great lost English talent of the last thirty years in some respects, but [. Click to continue reading...

Due to a technical error, we appear to have lost last night's piece about "Football Manager". Many apologies. With a bit of luck, it will be re-written at some point in the future. It's difficult not to feel a twinge of sympathy for the supporters of Stoke City and Hull City. With the expressions of [. Click to continue reading...

Of the many things that young people no longer do that I did in my youth, buying second-hand books is one that I am fairly confident never happens any more - at least not annuals from market stalls. On Saturday lunchtimes, as a boy I would go to the old band-stand in the centre of [...] Click to continue reading...