Search: 'shirts'

Plenty of clubs are in financial difficulties but only a couple can appeal to recording artists for salvation. Port Vale fan Rob Rushton talks about Robbie Williams's unwillingness to provide financial help to his hometown club

I cannot recall the exact date, but I vividly remember Port Vale playing Watford in Division Three in the mid-1970s, when the Vale fans behind the goal sang: “You can stick your grand piano up you arse,” to Watford chairman Elton John. Either good advice, or pure jealousy – you decide – as Elton’s millions boosted Watford up the league to the First Division.

Read more…

Peter Robinson has photographed football across five decades, as his new book records. But in spite of his unparalleled career, the Premier League want him to start again

My first involvement with football came through meeting someone I knew in the street who told me that the Football League Review was looking for a regular photographer. This was the League’s official magazine, produced on a shoestring initially. It was included as an optional insert with club programmes. Most of the lower division clubs took it be­cause they needed something to pad out their prog­rammes, most of which were only the size of the Re­view itself. Some of the wealthier clubs with bigger programmes didn’t want it, though, and that affected their level of co-operation with me when it came to taking pictures. The League wanted a range of clubs to feature, though you couldn’t hope to cover all 92 in a season even when the Review went weekly.

Read more…

Few football men can be claimed to have died as a result of their desire for power and few had as lasting an impact as Herbert Chapman, as Barney Ronay explains

“In this business you’ve got to be a dictator or you haven’t a chance,” Brian Clough remarked on his appointment as Hartlepools United manager in 1965. It is temp­­ting to wonder whom Clough might have had in mind as a dictatorial role model in 1965. Mao Tse-Tung? Leonid Brezhnev? Charlie Chaplin? More likely, however, Clough was briefly visualising himself as a stocky, dapper man with a large-brimmed hat and the look of a prosperous northern greengrocer.

Read more…

Chris Taylor argues that all David Beckham had to do to become universally popular in England was to stop playing for Manchester United

The reason Real Madrid bought David Beckham was obvious to everyone. World domination. Those craf­ty swine from the Estadio Santiago Bernabéu weren’t content with their European monopoly, they want­­ed the rest of the world. And so to help promote their tour of south-east Asia, they bought David Beckham.

Read more…

England may have lost twice to the United States but have inflicted frequent and often quite heavy revenge, beginning, as Gavin Willacy relates, with Tom Finney in 1953

Three years after their humiliation by the United States in Belo Horizonte, Alf Ramsey, Billy Wright, Jimmy Dickinson and Tom Finney were given the chance to gain some sort of revenge on those pesky Americans when the FA sent England on their regular tour of the Americas.

Read more…