Author: John McGee
Great Football League Teams 36: Brighton and Hove Albion 2010-11
Last Wednesday Bradley Wiggins’ big yellow Tour de France victory parade passed near to a town synonymous with its greatest ever champion — Mourenx, site of the coming of age of the indomitable Belgian, Eddy Merckx. From the moment his breakaway victory there on the 17th stage of the 1969 Tour, people spoke in hushed tones about Merckx’s achievement.
In leaving his great rival Felice Gimondi for dead in …
Never Write Off a Wounded ‘Banger’ - Carlisle United Will Go Down Swinging
This time four years ago Carlisle United stood on the brink of glory. A single win from their last four games against Leeds United, Southend, Millwall or Bournemouth would have been enough for the Cumbrians to claim the final automatic promotion spot from League One and reach the heady heights of English football’s second tier for the first time in 20 years.
Some fans will tell you that the …
Book Review: The Smell of Football
The Smell of Football by Mick ‘Baz’ Rathbone
Published by Vision Sports Publishing
July 2011, £12.99
ISBN: 978-1907637148
I have a regular correspondent who likes to talk football. A Liverpool die-hard, man of Shrewsbury, our exchanges normally concern the current wiles of his personal idol, Rafael Benitez, or his affection for his hometown ‘Salop!’ boys and our shared whimsy for the Midlands club born of our bonding over mutual appreciation …
Football - the last bastion of Social Democracy?
I know what you’re already thinking. That I’m going to argue something entirely inarguable. That in between skimming the dressing room copies of Nuts and Zoo the average Premier League footballer is more likely to clutch a well thumbed copy of Ayn Rand’s hymn to self interest, ‘Atlas Shrugged’ than the collected writings of Tony Crosland.
And you’d be right of course. Modern football is awash with greed — with …
Football Fandom’s Blank Generation
In Blank Generation, Richard Hell’s notorious hymn to disaffected youth, the auteur claims himself a ‘cartoon long forsaken by the public eye’ — a totem for a column of society with nothing to say and no voice with which to say it. It gets to the very core of why ‘punk’ (the movement and the statements, not the often desperate excuse for music) formed and proved pertinent anthems for …