sporting history
Who would be a goalkeeper?
There’s a whiff of hauteur in Robert McCrum’s history of the penalty kick – his great-grandfather’s brainchild of 1891, which proved such a momentous change to football
There never was fair play
Sports history, writes Wray Vamplew, is sometimes ‘sentimental, reactionary and built on the implicit assumption that the sporting past was…
Crazy cricket
Cricket in Latin America sounds like an oxymoron. Yet in almost every country in the region willow was hitting leather…
John Bull at play
The history of English sport reflects a defiant people determined to protect their ancient prerogatives, says Alex Massie
Cricket’s Faustian pact
Imagine an archetypal English scene and it’s likely you’re picturing somewhere rural. Despite losing fields and fields each year to…
Britain’s obsession with boxing is as deep-rooted as its devotion to cricket
Boxing has long been a British obsession, exported successfully to North America, but never widespread on the Continent. Mainland Europeans…
