football | The National Archives blog

Posts tagged 'football'

Wed May

2013

Red Devils’ delight in Manchester

Posted by Keith Mitchell in Records and research

With the end of another football season, I have to grudgingly admit the Red Devils from Manchester are the best team again. To win 20 top tier titles, compared to my team’s record, is certainly worth a mention. Football has also lost a great character and manager with the retirement of Sir Alex Ferguson.

So after watching another dreary performance from my team, I thought: What can the Archives tell you about football? A fair amount, judging by a search of our catalogue, Discovery. It is a wonder what a quick random search of a catalogue can find.

Photograph of the Manchester United Football Team, leaving the Central Station, Manchester, with the English Cup (catalogue ref: COPY 1/532/135)

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Wed Jun

2012

‘The Importance of Being an Innocent Bystander’

Posted by Simon Demissie in Records and research

And so, England’s football team comes home. Sunday evening’s defeat in a penalty shootout at the European Championships in Ukraine followed a familiar trend where effort and determination were to the fore, but disappointment was the team’s ultimate reward. Out but not down; defeated but not beaten.

Kevin Keegan in the 1976 COI film, 'Children's Heroes'

At least, they were not beaten in the sense alleged by a previous England tour to Eastern Europe 38 years ago. Then, in June 1974, the team arrived in Belgrade from Sofia to play the Yugoslav side in a friendly (following a 1-1 draw with East Germany and a 1-0 victory over Bulgaria) ¹ but events at the airport – in what would become known as ‘the Keegan affair’ – led to some frantic diplomatic manoeuvring, the detail of which is available in a Foreign Office file available here at The National Archives (FCO 28/2657).

Notes:

1. The Guardian’s David Lacey wrote a piece on this subject: www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/may/21/seven-deadly-sins-football-sloth-keegan-belgrade ^

Mon May

2012

A desert island from my shelf

Posted by Jo Pugh in Records and research, Technology and innovation

Desert Island (by Flickr user ronsaunders47 - CC-BY-SA)

When you work in an archive, a certain amount of shelving is, of course, unavoidable, and as a word, I always feel ‘shelving’ has quite a pleasant ring to it. But while it’s euphonious, it’s not positive in every context. It can imply something interrupted, put to one side, and it’s just life that this is what happens, in a world of competing priorities, to some projects that seemed like good ideas at the time.