The Blizzard

The entire audio recording from our event in Dublin on Monday 3rd December. The panel, hosted by Andrew Mangan, featured Jonathan Wilson, Philippe Auclair and Miguel Delaney, and discussed the Premier League "title race", the worst tackles ever seen and Jose Mourinho's future.

"I wasn’t at the stadium in Lyon. I was watching the game on a not-so-big TV screen in a pub near Soho Square in central London, and Japan still went out of the tournament as the bottom of the group losing all three games. But there, I witnessed Japan making a mark, albeit a small one, in the world of football. After going 2-0 down, we scored a goal, the greatest joy in the game of football – our first World Cup goal."To non-Japanese eyes, it might have looked a mere consolation late in the second half. It was quite a simple goal, too: a cross from the left was headed back across and the ball was met in the six-yard box. Yet, to us, it was a goal screaming, “We’re here in the World Cup!” I also happened to make my presence known in the pub as soon as the ball was in the back of the net by shouting, “Yeah!” and punching the air with delight… alone."In episode One Hundred and Eight we take a look back at "At Home" by Shinobu Yamanaka, first published in Issue Twenty Nine in June 2018.Read the full article here: www.theblizzard.co.uk/article/at-home

Issue Twenty Nine, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available for £12 plus postage on www.theblizzard.co.uk. Since we’ve relaunched the website, all our articles, including this one, are available to read for free. Non-subscribers get 3 free articles a month, while subscribers have unlimited advert-free browsing, as well as access to digital downloads of all our issues in eBook formats.Those who want to buy one-off eBooks can still do so – from the Kindle and Google Play stores.

The first half of our live event in Manchester on Thursday 30th August. Yes, we know the sound quality isn't the greatest throughout, and we apologise, but would like to bring you at least some of the evening's discussion for those who couldn't make it along. The panel, hosted by Rory Smith, featured Jonathans Wilson and Northcroft and Miguel Delaney, and in the first half of the evening focussed pretty much exclusively on developments over on the red side of Manchester.

"The fact that he was asked to change the title only adds to the effect. He had picked up the phrase from the broadcast media. So how could it be inappropriate for broadcast media? What kind of place was this? In such circumstances, what could be a better alternate title than “Alternate Title”? Micky Dolenz had come, walked down our streets, and with no song-writing finesse to filter through the experience, had successfully transformed his confusion about English contradictions into art.Our craft is less visceral, less intuitive and without the same emotional impact. But we can go deeper. We have the opportunity to identify the contradictions in a footballing culture and then analyse the tensions between them.By way of example, let us take Brazil, my home for the past two decades. A number of articles in the history of this publication have done their bit to explode the myth of Brazilian football as a kind of Carnaval in boots, a romanticised state of nature in which self-expression is all and the scoreline is nothing."In episode One Hundred and Five we take a look back at "Alternate Title" by Tim Vickery, first published in Issue Twelve in March 2014. Read the full article here: www.theblizzard.co.uk/article/alternate-title

Issue Twelve, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available for £12 plus postage on www.theblizzard.co.uk. Since we’ve relaunched the website, all our articles, including this one, are available to read for free. Non-subscribers get 3 free articles a month, while subscribers have unlimited advert-free browsing, as well as access to digital downloads of all our issues in eBook formats.Those who want to buy one-off eBooks can still do so – from the Kindle and Google Play stores.

"Saelua's role in giving some dignity back to one of the worst teams in the world made waves across the globe. "Korean TV came to my house to do an interview. It was kind of weird," Saelua said. "I would have people from New York call in and say they wanted to come to my house and do a photo shoot and interviews and stuff. All the attention was very overwhelming.""There was less of a ripple in the trans community. Plenty don't care about the "macho" elements of sport, according to Juliet Jacques, a writer who frequently tackles trans and football topics. "Those who do like football realised that the anomaly of a 'transgender' woman playing for a men's team owed much to American Samoa's lowly international position, the small resources and pool of talent available to them etc," Jacques said, "and that Saelua's debut was a good thing to see but unlikely to change the deeply ingrained sexism, split between male and female and lack of space for anyone between male and female in western professional football."In episode One Hundred and Four we revisit "Breaking the Mould" by Zac Lee Rigg, first published in Issue Seven back in December 2012. Read the full article here: www.theblizzard.co.uk/article/breaking-mould

Issue Seven, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available for £12 plus postage on www.theblizzard.co.uk. Since we’ve relaunched the website, all our articles, including this one, are available to read for free. Non-subscribers get 3 free articles a month, while subscribers have unlimited advert-free browsing, as well as access to digital downloads of all our issues in eBook formats.Those who want to buy one-off eBooks can still do so – from the Kindle and Google Play stores.

"Only two things dominated the lives of any schoolboy growing up in Johannesburg in the late 1970s – sport and girls. Girls were a proposition too various and complicated to contemplate, so we sublimated frantically and played more sport than we were already playing. Scratch soccer games at break-time. Cricket, rugby, touch-rugby. We swam, considered water polo. We even tried athletics."If we discovered that we were ill-suited to rugby and self-loathing to any great degree, we heard the distant call of hockey. Although close by, the hockey fields were, strictly speaking, outside of the school grounds, which should have told us something. Over the merry clash of sticks we slowly realised that it was a sport reserved for the intellectual and the gloriously eccentric. I played it happily for five years."In episode One Hundred and Three we look at "Blue Period" by Luke Alfred from the recently released Issue Twenty Eight (published in March 2018). Read the full article here: https://www.theblizzard.co.uk/article/blue-period

Issue Twenty Eight, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available for £12 plus postage on www.theblizzard.co.uk. Since we’ve relaunched the website, all our articles, including this one, are available to read for free. Non-subscribers get 3 free articles a month, while subscribers have unlimited advert-free browsing, as well as access to digital downloads of all our issues in eBook formats.Those who want to buy one-off eBooks can still do so – from the Kindle and Google Play stores.

Issue Twenty Eight is out now, and jam-packed full of interesting and enlightening articles - we've got David Winner, Anthony Clavane and Jonathan Wilson tackling Brexit; interviews with Andi Herzog and Carlos Alberto Parreira; a photo essay from the Polish non-leagues; eight of the worst seasons in living memory; John Brewin on the Nevilles, the Gallaghers and football in Manchester; Sean Cole on Notts County's failed dalliance with Munto Finance and much more. Head to www.theblizzard.co.uk/articles to dip into the most recent issue, or any of the 600-odd articles from our back catalogue.

"Atlético Madrid 0 SpVgg Fürth 2; Lucchese 1 Manchester City 0; Triestina 3 Ajax 0; Benfica 0 Rot Weiss Essen 1. Not, as might be supposed, the scorelines from some long-forgotten round of the Uefa or Intertoto Cup, but a rather different measure of footballing success."In episode One Hundred and Two we revisit "The Clubs Behind the Countries" by Richard Jolly, first published in Issue Thirteen in June 2014.Read the full article here: https://www.theblizzard.co.uk/article/clubs-behind-countries

Issue Thirteen, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available for £12 plus postage on www.theblizzard.co.uk. Since we’ve relaunched the website, all our articles, including this one, are available to read for free. Non-subscribers get 3 free articles a month, while subscribers have unlimited advert-free browsing, as well as access to digital downloads of all our issues in eBook formats.Those who want to buy one-off eBooks can still do so – from the Kindle and Google Play stores.

"It all goes to show that less can sometimes be more. This might jar with US thinking about sport, but keeping international competitions so open that the best teams rarely meet — or possibly don't at all — has been football's secret master-stroke. It turns the latter stages into must-view events. The Champions League brand plays heavily on the exclusivity and scarcity of its product."In episode One Hundred and One we look back on "Dessert Comes at the End by Raphael Honigstein, first published in Issue Zero in MArch 2011. In it, he argues that football's administrators must beware killing the golden goose. Read the full article here: www.theblizzard.co.uk/article/dessert-comes-end

Issue Zero, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available for £12 plus postage on www.theblizzard.co.uk. Since we’ve relaunched the website, all our articles, including this one, are available to read for free. Non-subscribers get 3 free articles a month, while subscribers have unlimited advert-free browsing, as well as access to digital downloads of all our issues in eBook formats.Those who want to buy one-off eBooks can still do so – from the Kindle and Google Play stores.

"Beck would go to great lengths in search of the smallest advantage. Visiting sides were made to feel as unwelcome as possible, with the heating turned off in the cramped away dressing room and flat, soggy practice balls given out. It was psychological warfare. The impact of these unsporting practices and intimidation tactics is impossible to quantify, and many felt they were done simply for effect – pseudoscience to create a hostile atmosphere. Meanwhile, Cambridge players were forced to take ice-cold showers before kick-off to ensure their alertness. A mythology developed around these rituals that remains to this day. Some opponents didn’t take kindly to it."In episode One Hundred we revisit 'Route One' by Sean Cole, first published in Issue Twenty Seven in December 2017. In it, he examines how John Beck’s long-ball theories brought unprecedented success to Cambridge United in the 1990s. Read the full article here: www.theblizzard.co.uk/article/route-one

Issue Twenty Seven, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available for £12 plus postage on www.theblizzard.co.uk. Since we’ve relaunched the website, all our articles, including this one, are available to read for free. Non-subscribers get 3 free articles a month, while subscribers have unlimited advert-free browsing, as well as access to digital downloads of all our issues in eBook formats.Those who want to buy one-off eBooks can still do so – from the Kindle and Google Play stores.