The Blizzard

“What you see is 90 minutes of action treated almost as a distraction from the real business of sport: the narrative of news… Reality is not enough, so it is expanded, meaning is extrapolated, significance is assumed. And all of it around a structure to ensure maximum exposure, maximum interest.”In Episode Fourteen we bring you ‘Is Football Still Sport? by Rory Smith. Channelling the ‘structured reality’ of ITV’s documentary soap-opera The Only Way Is Essex, and the ‘sports entertainment’ of WWE wrestling, Rory asks, seeing as it unfolds like a soap opera for the entertainment of millions and the profit of a few, what has football in the age of Sky and Super Sunday become? If you have any feedback, comments or suggestions email [email protected], or find us on Twitter @blzzrd.Rory Smith writes about football for The Times, as long as someone with a foreign-sounding name is in the news. He has previously worked at all three Mirror titles, both of the Telegraphs and, briefly, a pair of Independents. He ghosted Rafael Benitez's first memoir, Champions League Dreams, and moved some commas around on The Numbers Game. He was once nearly on Blockbusters. Twitter: @RorySmithTimes. Issue Two, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available on a pay-what-you-like basis from www.theblizzard.co.uk. Digital downloads cost as little as a 1p each (RRP £3), while print versions are available from £6 + postage (RRP £12). You can also find us on the Kindle and Google Play stores.

“Xavi’s movement is a kind of reverse sheepdog trick — instead of penning a flock in to an enclosed space, his darting, nipping and barking is about spreading them around the field, into unexplored, unpredictable spaces.”In Episode Thirteen we bring you ‘The Inverted Sheepdog’ by Graham Hunter, which looks in detail at how the Spain international became the creative hub of the all-conquering Barcelona team of the early twenty-first century. As Graham himself puts it “Sublime player, top man. A footballer who epitomises what has gone right at Barcelona over the last couple of decades.”If you have any feedback, comments or suggestions email [email protected], or find us on Twitter @blzzrd.Graham Hunter moved to Barcelona in 2001. He is a journalist of international reputation and covers Spanish football for Sky Sports, the BBC and newspapers and magazines across the world. Twiter: @bumpergraham.Issue Four, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available on a pay-what-you-like basis from www.theblizzard.co.uk. Digital downloads cost as little as a 1p each (RRP £3), while print versions are available from £6 + postage (RRP £12). You can also find us on the Kindle and Google Play stores.

“Erbstein’s was an extraordinary life that was characterised by courage and resourcefulness in the face of adversity. That he and his family survived the holocaust was a matter of astonishing good fortune, but just four years after the end of the war, Erbstein was killed with his team, Il Grande Torino, in the Superga air crash.”In Episode Twelve of the Blizzard Podcast we bring you an extract from Chapters 10 and 11 of ‘Erbstein: The triumph and tragedy of football’s forgotten pioneer’ by Dominic Bliss, published by Blizzard Books in 2014. The book is the result of years of painstaking research into one of football’s forgotten greats. Erbstein was part of the great Jewish coaching tradition developed in the coffee houses of Budapest, and after a playing career that included stints in Hungary, Italy and the USA, he moved to Bari to embark on a coaching career that soon became noted for its innovativeness. He would go on to coach the great Torino side of the 1940s who dominated Italian football, until the tragic accident that claimed the lives of the squad, and their manager, at Superga in 1949.The extract in this episode details his family's experiences during the Hungarian holocaust, and how his quick wits and contacts helped spare the lives of his wife and daughters from a fascist death-march in 1944.If you have any feedback, comments or suggestions email [email protected], or find us on Twitter @blzzrd.The book is available from www.theblizzard.co.uk. Digital downloads cost £3, while print versions are available from £10 + postage. You can also find it on the Kindle and Google Play stores.

“’He describes himself as a ‘fiddler’. I’d say he’s more than that: a born crook. He would attempt and succeed in staging the most abject of blackmails — the blackmail of hope. Dressed in a German uniform, he’d get out of a car seized from the maquis and embark on the following monologue:‘To what extremities am I reduced, I, a Frenchman, forced to wear the German uniform, these awful rags! [...] They’re going to kill you – but I’ll save you, risking my life. I’ve saved fifty-four. You’ll be the fifty-fifth. That’ll be 400,000 francs.’”In Episode Eleven of the Blizzard Podcast we bring you 'The Collaborator’ by Philippe Auclair from Issue One, which details the treacherous life and traitor’s death of Alexandre Villaplane, France’s first World Cup captain turned crook and Nazi collaborator.If you have any feedback, comments or suggestions email [email protected], or find us on Twitter @blzzrd.Philippe Auclair is the author of The Enchanted Kingdom of Tony Blair (in French), Cantona: the Rebel Who Would Be King, which was named NSC Football Book of the Year, and a biography of Thierry Henry. He writes for France Football. Twitter: @PhilippeAuclairIssue One, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available on a pay-what-you-like basis from www.theblizzard.co.uk. Digital downloads cost as little as a 1p each (RRP £3), while print versions are available from £6 + postage (RRP £12). You can also find us on the Kindle and Google Play stores.

"It had been foolish of me to blame football for the dangerous passions it can unleash. Turning against football on these grounds would be like hating democracy because people voted for Thatcher."In Episode Ten of the Blizzard Podcast we bring you 'The Lager of Life' by Tim Vickery from Issue Nine. It is a game haunted by violence, but can it be blamed for it? Are big derby matches just a 90-minute version of Orwell's Three-Minute Hate?If you have any feedback, comments or suggestions email [email protected], or find us on Twitter @blzzrd.Tim Vickery writes and broadcasts on South American football for the BBC, World Soccer, ESPN, SBS and TalkSport. Twitter @Tim_Vickery.Issue Nine, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available on a pay-what-you-like basis from www.theblizzard.co.uk. Digital downloads cost as little as a 1p each (RRP £3), while print versions are available from £6 + postage (RRP £12). You can also find us on the Kindle and Google Play stores.

John ‘Jack’ Slater, Bolton full-back between 1905 and 1914, would go on to own one of Britain’s largest industrial conglomerates. He survived financial crashes of many millions of pounds and went on to become football's first (and to date only) MP.In Episode Nine of the Blizzard Podcast we bring you John Harding's story of football's first millionaire from Issue Fourteen. The son of a mill-worker went from signing a £4 a week contract for a provincial club to completing business deals worth hundreds of millions of pounds in today's money, and would go on to rub shoulders in the House of Commons with Aneurin Bevan, Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden. If you have any feedback, comments or suggestions email [email protected], or find us on Twitter @blzzrd.John Harding is the PFA's official historian, and writes on a variety of topics ranging from literary and sporting biography to cultural history and criticism.Issue Fourteen, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available on a pay-what-you-like basis from www.theblizzard.co.uk. Digital downloads cost as little as a 1p each (RRP £3), while print versions are available from £6 + postage (RRP £12). You can also find us on the Kindle and Google Play stores.

"It's possible something brilliantly illuminating happened there, part Escape To Victory, part footballing salon, part late-colonial Woodstock distilled through sternly moustachioed men of empire."In Episode Eight of the Blizzard Podcast we bring you Barney Ronay's 'The Bomb and the Bowler Hat' from Issue Three, looking back at the extraordinary collection of football minds interred in the Ruhleben Camp outside Berlin during World War One. The legacy of those collected in the prisoner of war camp, including influential coaches of clubs such as Athletic Bilbao and FC Nurnburg, could well be the birth of modern football as we know it. If you have any feedback, comments or suggestions email [email protected], or find us on Twitter @blzzrd.Barney Ronay writes for the Guardian about sport. He is the author of several football books including The Manager and Any Chance Of A Game? and writes occasionally for film and television, most recently co-scripting the feature film From The Ashes. Twitter: @BarneyRonayIssue Three, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available on a pay-what-you-like basis from www.theblizzard.co.uk. Digital downloads cost as little as a 1p each (RRP £3), while print versions are available from £6 + postage (RRP £12). You can also find us on the Kindle and Google Play stores.

"Cultural exports have led us to believe that all Swedish people are blonde, live in IKEA-furnished houses, can produce catchy pop-songs and are mostly named Ulf. This is largely the case, but that isn't the Sweden Zlatan Ibrahimović grew up in."In Episode Seven of The Blizzard Podcast we bring you Lars Sivertsen's 'The Bicycle Thief' from Issue Eight which tackles the enigma that is Zlatan Ibrahimovic, and looks at how his upbringing in the tough Malmo suburb of Rosengard shaped him into the footballer he has become today. As is often the case when things involve Zlatan, this episode contains more than its fair share of 'industrial' language. If you have any feedback, comments or suggestions email [email protected], or find us on Twitter @blzzrd.Lars Sivertsen is a Norwegian writer based in London. He is Premier League Correspondent for TV 2 Norway and a regular contributor to Josimar. Twitter: @larssivertsenIssue Eight, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available on a pay-what-you-like basis from www.theblizzard.co.uk. Digital downloads cost as little as a 1p each (RRP £3), while print versions are available from £6 + postage (RRP £12). You can also find us on the Kindle and Google Play stores.

"The GDR's national team - so notorious for choking when it counted - managed to qualify for a World Cup for the only time in their history. It was, of course, the World Cup in West Germany"In Episode Six of the Blizzard Podcast we bring you Uli Hesse's 'Never the Twain' looking back at the meeting between East Germany and West Germany at the 1974 World Cup, and the consequences of a meeting between an East German player and the West German Minister of Finance, which was first published in Issue Thirteen in June 2014. If you have any feedback, comments or suggestions email [email protected], or find us on Twitter @blzzrd.Uli Hesse is the author of Tor! The Story of German Football and co-author of Who Invented the Stepover? He has also written three German-language football books, is a regular columnist for ESPN, a contributing editor of Champions magazine and has been published on five continents.

Issue Thirteen, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available on a pay-what-you-like basis from www.theblizzard.co.uk. Digital downloads cost as little as a 1p each (RRP £3), while print versions are available from £6 + postage (RRP £12). You can also find us on the Kindle and Google Play stores.

"Many of those parents who did arrive with their children were carrying Geiger counters. Before each match, they would hastily walk over the pitch to take measures of the air at grass level."In Episode Five of the Blizzard Podcast we look back at Javier Sauras and Felix Lill's 'After the Earthquake', and how football is playing its part in rebuilding the shattered communities around Fukushima, first published in Issue Sixteen.To suggest an article you'd like to hear in Episode Six, email [email protected] by Monday 28th September, and we'll pick one lucky winner out of the metaphorical hat. Issue Sixteen, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available on a pay-what-you-like basis from www.theblizzard.co.uk. Digital downloads cost as little as a 1p each (RRP £3), while print versions are available from £6 + postage (RRP £12). You can also find us on the Kindle and Google Play stores.