131: Phil Jagielka, Everton, Topps Match Attax Trading Card Game, 2009/10

Mat Jolin-Beech is at the helm for today’s post with a football history lesson for us all and just the thing to get you in the mood for the first weekend of Football League action. As well as today’s offering the Steel City’s early footballing days were graced by The Zulus, a team formed to raise money for widows of the Zulu War and on occasions the team was known to adopt traditional Zulu costumes as part of their playing kit. They were eventually disbanded for bringing the game into disrepute for paying their players. The whole cultural appropriation thing was clearly fine. Over to Mat.

Phil Jagielka, the 38-year-old defender, has seen his second spell at Sheffield United come to an end. After failing to win a contract extension, he joins the plethora of players out of contract and looking for a new club for the new season after proclaiming he’s not yet ready to retire.


After breaking through for the Blades at the age of 17 in May 2000, he helped steer the club back to the Premier League by 2006, and even had a famous stint in goal for the Bramall Lane club. After a dozen years with Everton, the veteran returned to Sheffield United in order to give then some top-flight experience. After a successful first season, the second resulted in relegation and that saw the club’s oldest player leave. As with many posts there is much more that could, and should, be said but this is a jumping off point from one of Sheffield’s oldest players, to Sheffield’s, and the world’s oldest football club. Sheffield FC.

Jagielka – born in 1982. Sheffield FC – born in 1857. Recognised by FIFA as the world’s oldest club still playing football, and one of only two clubs to be awarded the FIFA Order of Merit. The other? Real Madrid. Just as a point of reference, the FA wasn’t founded until 1863, leaving Sheffield FC to play under its own rules – the Sheffield Rules, obviously. This involved some 18-a-side games, a rules derby – which is still played to this day with Hallam FC, and they played a "London team” under FA rules which they lost by two goals and four touches down to nil. Eventually they relented and adopted the FA rules in 1878. You know what they say: you can tell a Yorkshireman, but you can’t tell him much! It seems as though that saying is at least as old as football.

The city, and the club, are rightly proud of their place in history, claiming to be the home of football. The founders, Nathaniel Creswick and William Prest, wrote down the first set of rules for the beautiful game, well ‘Mob Football’, featuring corners, throw-ins, crossbars (Tony Yeboah is grateful for that one), fouls, and free-kicks.

In order to mark the club and Sheffield’s place, and to give football a home to come back to, Sheffield FC is eager to build a new 4,000-seater stadium. Current club chairman Richard Tims wants the new stadium to become a destination for football pilgrims from all over the world. He said: “St Andrews is known around the world as the home of golf, Lord’s is the home of cricket, and we want Sheffield to get the recognition it deserves as the home of football. This will be somewhere to which the sport’s three billion fans can make a pilgrimage and pay homage to the city which gave the world the beautiful game.”

For the ancient club, they are striving hard to get a place on the map. And if they are looking for another headline, there is an ancient defender looking for a new club.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

N/A: Chris Kamara, Sheffield United, Chris Kamara’s Street Soccer, Midas Games

Image
In November 1972 the arcade game Pong made its debut and the gaming industry was born. While not the first attempt to make some computer pixels do not very much for the amusement of the masses it was by far the most commercially successful and, by the end of the decade, the first ever football game was unleashed on the world in the form of NASL Soccer. Judging by the YouTube footage it seemed to involve lots of brightly coloured stick men over hitting through balls and running in the opposite direction to oncoming forwards which may well be what the likes of Trevor Francis , Johan Cruyff and Gerd Muller were getting up to over in the US at the time. Throughout the 1980s the games became more realistic and a host of star players and managers put their names on products of variable quality. Peter Shilton’s Handball Maradona (not that he is anyway bitter about being out jumped by a midget) gave youngsters the opportunity to fulfil their goalkeeping fantasies in a range of scenarios with r
Read more

269: Trifon Ivanov, Bulgaria, USA ’94 World Cup, UK and Eire Edition

Image
The 1994 FIFA World Cup in the USA was my introduction to football and, nearly thirty years later, probably the international tournament I remember most fondly despite the fact that I realistically don’t remember too much about it. I can attest to having witnessed Ray Houghton’s wonder goal/flukey lob in the Republic of Ireland’s shock victory over Italy as it was the centrepiece of a First Holy Communion celebration my family was attending. The joy and shock experienced by the predominantly Irish and Italian guests crowded around what seemed like the world’s biggest telly spilled over into the garden for all of us kids present and led to an inevitable kickabout. A few weeks later the quarter finals coincided with a primary school barbecue which, again, saw lots of people crowded around a telly watching Italy take on Spain . I remember very little about the game as my primary focus was the kickabout in the school playground and trying to digest ropey veggie burgers but one parent said
Read more

44: Savo Milosevic, Aston Villa, Merlin’s Premier League 98 Official Sticker Collection

Image
Nearly a quarter of a century ago The Guardian published an article entitled ‘The 10 Worst Foreign Signings in History’. Focusing almost exclusively on British football in the 1990s the list is hardly exhaustive and mentions many names that will not come as a shock to any football nostalgic or reader of these pages over the last three years. Serie A imports Tomas Brolin , Andrea Silenzi and Marco Negri featured with particular disdain reserved for the latter’s regular take home of £18,000 per week for contributing about as much as Winston Bogarde did for Chelsea which seems harsh for a man who actually lit up Ibrox with 23 goals in his first ten games. George Weah’s “cousin” (not his actual cousin ) Ali Dia is of course included alongside Marco Boogers and Michele Padovano who managed just one goal in his twelve games for Crystal Palace and returned to the club a year after leaving demanding £1m in unpaid wages. The common denominator between the article’s inhabitants was the posit
Read more