Latest News & Items

A new sport for the New Year: Bumble puppy!

11th January 2024

Perfect Putting at the Ryder Cup?

28th September 2023

Sportspages on Holidayish

1st August 2023

Do feel free to order during the next two weeks. We are on a bit of a holiday ‘go-slow’ but orders will be fufilled and sent out…just a little more slowly!

A new sport for the New Year: Bumble puppy!

Perfect Putting at the Ryder Cup?

Sportspages on Holidayish

Do feel free to order during the next two weeks. We are on a bit of a holiday ‘go-slow’ but orders will be fufilled and sent out…just a little more slowly!

England in the 2023 Women’s Football World Cup

It’s that time again, when we can hope and dare to dream: that England CAN win the 2023 World Cup in New Zealand and Australia. They have a good chance. It’s a great time for women’s football…and it’s a good time to look back at its history.

As we all know, women’s football grew massively in World War One. The Dick Kerr Munitions Works encouraged their women workers to play football during World War One to improve their health and morale. After they beat their male factory co-workers in an informal lunchtime match, the women’s team decided to take their football a little more seriously. They played their first public match in 1917 in front of 10,000 spectators. They beat Arundel Coulthard Factory 4-0. By 1920, they were playing St Helen’s Ladies at Goodison Park in front of 53,000 spectators with 14,000 more trying to get into the grounds.

In 1921 the FA banned women’s football from FA grounds. The men had returned from the War and demand for pitches was too great. All of a sudden football was deemed an unsuitable game for women’s health. The ban lasted 50 years.  Undeterred, Dick Kerr Munitions Works Women’s team renamed themselves Preston Ladies FC and carried on playing. In 1926 they played the Edinburgh Ladies and won 5-1. Deemed an international match, in fact THE international match, Preston Ladies therefore became unofficial World Champions. It would be great if England could make it official this time around.

 

 

 

 

Calling time on Just Fontaine – a French football legend, RIP

We love discovering sports memorabilia with great stories. Recently we acquired one of Just Fontaine’s commemorative watches, which fills exactly that brief.

Just fontaine, french football, 1958 World cupThe wristwatch is inscribed to dial “Just Fontaine. World Record 13 goals 1958-1998”. Fontaine, French football legend, presented one of these watches to each of the twenty two members of the French 1958 World Cup Squad  to commemorate his extraordinary record of scoring 13 goals in one World Cup tournament, including 4 against the defending champions, West Germany. In case you’re wondering, Pele scored 12 over 4 World Cup tournaments. So far, no one has bettered Fontaine’s record. Fontaine’s debut for France in 1953 gave a few clues as to what he might achieve, three to be exact – the 20 year old scored a hat trick against Luxembourg, ending in a meaty 8-0 score.

 

 

Maryan Wisnieski, French football, just fontaine, world cup football

 

Subsequently Fontaine presented his dedicated watches to his former teammates after the Final of the 1998 World Cup at the Dinner Banquet. Upon receipt of their watches, each member exchanged with another team mate. Maryan Wisniewski swapped with his room mate Jean Vincent – Wisniewski’s World Cup shirt number was ’22’ and Vincent’s ’21’. The watch we have is number ’21’, engraved to verso. The details of all Fontaine’s thirteen goals are also inscribed to verso. A handwritten letter from Wisniewski (written in French) explains the history of the watch.

France finished third in the 1958 World Cup, beating West Germany 6-3 in the 3/4th play off match. Wisniewski  was no slouch himself: he scored two goals in the Finals in Sweden and played 33 times for France from 1955-63. Wisniewski passed away in 2022. Just Fontaine passed away on 1st March 2023 – this watch encompasses the spirit of two great French football legends.

Sporting Legends we have lost

When we sent out our first New Stock Catalogue of the year, we realised it had been a while – too long! – since our last one in September. We reflected on the sporting legends we had lost just since September – way too many. We thought we’d like to make at least brief mention of a few of them here.

They come from so many different sports – boxing’s Gerrie Coetzee from South Africa, formula one’s Patrick Tambay from France and our own horse racing commentator, John Hanmer to name a few. Sadly they were joined by Ryder Cup golfer, Barry Lane, cricket’s Robin Marlar and Jeremy Lloyds, and David English, who raised £14 million for charity through the Bunbury Cricket Club. We lost Maurice Norman, part of the Double-winning Tottenham Hotspur team of 1960-61 and Brian Robinson too, the first British cyclist to finish the Tour de France AND win a Tour Stage.

David Duckham, British Lions
David Duckham, British Lions

Two great titans of rugby left us too: David Duckham and Doddie Weir. Duckham gained 36 England caps and was part of the revered British Lions squad, who beat the seemingly undefeatable All Blacks in 1971. Scotland’s Doddie Weir also starred with with the British Lions before he was tragically diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease in 2016. By the time he left us in November, his foundation had raised £8 million for MND research.

All these sportsmen were tremendous and we are honoured to remember them. They were also joined by 3 huge sporting legends: England’s World Cup star, George Cohen, Italy’s Gianluca Vialli and Brazil’s incomparable Pele.

George Best called England World Cup winner, George Cohen, “The best full-back I ever played against”. Cohen spent his entire career in football at Fulham. One could almost describe Gianluca Vialli and Cohen as footballing ‘neighbours’.  Vialli  was an extremely talented footballer, who played for Italy in 2 World Cups. It was arguably at Fulham’s neighbouring club, Chelsea, however, that he left his most indelible stamp. As a beloved player-manager, he helped Chelsea win the FA Cup, the League Cup and the Cup Winners’ Cup.

All of these sportsmen have been phenomenal throughout their respective sporting careers…but when it comes to sporting legends, it is hard for anyone to come close to the late and great Pele. He began his professional career at 15 and made his international debut a year later. He won 3 World Cups as a player over a 14 year international career. In 1999 a poll of Ballon d’Or winners voted him player of the century. He was. We salute him and we salute them all.

Argentina wins the 2022 World Cup for the third time

Uruguay World Cup Football 1930

King Charles III and Cricket

King Charles III, cricket, sportspages
King Charles III and cricket

We have been contemplating the huge job in front of King Charles III. We reminded ourselves what an able man he has shown himself to be over the years. Us being us, we looked to sport for the clues. We all know what a great polo player and general equestrian he was. We’ve seen him skiing, sailing, windsurfing and fishing. Less well known was his success on the cricket field.

Following in his father, the Duke of Edinburgh’s footsteps, Charles was an enthusiastic and able cricketer. In 1971 he arrived on horseback, all padded up for a cricket match at Cranwell in Lincolnshire.  Prince Charles was in an RAF team against the Lord’s Taverners.  He batted gamely and scored 17 runs but was bowled by the recently retired Surrey and England cricketing legend, Ken Barrington. Undeterred Prince Charles returned to the crease to bowl 7 overs and wreaked revenge on Ken Barrington by bowling him out.

We wish the new King continued success, going forward. Is it a sign of the power he might have that England won a Test series against South Africa two days into the start of his new reign?!

England’s Lionesses in the Women’s Euros 2022: How far women’s football has come!

How proud would these pioneers of women’s football from 1918 be to see England’s Lionesses perform in the Women’s Euros 2022?!
women's football, sportspages memorabiliaWhen this Scottish women’s team played in 2018, they would have rightly believed they had already come far. Despite attempts to set up and build up women’s football in the nineteenth century, it was World War One that gave women’s footballers the push they needed. Up until then, too many people still believed that football was still very much a man’s game and women playing it was viewed as unseemly.

In World War One, however,  many women worked together in factories for the first time. They were encouraged to keep fit for work. So they banded together to form football teams and fill the football stadiums that the men had left behind them as they went off to fight. By 1920 a Boxing Day football match between England’s top female teams, Dick, Kerr Ladies v St Helen’s, filled Everton’s Goodison Park stadium with 10,000 turned away at the gates.

But women’s football became a victim of its own success. Feeling threatened, possibly, by the success of women’s football and what effect that might have on men’s football after World War One, the FA issued a ban on 5th December 2021. No member club could let women’s teams play on their grounds. They claimed that women’s teams had siphoned off money they raised for charity for their expenses. They encouraged some doctors’ views that playing football might be bad for a woman’s body and might even stop a woman becoming pregnant.

The FA stuck to its edict. In 1947 the Kent County FA suspended a referee because he also trained a women’s football team. It was only in 1971 that the FA finally lifted their ban against women’s football. How we’d love to go back and tell all those women footballers, who persevered despite all obstacles, that in 2022 the BBC delayed the News at 10 so that we could all watch the end to another thrilling Lionesses’ game (depending on how far back we went, we might have a struggle explaining the BBC’s News at 10 first!).