Football Ruined My Life

In this edition of the podcast, Colin Shindler and Jon Holmes are joined by Andy Hamilton to talk in a very headmasterly tone about Onfield Behaviour which quite frankly is bringing the good name of the Football Ruined My Life school into disgrace.  In a Champions League quarter final this season two Real Madrid boys in the Lower Sixth, Rudiger and Mbappe, were shown on television after a fortunat...

We’re all fans.  That’s why we make this podcast and that’s why presumably you all like listening to it.  Fan sentiment is something we suspect we all feel strongly about but probably in our different ways.  It’s not just foreign owners, ludicrous transfer fees, and (present company excepted) cynical agents taking money off both their clients and the clubs.  Today’s panel (of Jon Holmes, Colin Shi...

In the first podcast Football Ruined My Life has done since the untimely demise of Patrick Barclay, Jon Holmes and Colin Shindler are joined by the Daily Telegraph sports columnist Jim White.  Forced to restart the episode because the Producer had failed to press the record button first time round, eventually the panel turn to the “the poisoned chalice”. They consider the story from the sad night...

It’s commonly known as “the poisoned chalice”.  The only England manager to win the World Cup was Alf Ramsey in 1966.  Nobody has done it since though a few have come close. In this, his last ever podcast, Patrick Barclay, along with Jon Holmes and Colin Shindler, analyses why that has been the case.  Paddy and co. take the story from 1974 when Sir Alf was dismissed by the FA to the end of Bobby R...

This is the penultimate podcast in which Patrick Barclay appeared.  In it the original Football Ruined My Life panel of Paddy, Jon Holmes and Colin Shindler analyse the year 1968, as the latest in their periodic examinations of one particularly memorable year.  In football terms 1968 was the year that Manchester United followed Celtic to become the first English club to win the European Cup but ev...

This is the first of the last three episodes recorded with Patrick Barclay.  We are re-releasing the podcast he made with the original Football Ruined My Life team of Patrick Barclay, Jon Holmes and Colin Shindler because it was previously published the day we heard of Paddy’s tragic death and we removed it out of respect as soon as we heard the news.    Stand-up comic Omid Djalili was born in Che...

Back in February, when we learnt about the tragic and shocking death of our friend and colleague, Patrick Barclay, we suspended the podcast and took time to consider if and how it can continue.  Replacing Paddy is impossible; the breadth of his knowledge and his infectious (and mischievous) sense of humour made him unique.  But here we announce our return with roster of stars who will make irregul...

It is with deep sadness that Jon, Paul and I have to tell you all that our friend and fellow podcast host Patrick Barclay died suddenly on the morning of 12 February. All of us and no doubt many of our listeners who responded to Paddy's cheery Scottish burr over the course of 80 or so episodes will have cause to feel his loss. Out of respect we have removed this week's edition.  We are obviously t...

This week the panel (and their producer) are bitterly divided on the contentious issue of the Nations League and its value compared to the old Home Internationals when England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland played with themselves. One side sees a desperation of the television companies and UEFA to ensure that no summer passes without an international tournament, leading to player burnout an...

Twelve yards away, the keeper can’t move off his line until the ball is struck. How does anyone ever miss a penalty? Well, as we all know they do miss and frequently it’s crucial in a match.  So it can be too for the award in the first place of a penalty for handball with no intent to handle by the defender and for fouls when the forward has cleverly tripped himself up but made it look like it’s a...

A change of pace for Football Ruined My Life this week. In this podcast we’re looking back at football players and managers who died during 2024.  Clearly we can only deal with a handful of the many who left us last year but what follows is the choice of Jon Holmes, Paddy Barclay and Colin Shindler as they discuss the lives and careers of the football men who meant something to them and whom they...

The prolific goal-scoring winger Ian Storey-Moore turns 80 on the day this episode was published... and Football Ruined My Life has chosen to mark the occasion by giving him the greatest present a footballer of the 1960s and 1970s could possibly want - a guest appearance on the podcast with Paddy Barclay, Jon Holmes and Colin Shindler. A star forward in the nearly great Nottingham Forest team of t...

Real centre forwards were old fashioned battering rams like Nat Lofthouse, Ted Drake of the great Arsenal side of the 1930s and Bobby Smith the rampaging leader of the Spurs double winning attack.  As football has become more skilful, they have largely been replaced by False 9s as they are now called or deep-lying centre forwards as they were in the days of Don Revie and the Hungarian Hidegkuti.  ...

He’s a well-known and much liked voice on Radio 4’s Word of Mouth programme as well as Professor of Children’s Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London.  But Michael Rosen is this week’s guest on Football Ruined My Life because he is a genuine Gooner - as visitors to the Emirates Stadium can see when they observe him depicted on the famous mural next to his late son Eddie and Gunnersaurus. F...

As a New Year’s gift, the panel come bearing the bulging postbag containing our listeners’ emails.  Once again we can report a high standard of literacy and a comfortingly accurate recall of matches and teams from the dim recesses of all our childhoods.  One correspondent, the self-styled King Arthur, a Liverpudlian now living in Malibu California, has written enough emails to fill three editions...

Colin Shindler, Jon Holmes and Paddy Barclay wish all our listeners a very merry Christmas and we do so by recalling Christmas time matches from long ago.  With far less choice on offer, both on television and on the dining room table, football at Christmas provided a fabulous feast of entertainment, the climax to which came on Boxing Day in 1963 when to everyone’s astonishment a record number of ...

Colin Shindler, Patrick Barclay and Jon Holmes examine the value of utility players – the player who could fill in anywhere on the pitch from right back to outside left.  There is a marked tendency by current managers to favour specialisation over utility yet we all remember, usually with affection, those players who could “do a job” anywhere on the pitch – the perfect player to bring on in the da...

Colin Shindler, Paddy Barclay and Jon Holmes discuss the phenomenon of Brits Abroad, those British footballers who made the transition to the sun, sangria and shenanigans of playing for foreign teams.  Jon of course became a one-man Lunn PolyTravel Agency for his clients in the 1980s but the phenomenon of British footballers travelling to foreign climes began early in the postwar years with the Bo...

… is the word frequently given to goals scored, usually from outside the penalty box, like drawings in a Roy of the Rovers cartoon that bring the crowd to a fever pitch of excitement.  Unless of course the goal has been scored by the opposition.  In which case the spectacular goal will be suffered in a mute and somewhat resentful silence, one in which the unfairness of Life in general and the exis...

It was the year of the Sky revolution in football but for Jon Holmes it was also the end of Gary Lineker’s career in England as he prepared to move to Japan and ultimately into the television studio.  Leeds United won the last First Division and their manager Howard Wilkinson was the last English manager to win the championship.  It was the year that saw an unfancied Denmark team win the Euros and...

Paddy Barclay, Jon Holmes and Colin Shindler talk about their favourite match and, to help them to do so, each of them invites as a guest on the podcast a player who took part in that match.  If we could all take 8 matches to a desert island populated only by Roy Plomley and at some point you would be asked: “If seven of your matches were washed away which one match would you save from the waves?”...

Whatever happened to outside rights and outside lefts?  You remember those speedy tricky wingers who beat their full backs on the outside, got to the dead ball line and centred so that their centre forward could charge at the ball and force it into the net.  The men ploughing those lonely furrows seem to have disappeared.  Why has this happened and what has replaced them?  Paddy Barclay, Jon Holme...

Why don’t great players automatically make great managers?  Why did Bobby Charlton fail so disastrously at Preston when Kenny Dalglish succeeded so triumphantly at Liverpool as Johan Cruyff did at Barcelona?  Jose Mourinho and Arsene Wenger had no careers at all as players but turned out to be great managers, Steven Gerard and Frank Lampard were great players but not great managers.  Is there a pa...

David Peace, the author of The Damned United, joins Jon Holmes, Patrick Barclay and Colin Shindler to talk about his latest novel.  Munichs, details the story of Manchester United from 6 February 1958, the day of the plane crash that killed 23 people (including eight players) to the team’s appearance in the Cup Final in May 1958.  He talks about what a novel can do to intensify the drama of that t...

This week the Paddy Barclay, Jon Holmes and Colin Shindler ask each other how the Football Pyramid has changed over our lifetimes of watching the game.  Our first memories were of football in the mid to late 1950s when life was bounded by the First and Second Divisions and the Third Divisions North and South.  Of course, there was no Premier League but more crucially to lose Football League status...