The Blizzard

"South London, to fans who came to the game with the advent of the Premier League, probably seems rather similar to, say, East Anglia - not a hotbed, but with one or two clubs who occasionally spend a season or two among the elite before sinking back to their natural level." It was not always thus. In Episode Twenty Four we revisit Nick Szczepanik's 'South of the River' from Issue Four, published in 2012, which looks back to a time when South London's four clubs - Charlton Athletic, Crystal Palace, Millwall and Wimbledon - were in rude footballing health as Crystal Palace's promotion in 1989 meant all four were in the top flight together for the first time. It's fair to say that the fortunes of two of the area's Championship clubs at the time of writing, Charlton and Crystal Palace, have somewhat diverged since. Nick Szczepanik is a freelance football writer contributing mainly to the Independent and Independent on Sunday after 15 years with the Times. Twitter: @NickSzczepanik. If you have any feedback

"Grant realised that nightmares had tortured his father every night... It had been going on for years. After hearing his father scream that night, Avram vowed that he would find out everything that had happened to his family - and find the lost graves of those relatives who were buried in far-off lands." In Episode Twenty Three we revisit Igor Rabiner's 'Closure' from Issue Eleven, the story of former Chelsea manager Avram Grant's emotional search for the graves of his ancestors, who died in a Russian gulag in the 1940's. A story of coincidences, aided by football, Grant visits distant, rural Russia where his father, the easy-tempered, lively, optimistic man had been forced to hand-dig the graves of his parents more than 60 years previously. Igor Rabiner is the author of 16 books including How Spartak Has Been Killed (in Russian), winner in the Sports Investigation category at Knizhnoe Obozrenie's Sports Book Awards. His latest is SEx in Sports, examining the ups and downs of Sport-Express and sports jour

"Two days later the Australians were back at the Cong Hoa Stadium to face the hosts South Vietnam. The atmosphere was tense, the pitch surrounded by barbed wire, army snipers and soldiers armed with fixed bayonets." In Episode Twenty Two we look back to Davidde Corran's 'Tour of Duty' which details the unlikeliest of football tours as the Australian national team were parachuted into Saigon at the height of the Vietnam war to take part in an 8-team friendly tournament. Still 7 years before they would first qualify for a World Cup, the Socceroos nonetheless lifted their first continental trophy under the most difficult of circumstances. Davidde Corran is an England-based Australian football journalist who works across TV, radio and print. Twitter: @DaviddeCorran If you have any feedback comments or suggestions email podcast@theblizzard.co.uk or find us on Twitter @blzzrd. Issue Three, like all issues of The Blizzard, is available on a pay-what-you-like basis from www.theblizzard.co.uk. Digital download

“As a result of not smoking I’m now fitter and have more money. And that works just fine, until you see a picture of Berbatov or Özil or Socrates puffing away on a cigarette and looking like the coolest bastard in the world. Berbatov is not only cooler than me, but is also fitter and has more money. So what was the point of giving up?” In Episode Twenty One we feature ‘Literally on Fire’ by Jonathan Liew, looking at the complicated history of smoking and football. From collectable cigarette cards in the late 19th century to Dixie Dean and Stanley Matthews endorsing cigarette brands, to long-lens paparazzi snapping pictures of stars on holiday taking a puff on a cheeky fag, the relationship between sport and smoking has changed completely. Jonathan Liew writes about sport for the Daily Telegraph and is a former Young Sportswriter of the Year, as wistfully sepia-tinted as that sounds. Twitter: @jonathanliew If you have any feedback comments or suggestions email podcast@theblizzard.co.uk or find us on Twit

"Little did people know that Cruyff's column would have a profound impact and lead to the so-called 'Velvet Revolution', which would soon become bloody. That it would lead to ugly court cases and yet another showdown between Cruyff and Van Gaal, forcing fans to pick either their mother or their father in a bitter divorce case". In episode Twenty we look back to Elko Born's 'The Velvet Revolution' from Issue Fourteen, which details the struggle for power at the top of Ajax, arguably for the soul of Dutch football itself, and the fallout from Cruyff and Van Gaal's, er, fallout. If you have any feedback comments or suggestions email podcast@theblizzard.co.uk or find us on Twitter @blzzrd. 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 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.

"They have been drawn in a difficult group, but hey, everyone has been drawn in a difficult group. With this foreign coach they will go far. He understands them. He is up-to-date with his practice and methodology. His parents know Africa. They were traders. Or missionaries. Or both." In episode Nineteen we look back to Luke Alfred's 'An African Parable' from Issue Zero, which contains no names or teams that you will recognise by their names or the colours of their shirts, but a story that you will know because it is so common as to be representative. If you have any feedback comments or suggestions email podcast@theblizzard.co.uk or find us on Twitter @blzzrd. Issue Zero, 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 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.

"Both were scarred by defeat and disappointment, both were obsessed by the fear of failure; both distrusted the press and surrounded themselves with a small group of loyalists. They remained difficult men to love." In episode Eighteen we look back to Dominic Sandbrook's 'Revie-Nixon' from Issue One, in which he examines the parallels between the US politician and the England and Leeds United manager. From their upbringings to their carfeer trajectories, to the ultimate downfalls and ignominious exists that defined their careers, there's a lot more in common between the two men than you might think at first glance. If you have any feedback comments or suggestions email podcast@theblizzard.co.uk or find us on Twitter @blzzrd. Dominic Sandbrook is a historian. His most recent book, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979, accompanying his BBC2 documentary series on the 1970s, was published by Allen Lane. Twitter: @dcsandbrook Issue One, like all issues of The Blizzard is available on a pay-

"To pass is to relinquish control, to give up the certainty of the ball at your feet for the uncertain outcome. To pass is to anticipate and imagine a future, while to keep the ball and dribble is to stay in the moment for as long as possible." In Episode Seventeen we look back to 'Notes on Street Football' by Aleksandar Hemon, first published in Issue Ten in September 2013. What can kickabouts on street corners and parking lots reveal about the tortured artists of neo-romantic myth? Are the romantic street-artists on the wane in the age of globalised, professionalised, commercialised football? If you have any feedback comments or suggestions email podcast@theblizzard.co.uk or find us on Twitter @blzzrd. Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian-American writer and novelist. His novel, The Lazarus Project, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Awards. His most recent book is a work of non-fiction, The Book of MY Lives. Twitter: @SashaHemon. Issue Ten, like all issues of

"It is a cringe-worthy advert produced by Qatar Airways, starring the players of Barcelona. It is 40 seconds of distilled ideology at its purest. Messi and the gang roll up to the check-in desk in their rock-star gear. Behind them lies a void of squeaky clean airport marble, like a hospital for rich people. It is notable how the 105,000 fans who attend each home game have been erased from this fantasy. And all of this with Samsung suitcases." In Episode Sixteen we look back at Alexander Shea's 'Against Sanitised Football' from Issue Seventeen. Can fans fight back against clubs who seek to ignore their history for bland branding? If you have any feedback comments or suggestions email podcast@theblizzard.co.uk or find us on Twitter @blzzrd. Alexander Shea researches football ultra groups who mobilise as paramilitaries during international warfare. Based at the University of Oxford, he is currently researching the phenomenon in the former Yugoslavia, contemporary Ukraine and Armenia. Twitter: @Alexander_Sh

"One good season is now usually enough to earn a big move, but football’s current landscape is claiming more and more victims of the game’s Peter Principle – 'everyone in an organisation keeps on getting promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. At that point, they stop being promoted.'" In Episode Fifteen we look ahead to Rupert Fryer’s ‘The Peter Principle’ from the upcoming Issue Nineteen (available to subscribers now, and on general sale from 9th December). Does the Peter Principle apply in football as well as in the business world? Who are the footballers hoping to avoid becoming the Peters of 2014-15? If you have any feedback, comments or suggestions email podcast@theblizzard.co.uk, or find us on Twitter @blzzrd. Rupert Fryer is a freelance journalist and co-founder of SouthAmericanFootball.co.uk. He has written on South American football for the likes of Fox Sports, the Guardian, the Observer and Sport360. Twitter: @Rupert_Fryer Issue Nineteen, like all issues of The Blizza

“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 podcast@theblizzard.co.uk, 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 Indepen

“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 podcast@theblizzard.co.uk, 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

“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 th

“’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 podcast@theblizzard.co.uk, or find us on Twitter @blzzrd. Philippe Auclair is the author of The Enchanted Kingdom of Tony Blair (in French), Cantona: the Rebe

"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 podcast@theblizzard.co.uk, 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 podcast@theblizzard.co.uk, 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-li

"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 podcast@theblizzard.co.uk, 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:

"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 podcast@theblizzard.co.uk, 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: @larssivertsen Issue Eight, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available on a pay-what-you-

"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 podcast@theblizzard.co.uk, 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 fro

"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 podcast@theblizzard.co.uk 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.