Podcast Corner: Golazzo, Fergie, and a whole lot of football history
The podcasting scene is a source of footballing history
Jonathan Wilson and Rob Draper co-host It Was What It Was, the Overlap’s historical football podcast. Wilson is a historian of the game and a regular on Second Captains - we’re still reeling from his nine-minute voicenote about the history of Nazis in football. Each week on It Was What It Was, they’ll be talking about the key episodes in football history that have shaped the footballing world today, discussing the best stories from football’s past, giving insights to the personalities involved, providing details from behind the scenes, and offering vital historical context.
Episode one is about ‘Ta-ra Fergie’, the infamous sign held up by Pete Molyneux during Manchester United's 2-1 loss to Crystal Palace in 1989. It’s a well-used meme these days - United’s current turmoil and managerial turnover in the past decade post-Alex Ferguson has helped with that - but Wilson takes us back further, to show how millions had been spent in his couple of years in the job but with little improvement.
A great what if: Peter Beardsley was close to signing for United before plumping for Liverpool, one of the first notches in Fergie’s bane for the Merseyside club. There are more what-ifs at the end of the detailed first episode: Who would have replaced Fergie if he had been fired (the bookies had him at short odds in 1989 before United won the FA Cup) - they posit Oldham boss Joe Royle - and what kind of career would the Scot have had if he had been forced out of United? Fans won’t even want to think about that one.
There are more than 80 episodes of this Italian football history show to catch up on if you didn’t listen to it before it came to an end in October 2021. It’s hosted by three men who know their calcio, James Richardson, James Horncastle, and Gab Marcotti, looking back on the ‘original’ Ronaldo, Ultras in Italy, a retrospective on Pippo Inzaghi (a forward who tortured Ferguson to the point he declared he was “born offside”), and so many other great players, managers, and others of Italian football’s heyday.
This is a fun show that has also called it a day but leaves behind a 75-episode archive to dig through - one of their first episodes is also about the early days of Fergie’s reign. They cover Liverpool’s mid-90s Spice Boys, Glenn Hoddle’s reign as England manager, and look in depth at a couple of storied tournaments, before the latter episodes are draft-focused, a la the Big Picture’s movie drafts. For example, they pick an XI of England’s internationals from the 1980s, Premier League 1992-93, and Champions League 1999-2000. Who needs modern football anyway!?
