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The Premier League might be the world’s favourite league, but it hasn’t managed to get all of the greats here over its existence. Lionel Messi is perhaps the most famous one who got away, but perhaps the biggest miss of them all was Gabriel Batistuta.  ...

Golf Monthly had a pretty arresting cover shot for the September 1973 issue, three golfers lined up and ready to tee off. Tony Jacklin looked to be in Position A, but the chances of Bert Yancey and Tom Weiskopf surviving without having some substantial dental bills to...

At the beginning of November 1992, F1 was not in the rudest of health, with Autosport’s front cover proclaiming that the sport was in crisis and detailing an ‘emergency summit to save Grand Prix racing.’ Spoiler alert: it survived.   Nonetheless, Autosport...

November 10 1963 and it was time for the Royal Variety Performance to be screened by ITV, although the event actually took place six days earlier.   Amid trad Royal Variety fare such as Charlie Drake, Flanders & Swann, Eric Sykes, Steptoe & Son and Pinky...

Never short of a word, England’s Joe Marler ruffled a few feathers ahead of the meeting with New Zealand this week with his dismissal of the All Blacks’ haka as ‘ridiculous’. A backlash followed and cue the kind of back pedalling you never see from Marler on the...

June 1994 saw the end of another National Hunt season, Horse & Hound commending Richard Dunwoody on his success as champion jockey and winning the Grand National.   But an editorial in the magazine was exercised by talk of an introduction of summer racing...

August 1976 and ITV’s big summer movie was ‘Spartacus’, featuring Kirk Douglas who told TV Times readers, “I’m impressed every time I see ‘Spartacus’. It really stands the test of time. It was a helluva gamble, the most expensive film made in Hollywood up to that...

Back in February 1995, Glenn Hoddle was making his way in the world as a manager after a playing career that saw him lauded as a genius by some and an unaffordable luxury by others.   Had we but known it, the England job was just around the corner, following...

The November 1938 edition of Golf Monthly featured a fascinating tale of a highly unusual match played at Maylands Essex, where the mighty Henry Cotton took on three highly acclaimed female golfers, Lady Heathcote-Amory, Enid Wilson and Reve Lacoste, playing the best...

Rugby’s Autumn Internationals are almost upon us and that will give us the opportunity to enjoy the dulcet tones of regret Jonathan Davies on commentary once again.   If you can’t wait, then Rugby World’s February 1987 edition had an interview with the ‘Welsh...

F1 was in Mexico City for the Grand Prix this weekend, some 61 years after the first one that counted towards the championship was held in 1963 – the inaugural race was a year earlier but was not a championship race.   As part of his golden year, Jim Clark took...

Mrs. SJ Opray took to the letters page of Horse & Hounds on May 2nd 1964 to complain about falling standards in the equestrian field. Her letter, headed ‘Scruffy turn-out of horses’, made it clear that the modern world was going to hell in a handcart.  ...

FourFourTwo’s correspondence from May 2012 saw Wilko Wilkes getting on the penalty soapbox – only he’d moved it six yards back.   “In my opinion there is a problem that needs solving more than any other, which never gets questioned: penalties are far too easy to...

In 2001, by winning the US Masters, Tiger Woods completed the remarkable run of winning four consecutive Majors, but the fact that he had done it across two different calendar years had the Golf Monthly letters page asking whether or not it counted as the Grand Slam....

The eternal dilemma of Formula 1 was splashed across the letters page of Autosport on 2 April 1998 – is it a sport, or is it entertainment?   Sean Hannam was in the former camp: “I am bored of hearing about F1’s ‘shortcomings’ as a mass-media show. It is...

June 1968 and if the readers’ letters in TV Times are anything to go by, the psychedelic intoxicants so beloved of the age had reached the makers of children’s TV. No, not ‘The Magic Roundabout’, something else, as you can see in detail here.   “As an admirer of...

In October 1996, as professionalism was making its unsteady way into the world of rugby union, so television was about to create a stir with the move of the Five Nations from BBC television to Sky.   The letters page of Rugby World was suitably exercised, B...

April 1963, and the letters page of En Route – which you can find here - was concerned with the caravanning clergy. HDL Thomas of Ipswich asked, ‘When caravanners cross the Channel, do they find Anglican chaplains in all the wrong places?’ No, it’s not what you think…...

It’s still a busy market in the magazine world and so if you want to catch the attention of the casual punter, a dramatic cover helps. Such as this one from Horse & Hound in the run up to the 1988 Grand National, capturing the horses finding their way over the...

There’s drama aplenty on the cover of Rugby World in May 1965, featuring Stewart Wilson of Oxford University and London Scottish, appointed Scotland’s captain for the Calcutta Cup match against England in that season’s Five Nations.   Wales had already clinched...