Beyond The Last Man
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Explore 20th century football writing and nostalgia in a skilled and cultured groove. Beyond The Last Man by Craig McCracken is the author's humble effort to help bridge that void; a place to retell some marvelous stories and share some wonderful old photographs that you might not be familiar with from the golden age of the game.
Beyond The Last Man
2M ago
Alex Ferguson’s glorious tenure at Aberdeen peaked with the Cup Winner’s Cup triumph over Real Madrid in 1983, but, egregious as it may sound, is it possible he could have achieved more during those halcyon days at Pittodrie? The Dons were, for a period, rightly considered one of the best teams in Europe and their ..read more
Beyond The Last Man
3M ago
We love the wonderfully descriptive nicknames that the famous Italian journalist Gianni Brera gave to the top Serie A footballers of the day. Luigi Riva was the fortunate recipient of one of his most descriptive: to Brera he was ‘rombo di tuono,‘ or roar of thunder; an elegant and concise encapsulation of the way the Cagliari ..read more
Beyond The Last Man
3M ago
Ask a footballing layman what they know about Dutch club football and chances are the answer you’ll get will be a splash of Ajax, a pinch of Feyenoord and a smidgen of PSV – a natural response considering the extent to which the giants of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Eindhoven dominate the Dutch game culturally and ..read more
Beyond The Last Man
4M ago
An annual Beyond The Last Man tradition is to dedicate our final post of the year as a tribute to and recognition of the great footballers who have sadly passed away over the past 12 months. We create an imagined team by selecting the very best of those players judged on the entirety of their ..read more
Beyond The Last Man
5M ago
A small selection of retro Charlton Athletic player and team shots spanning three decades makes up our latest Vintage post. Click any of the images to open the gallery. If you would like to view other posts from our Vintage series, just click on the tag to the left or select from our Regular Features ..read more
Beyond The Last Man
6M ago
With a Final that appeared such a foregone conclusion, just a few thousand fans from Italy bothered to travel to Rotterdam for the 1974 European Cup Winners’ Cup final. Here, after all, was AC Milan, nine-time Serie A champions, twice champions of Europe and winners of this particular competition the previous year. And while their ..read more
Beyond The Last Man
7M ago
A problem that illustrator Bob Bond sometimes faced when creating his Star Strip series was finding enough incidents of dramatic interest to fill a page. A successful career was not the same thing as an interesting career after all: many of the big name players of the day were worthy, if a little dull. This ..read more
Beyond The Last Man
8M ago
If peak-era Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi had scored twenty goals within a time frame of six League games and little over three weeks, the football world would have raised its collective hands to applaud their genius. When little-known Romanian striker Rodion Camataru actually, not hypothetically, performed this cartoonishly unlikely feat back in 1987, all ..read more
Beyond The Last Man
8M ago
‘SIR STANLEY MATTHEWS TO PLAY AGAINST REAL MADRID IN THE BERNABEU‘ ran the Spanish headline. Surely no particularly dramatic scoop with the legendary English winger playing in most of the world’s great stadiums and against many of the world’s top teams during his lengthy career? But this particular headline was published in 1970 when Stanley ..read more
Beyond The Last Man
10M ago
A third and final post in our Belgium Vintage series spans images from the 1980s; a decade when the national team were still a potent force in the international game and the country’s club sides could reach, and win, European Finals ..read more