Danish Dynamite

The story of the coolest international football team in history - the 1980s Danish national team - told for the first time in English. The Denmark side of the 1980s was one of the last truly iconic international football teams. Although they did not win a trophy, they claimed something much more important and enduring: glory, and in industrial quantities. They were a bewitching fusion of futuristic attacking football, effortless Scandinavian cool and laid-back living. They played like angels and lived like you and I, and they were everyone's second team in the mid-1980s. The story of Danish Dynamite, as the team became known, is the story of a team of rock stars in a polyester Hummel kit. Hailing from a country with no real football history to speak of and a population of five million, this humble and likeable team was unique. Everymen off the field and superheroes on it, they were totally of their time, and their approach to the game was in complete contrast to the gaudy excess and charmless arrogance of today's football stars. That they ultimately imploded in spectacular style, with a shocking 5-1 defeat to Spain in the 1986 World Cup in a game that almost everyone expected them to win, only adds to their legend. For the first time in English, Danish Dynamite tells the story of perhaps the coolest team in football history, a team that had it all and blew it in spectacular style after a live-fast-die-young World Cup campaign. Featuring interviews with the players themselves, including Michael Laudrup, Preben Elkjær and Jesper Olsen, as well as with those who played or managed against them, this is a joyous celebration of one of the most life-affirming teams the world has ever seen.

White Goes for the Jugular The Danish Gambit, 1.e4 e5 2.d4 exd4 3.c3, is one of the most aggressive chess openings ever devised. Dynamite was invented by a Swede, Alfred Nobel. The book you are reading now, however, was not written by Nordic players. Instead, Grandmaster Karsten Müller and FIDE Master Martin Voigt bring a touch of German method to the analysis of the explosive group of classical open games where White goes for out- and-out attack based on an early e4, d4 and Bc4, often with c2-c3 to follow. Müller and Voigt do not confine themselves to the Danish Gambit alone but they examine a whole family of related opening variations that share some common characteristics. Most importantly, White is ready to offer some material (a pawn or two, sometimes a piece or more). White goes for the jugular and if Black is not careful he will not even reach the middle game, let alone an endgame...A guiding principle for the authors of this book is that White will play attacking chess, fighting for the initiative at every move. If Black does not meet the challenge in an equally determined way, he will surely lose. This is the epub edition of the popular book published in 2003.

Danish sport has been associated with Europe and the World; not least through I.P. Muller and Niels Bukh and the Danish Gymnastics revolution with its emphasis on male aesthetics and hygiene in the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, Denmark has stood apart from Europe in the early moments of its history of sport with the rural revolution of the farming communities as a statement of political independence and assertion. However, during the German occupation of Denmark, Danish sport was part of a European collaboration which characterized a number of the occupied countries not least in the Nordic area. After the Second World War, Denmark embraced international body cultures with other European nations in particular Eastern martial arts. Denmark too, as part of trends in the European region and the world, became caught up in sport as a powerful contemporary political statement. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Aage Sorensen was an influential intellectual presence who was one of the world's leading authorities on social stratification and the sociology of education. His research sought to understand the structures, dynamics and mechanisms that underlie inequalities in industrial societies by focusing on how individuals' attainments are shaped by characteristics of a society's or organization's opportunity structure, on the one hand, and individuals' education, experience and other human capital resources, on the other. He emphasized inequalities associated with education and schooling, class, and stratification outcomes such as income and occupational status. Within these general foci, he tackled the study of phenomena as diverse as rates of learning in elementary school reading groups and promotion patterns in large industrial corporations. The chapters of this volume illustrate some of the major themes that characterized Aage's research; these topics are also likely to constitute important concerns for future efforts to understand structured social inequality in society. These themes include: the development of explicit dynamic models to account for observed patterns of education, career, and labor market outcomes; aspects of educational inequality such as school effects and learning opportunities; issues related to intragenerational mobility and careers; and the role of rents in generating structural inequality.

What is play? Why do we play? What can play teach us about our life as social beings? In this critical investigation into the significance of play, Henning Eichberg argues that through play we can ask questions about the world, others and ourselves. Playing a game and asking a question are two forms of human practice that are fundamentally connected. This book presents a practice-based philosophical approach to understanding play that begins with empirical study, drawing on historical, sociological and anthropological investigations of play in the real world, from contemporary Danish soccer to war games and folk dances. Its ten chapters explore topics such as: play as a practice of search playing, learning and progress the light and dark sides of play playing games, sport and display folk sports, popular games, and social identity play under the conditions of alienation. From these explorations emerge a phenomenological approach to understanding play and its value in interrogating ourselves and our social worlds. This book offers a challenging contribution to the interdisciplinary field of the philosophy of play. It will be fascinating reading for any student or researcher interested in social and cultural anthropology, phenomenology, and critical sociology as well as the ethics and philosophy of sport, leisure studies, and the sociology of sport. .

The Blizzard is a quarterly football publication, put together by a cooperative of journalists and authors, its main aim to provide a platform for top-class writers from across the globe to enjoy the space and the freedom to write what they like about the football stories that matter to them. Contents of Issue Fourteen ------------------------- World Cup Review ------------------------- * Cassiano Gobbet, The End of the Affair - Brazil’s 7-1 semi-final defeat will reverberate through history: what went wrong? * Ben Lyttleton, The Inevitable Conclusion - Another World Cup exit on penalties: why can’t the Dutch win shoot-outs? * Various, Notes from a Tournament - It wasn’t all about the football. Memories of the 2014 World Cup. * Ryu Voelkel, A selection of the best images from the 2014 World Cup --------------------- Past Glories --------------------- * Elko Born, The Velvet Revolution - Johan Cruyff, Ajax and the struggle for the soul of Dutch football * Dan Nolan, Orbán Planning - The Hungarian prime minister’s attempts to restore the national team to glory * Rob Smyth, Lars Eriksen, Mike Gibbons, The End of the Affair - How Spain and a misplaced backpass halted Denmark’s glorious 1986 World Cup campaign --------------------- The Misfits --------------------- * Richard Jolly, Bye-bye Bebé - The strange Manchester United career of the Portuguese striker * Luke Alfred, Best in Show - While most fans were focused on the 1974 World Cup, George Best was playing in South Africa * Joachim Barbier, The Still Point - Can a player like Javier Pastore make it at a club like PSG? ------------------------------ The Revolutionaries ------------------------------ * Alex Footman, $10 Per Day - Aid poverty and political turmoil, football goes on in Afghanistan * John Harding, Football’s First Millionaire - How Bolton’s Jack Slater smashed class barriers to make his fortune * Pedar Foss, The Rise and Fall of Castel Rigone - The entrepreneur, the village team and the experiment in humanistic capitalism * Gunnar Persson, A Passage to Indiana - The Swedish great Murren Carlsson’s doomed attempt to make it in the USA * Philippe Auclair, The Second Birth of French Football - Michel Hidalgo survived kidnapping to lead France to the 1978 World Cup ----------------- Fiction ----------------- * Iain Macintosh, Quantum of Bobby - Spinning through time and space, Bobby Manager finds himself in Escape to Victory ------------------------ Greatest Games ------------------------ * Michael Yokhin, Russia 1 Ukraine 1 - Euro 2000 qualifier, Luzhniki Stadium, Moscow, 9 October 1999 ------------------- Eight Bells ------------------- * Jack Lang, Brazilian Courtroom Dramas - A selection of controversies in the Brazilian game that were settled off the pitch