Chelsea’s hunt for a medieval big man adds intrigue to football’s space race | Barney Ronay

Seeing Andy Carroll or Peter Crouch at Chelsea is too good to hope for as it could confirm suspicions about the basic numbers of effectiveness and opportunity in elite teams

It is nearly 40 years since a famous photo emerged that left the nascent Indian space programme an object of widespread mockery. The photo, published in 1979, showed India’s brand new state-of-the-art communications satellite being wheeled out for its launch – on a bullock cart.

For political opponents the picture exposed the space programme as a matter of grandiose ambition undercut by agricultural thinking, a bullock cart culture. That same year the Indian government announced it would also be spending $6bn on bullock cart research, with the idea of entering the white heat of a new industrial age via more efficient bullock carts.

Carroll represents something else tactically and culturally, a football of the skies based on trajectory and spring

Continue reading...