A World Cup in Rinus Michels’ image

The World Cup, its drama accelerated by the arrival of the knockout phase, is demographically diverse but strangely homogeneous in its tactics. That, for better or worse, is the legacy of the great Dutch coach – perhaps the greatest of them all – Rinus Michels, whose Ajax teams of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and his spectacular Netherlands team that graced (but did not win) the World Cup in 1974, have developed into a dominant footballing genealogy. His star player, Johan Cruyff, took the style to Barcelona, where it evolved into the ‘Tiki-taka’ mastered by Pep Guardiola, which now dominates Europe’s major leagues, and therefore the football world. Here’s Michels in 1988, then taking the Netherlands to European glory, somewhat overwhelmed by a strike against the Soviet Union from the great Marco van Basten. It took even the master’s breath away.

Marc Bloch and the historian’s craft

On 23 June, two symbolic caskets entered the Paris Panthéon – representing the historian Marc Bloch, the first of his profession to be so recognised, and his wife Simonne Vidal. Their bodies remain in the family vault at Le Bourg-d’Hem in central France, where Bloch was interred after he was tortured and shot by the Gestapo in 1944. Bloch had joined the Resistance in Lyon in 1943, having been dismissed from his professorship at the Sorbonne by the Vichy regime. He was both a great man and a great historian; he transformed the study of medieval Europe with his brilliant two-volume study of feudal society and founded the Annales school, alongside Lucien Febvre, with Fernand Braudel its great later champion. His boldest statement is, however, The Historian’s Craft, written in 1941 and essential reading for anyone who wishes to seriously engage with the past, to turn a hobby into a craft: ‘Readers of Alexandre Dumas may well be potential historians who lack only training to find the purer and, to my way of thinking, the keener pleasure of true research.’

New Orleans cool

Summers need a soundtrack and when they are as sweltering as the one currently enveloping Europe, perhaps a sound associated with the enervating humidity of New Orleans is in order. The raffish Dr John’s 1973 album In the Right Place, produced and arranged by Allen Toussaint with the backing of The Meters, vehicle for the hugely talented Art Neville, is a masterpiece of swampy funk. ‘Right Place, Wrong Time’ was the album’s big hit, but it’s ‘Such a Night’ that captures the cool of a hot Crescent City.