Posts Tagged ‘outdoor’

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Landscaping In The Texas Style

Sunday, July 3rd, 2011

Most people simply let their garden mature naturally in that they do not select a particular style. This is all right, but it can turn into a hodge-podge, if not looked after. Some people, though, deliberately choose to landscape their garden according to a clear style or a theme. Some of these themes are very sophisticated and others are fairly simple.

One of the many themes to pick from is the Texas Style. We all know that everything in Texas is done on a grand scale, so you would be excused for thinking that landscaping in the Texas Style would require a huge garden.

It is possibly easier to carry out your landscaping in the Texas Style in a larger garden, but it just depends how you go about it.

The first things to remember are that Texas is very hot and so the terrain closely resembles wilderness. Plants and shrubs are thin on the ground, so to speak. Landscaping in the Texas Style is what you could call minimalist gardening.

You will have to make use of every square inch of your property, if you only have a small plot and the climate will have to be fairly warm in the daytime although it is good if it gets cold at night. This will allow you to grow many of the plants that thrive or at least grow in Texas. One good thing about Texan flowers is that when they do blossom, they really do show a lot of colour.

One of the kinds of plant that you are sure to have success with is the cactus. There are many varieties of cactus, so you should not have too much difficulty finding several kinds that will grow in your garden in order to produce a Texan dry climate look, as long as it does not rain every other day where you reside.

Cacti produce magnificent flowers when they blossom, but they have big thorns, so if you have young children, the Texas Style garden may not be for you for a few years yet.

Once you have your plants sorted out, you can begin looking for accessories. You can pick up ideas from the old cowboy films and from magazines, but a few recommendations are: a chow wagon style barbecue area with a canvas hood; some broken wagon wheels; a well, functioning or not (it could even be a fish pond that looks like a well); boulders and wooden fence posts.

Boulders are usually overlooked by gardeners but there are some fascinating stones, boulders and rocks in all sorts of shapes and colours. Boulders with fossils in them are fantastic conversation pieces. Smaller rocks can be used to create a rock garden and this will increase the range of plants that you can grow in your Texas Style garden. You will be able to plant succulents, small cacti and other small plants that frequently grow in this austere environment.

Lighting should be low and subtle so that you can see the stars at night. You could even have a camp fire with log seating or you can accomplish this effect by using low powered solar lighting. Solar powered lighting will also preclude you from having to have an electrician wire up your garden.

When you have finished landscaping in the Texas Style, do not forget to get pleasure from it by eating outside as often as you can. Barbecues, steaks and Texmex food are the order of the day.

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on quite a few topics, but is now involved with outdoor accent lighting. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Outdoor Wall Lamps.

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The Advantages Of Gymnastics

Saturday, July 2nd, 2011

Gymnastics is probably not being taught enough in our schools, but there a lot of benefits to practicing gymnastics. It is fairly obvious that gymnastics will improve physical condition, but there are psychological and emotional benefits too. If you start learning gymnastics in school and if you like it, it could also provide you with a job.

There are quite a few exercises that the novice gymnast can practice, whilst gradually adding more difficult trials as the gymnast’s body becomes more and more supple and fit. This is a quite slow process, but it is a highly worthwhile one.

Learning how to raise one’s goals slowly but surely is very good for the mind and physical stamina. Stamina is more useful in daily life than strength, although gymnasts have to be strong as well.

This continuous improvement and sense that you can do something that most individuals cannot is very important for confidence. Children, especially girls, frequently lack confidence, so practicing gymnastics would help bring them out of themselves.

If the child enters competitions like representing the school or the town, they will meet numerous strangers in a safe situation which will further enhance their confidence and social skills, This is an area that many other children find a problem until they are more than fifteen years of age.

The young gymnast may even be taken abroad to compete or compete against visiting foreign teams. Making foreign contacts like this and perhaps staying in touch by letter or email with a gymnast friend from the other side of the world will widen the child’s horizons significantly.

Raising one’s degree of skill and competence requires planning by the athlete and his or her coach. When the blueprint to success has been made, the gymnast will be expected to abide by the goals they have planned together. Learning responsibility like this is a very worthwhile thing for an adult leave alone a child. The child will learn self-discipline in training, diet and exercise.

Gymnasts are also judged by people they frequently do not know and in quite a public manner. Many people would resent this type of public criticism and find it difficult to bear, however the gymnast should learn to take the criticism as it was meant – not as an attack, but as a functional tool for advancement. This is another hard lesson to learn for much of the general public.

It is easier to hide oneself in a team. If a football team loses a game, some might blame the defence and some may blame the forwards, but if it is just you on the mat, everything that is said is to do with you and just you. This hurts in the beginning, but it is character and confidence building when you realize that not all criticism is meant spitefully. It can be used to your advantage too.

If the student gymnast actually likes gymnastics, he or she may go a long way in more senses than one. Even gymnasts that are not the best get to travel, take part in competitions abroad and take sponsorship. After all, not every company can afford to sponsor the top athletes, most are happy to sponsor a pretty good athlete who works hard.

If you make it to this stage, your advice will become sought after and there is a job waiting for you once you are too old to take part in competitions yourself – you can pass on your experience to other youngsters as their coach.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on lots of topics, but is currently involved with London Olympic dates. Click a link to find out more 2012 London Olympics Volunteers.

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Celebrity Cruises

Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

Are you planning a pretty extraordinary vacation? Say to celebrate a special event like retirement or an anniversary? If you are, then you really should add a cruise to your shortlist of holidays to research more.

A cruise is a very extraordinary type of vacation, because you get to visit several locations and even several different countries during the length of your holiday.

It is a very relaxing sort of vacation because you have nothing to do except enjoy yourself between destinations. You do not even have to pack and unpack between destinations because your hotel takes you to your port of call not a bus or a car. Usually, the cruise liner has already docked when you wake up for breakfast.

After breakfast, you can decide whether to go ashore or not, as you like. Usually, the ship will have a couple of tours you can pick from or you can go it alone. You are told what time to get back on board, say 19:00 hours and when you go down to dinner, the liner will weigh anchor and head for the next port of call.

This routine will be repeated every day, but at a different port, although you do have a ‘day at sea’ on some cruises. This is not a bad thing as it allows you to spend all day relaxing and enjoying the motion of the ocean. Most cruise ships have lots to do during these days at sea.

Nearly all liners will have a cinema and special interest lectures or groups, some of which are led by guest celebrities. For instance, you may be interested in learning about wine. Well, there is normally a wine appreciation group on board or you might like to learn some of the history of the next port of call, especially if it has connections to an ancient civilization.

Food figures large on cruises. On my last cruise, we had: breakfast, elevenses, luncheon, high tea, dinner and a midnight feast. Breakfast, luncheon and dinner were equivalent to five course meals, but actually you could just consume as much as you wanted. In between the meals, there was room (or cabin) service.

Food was included in the cost of our cruise, but you had to buy alcoholic drinks, although they are free as well on all inclusive cruises. Luckily, cruise liners also have gyms, swimming pools and deck sports to help you try to keep the pounds off. I was unsuccessful at that and I gained two pounds for every week of the voyage, which I am told is around average.

After dinner, there is usually a cabaret, a piano bar and a night club going on somewhere and if you can remain awake, you can normally visit all three dos to find out which one suits you the best that evening. For me it was cabaret, night club and last drink in the piano bar before going to my cabin.

The sheet was always turned down with a sheaf of papers on my pillow explaining about the next port and the excursions available, which could be booked any time of the day or night by using the cabin phone. I would go again tomorrow.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with cruises to St Croix. If you are interested in St Croix Vacation Rentals in the US Virgin Islands, please click through to our site.

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how To Get Rid Of Garden Pests

Monday, June 27th, 2011

Gardening would be a lot easier without interference from garden pests. The majority of garden pests are small, but they sure are a big hassle. The most common garden pests are insects, of course and it is a funny thing that these insects are apt to prosper in conditions that are not quite correct for flowers. Most garden pests do not actually live on the plants themselves, they live in rotting rubbish nearby or in sodden soil and go to the plant to feed. Some insects live in the roots if the earth is too wet.

So, one of the first things to do is to try to reduce the number of harmful insects in your garden. You can go a long way down this route by clearing away any old decaying rubbish and decayed wood. Make sure that your soil is well drained and keep cats out of your garden by squirting them with a water pistol until they get the message. Cats discourage birds and many birds eat insects.

You should also encourage insects and other animals that eat garden pests. Ants can be a pain, but they do eat a lot of insects. Ladybirds do too and so do spiders. Larger animals such as frogs, toads and lizards eat loads of insects, so a small open-ended garden pond could be used to breed frogs and toads. Lizards will appear on their own, if the conditions are perfect.

It is worth taking active steps to encourage the right sort of garden animals. Never use strong insecticides on your garden as you will destroy all the insects that are on your side too and the spray may kill the earthworms that are helping to aerate and dry out your top soil.

A small pond will encourage birds, frogs and toads, but frogs and toads also like a nice rock to shelter under during the day. Place a few rocks the size of a loaf of bread around your garden in the shadow of trees or bushes. Erect a bird table. Birds that eat bread and nuts do not usually feed on insects, but some do. However, the sight of other birds in your garden may encourage insectivores to come in and have a look.

There are basically two types of garden pests: the ones that actually eat the plant and the ones that extract the sap out of it. Caterpillars can be picked off and destroyed of or you can spray the leaves that are being eaten with a poison for the caterpillars to feed on. Many of the sap-suckers can be seen with no trouble, others cannot. A solution of washing-up liquid and water such as you use to wash dishes will kill the majority of of these including greenfly (aphids).

Slugs and snails do a lot of harm, but some birds including chickens and thrushes find them a delicacy. Chickens can be helpful allies in a garden, but they can be destructive too with all their scratching. Otherwise, you can reduce the population of slugs and snails by killing their eggs.

They tend to lay their eggs in rotting leaves or rotting compost, but not in compost heaps which are normally too hot for them, so a good clean up will eliminate a lot of the next generation.

You can exterminate the adults by placing a few low containers of beer by your plants. The slugs will drink the beer and drown. It is extremely effective. Slug pellets should finish the t-totallers off. Taking these actions will greatly reduce the number of garden pests attacking your plants.

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on quite a few subjects, but is at present concerned with exterior wall lighting. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Outdoor Wall Lamps.

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History Of Hurling

Saturday, June 11th, 2011

While hurling is generally accepted as a Gaelic sport it should perhaps be called a Celtic one. For the history of hurling is actually older than the history of Ireland itself. It started even before Christianity, arriving in Ireland more than three thousand years ago with the Celts.

The earliest references to hurling in Ireland were in early Irish laws dating back to the fifth century. Hurling played a prominent part in early Irish mythology. Legendary Irish heroes such as Cuchulainnt and Fionn Mac Cumhail and his Fianna are both written of as playing hurling.

Hurling is, in essence, a stick and ball game. The game is reckoned to be related to the games of shinty that is played primarily in Scotland, cammag on the Isle of Man and bandy that was played formerly in England and Wales.

The stick was, and indeed, still is known as a hurley and the ball a sliotar. Early Irish lawn Law stated that the son of a r? (local king) could have his hurley banded in bronze, while others could only make use of copper. It was prohibited to impound a hurley.

The object of the game is for players to use the hurley to hit a small ball through the opposition’s goalposts either over the crossbar for one point, or under the crossbar into a net defended by a goalkeeper for one goal, which is the same as three points.

The sliotar can be caught in the hand and carried for not more than four steps, struck in the air, or struck on the ground with the hurley. It can be kicked or slapped with an open hand (the hand pass) for short-range passing. A player who desires to carry the ball for more than three steps has to bounce or balance the sliotar on the end of the stick and the ball can only be handled twice while in his possession.

The English occupation of Ireland led to many statutes prohibitting or proscribing the playing of hurling as it diverted people from archery practice. The earliest of these dates from the 13th century.

However, it was the Eighteenth Century that came to be known as the ?The Golden Age? of hurling as members of the Anglo-Irish landowning gentry frequently kept teams of players on their estates and challenged each other’s teams to matches for the amusement of their tenants.

Tales of colourful hurling games from this era continue to be gathered from contemporary Irish storytellers and newspapers of the period. The contemporary era of hurling In Ireland dates from the establishment of the Gaelic Athletic Association formed in 1884 in Thurles, County Tipperary under the memorable patronage of Thomas Croke, Archbishop of Cashel and Charles Parnell.

The 20th Century saw greater organisation in hurling. The all-Ireland Hurling championship came into being along with the provincial championships. Cork, Kilkenny and Tipperary dominated hurling in the 20th Century with each of these counties winning more than 20 All-Ireland titles each. Wexford, Waterford, Clare, Limerick, Offaly, Dublin, and Galway were also strong hurling counties during the 20th Century.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many topics, but is at present involved with London Olympics 2012 venues. Click a link if you are interested in 2012 London Olympics Volunteers.

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Choosing Your Patio Garden Furniture

Friday, June 10th, 2011

Once you have finished making your patio, your deck or your lawn, you will unquestionably start thinking about how you can enjoy more time in the garden. Therefore, you will need some garden furniture. Many places sell garden furniture. You can try home improvement centres, large department stores and garden centres. There are also companies on line that will deliver. The hard job is picking your garden furniture.

There is a very broad choice of designs of garden furniture – a style to suit every person and complement every garden. So, before rushing down to the garden centre, it is worth considering for a while what you would like to accomplish with your open-air seating area. Do you want a theme? Do you want to entertain or dine there? Or do you just want to sit peacefully, take pleasure in your garden and read a magazine?

Indeed, the answer may well be a permutation of all those things. If you simply want to sit there with a drink and a book, you may be satisfied to just buy a couple of chairs and a small table, but if you want to have guests or eat family meals outside, you may prefer a more substantial table. A large oak table would be quite costly, but it would look magnificent and last for a ten years or more.

If you choose a table, you will have to have chairs to match, but do you want loungers as well? They could be of plastic and kept in the shed until wanted.

You will probably need some type of shade. This can be given by folding, even removable umbrellas or by overhanging trees or shrubs. Wisteria or clematis can do the task as well and cost you next to nothing.

Do you intend cooking in this space? If you do, what and how? Do you fancy a barbecue pit or a proper hob and oven? A lot of people in regions where the climate permits are doing a great deal of cooking outside in a carbon copy of an indoor kitchen, but without all the walls.. If you plan the outdoor kitchen carefully, you will be able to use it in the rain too. I find it lovely not to have kitchen smells in the house and cooking out of doors is a good experience as well.

If it gets nippy in the evenings then you can consider getting some patio heaters. They are not expensive to buy or to run and one standard patio heater can keep quite a crowd of people warm. (By the word ‘standard’ here, I mean upright, like a lamp post).

Lighting is the last major consideration in the list when deciding on garden furniture. There are actually two sorts of garden lighting to mull over: lighting to see by and lighting to lure insects away. Again, you could use standard lamps to light up your patio. They cast their light far enough so that you can still look at your garden after dusk or you could have individual wall light on dimmers.

The one light I would definitely have is a mosquito lantern. Hang this away from where you sit, because they do draw insects to them which they then electrocute with a pleasing zap.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article writes on quite a few subjects, but is at present involved with visual comfort lighting. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Outdoor Wall Lamps.

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The Ashes – Cricket’s Most Prized Trophy

Saturday, June 4th, 2011

The Ashes is the nickname given to a biennial series of test cricket matches played between England and Australia. The very first cricket test match was played between England and Australia in 1877, but the notion of ?playing for the Ashes? dates from some five years later after England had lost the ninth test match played between the two rivals.

On their 1882 tour to England just one test match was played at The Oval in August. The ground was almost impossible to play on and Australia, who batted first, made merely 63 runs. England, in response, played a little better but by scoring 101, did achieve a first innings lead of 38 runs.

In Australia?s second innings Hugh Massie?s 55, struck at a run a minute, allowed the tourists to make 122 runs . This meant that England needed a mere 85 runs for victory. But they had not allowed for Fred Spofforth, dubbed ?The Demon Bowler? who refused to admit defeat.

?This thing can be done? he asserted and swiftly succeeded in destroying the England batting. He took his final four wickets for just two runs and England lost the match by just seven runs.

This defeat sent shock waves right through the English sporting establishment and several mock obituaries appeared in the sporting press, including the most well-known one which appeared in ?The Sporting Times? on 2 September. It read :

?In Affectionate Remembrance of ENGLISH CRICKET, which died at the Oval on 29th AUGUST 1882, Deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing friends and acquaintances R.I.P.

N.B.-The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.

Therefore this was the first reference in print to ?The Ashes?. The England tour of Australia later that year was captained by Ivo Bligh who was afterwards to be the Earl of Darnley. Bligh said that he would ?regain the ashes? and this he went on to do with England winning the three match series by two games to one.

However the expression ?the Ashes? did not really catch on until 1903 when Pelham (or ?Plum?) Warner led a team out to Australia with the same promise of recapturing the ashes. This England did by winning the series 3 -2 . The Australian press latched on to the phrase and this time it stuck.

An ?urn? to contain the ashes was created and presented to Bligh during the 1882-83 tour. It is rumoured to hold the ashes of a cricket bail. It was presented to Bligh by a group of Victorian ladies which included Bligh?s future wife.

The urn is a small terracotta vase about six inches high and may originally have contained scent. It is so fragile that it is now kept permanently at the MCC headquarters at Lords.

There is a general conviction that the urn and its contents represent the official trophy played for by England and Australia, but it is in fact a private memento owned by the Darnley family and is just on loan to the MCC.

The trophy actually played for is a larger Waterford glass replica, but the original ?Ashes urn? still stays one of the most well-known sporting icons in the world.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many topics, but is at present concerned with tickets for London Olympics. Click a link if you are interested in 2012 London Olympics Volunteers.

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History of Baseball

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

Much has been written about the history and birth of the sport of baseball and disagreement has surrounded the subject for over a century.There has long been a legend, once extensively believed by many Americans, that baseball was made-up by one Abner Doubleday in 1839.

However there never has been a single scrap of evidence to support this assertion, which was in fact never supported by Doubleday himself. There is a large quantity of documentary evidence left by him including letters and nowhere is there mention of the game of baseball, or that he thought he played any major part in the development of the game.

In fact, baseball (and softball), as well as the other modern bat, ball and running games, cricket and rounders, was evolved from earlier folk games. Baseball probably originated in Britain, but similar games were played in many regions of Europe such as a game similar to the British rounders. It was called schlagball and was played in Germany.

Russians had played a bat and ball game known as lapta since medieval times, whilst In Romania they played a version called Oina. There is very little information as to how the modern game of baseball evolved from these earlier types of ballgames .

There is one school of thought that maintains that they evolved into a game called town ball which was the forerunner of baseball. Although others think that town ball and baseball are autonomous developments. The real ?father of American baseball? was not Abner Doubleday but one Shane Ryley Foster, who formulated the first published rules of baseball in 1845 for a New York (Manhattan) base ball club called the Knickerbockers.

However on June 3, 1953, Congress officially recognized Alexander Cartwright with inventing the modern game of baseball, and he was also voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Alexander Cartwright was a New York bookseller who umpired the first-ever recorded U.S. baseball game with codified rules in Hoboken, New Jersey on June 19, 1846.

He also founded the older of the two teams that played that day, the New York Knickerbockers. Cartwright later became contaminated by ?gold Fever? and emigrated to California, introducing the game of baseball to a lot of of the cities he stopped at on his way to California..

In 1857 a conference was held to revise the old rules laid down for the Knickerbocker club and representatives came from sixteen clubs in New York. In 1858, twenty-five teams including one from New Jersey met to form the National Association of Base Ball Players . It governed until 1870 but arranged and sanctioned no games.

During and after the American Civil War, the movements of soldiers and exchanges of prisoners helped spread the game. In 1869 the first honestly professional baseball team was created. Earlier players were basically amateurs.

The Cincinnati Red Stockings took on players nationally and actually toured the country. No one beat them until June 1870. After 1870, more and more professional teams were created and the era of the game that we know and love today was started.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is at present concerned with London Olympics 2012 venues. Click a link if you are interested in 2012 London Olympics Volunteers.

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NBA Basketball League

Sunday, May 29th, 2011

NBA is the acronym for National Basketball Association. It is probably the most dynamic and well-liked basketball association in the world. One of the individuals who can take most of the credit for this is Michael Jordan who worked tirelessly on its behalf in the 1980′s and 1990′s.

The NBA is the leading professional, male basketball league of north America, which encompasses the USA and Canada. The NBA has the best players, pays the highest salaries and has the highest level of competition. At the moment there are thirty teams competing in the NBA, which are located in both Canada and the USA.

The NBA began life as the Basketball Association of America or BAA in 1946. It was set up in order to coordinate the top professional teams, to promote them and to raise their popularity.. The first BBA game was played between the Toronto Huskies and the New York Knickerbockers in Toronto. It changed its name to NBA in 1949.

The NBA grew steadily and attracted the best basketball players in the world. In the early days there were such names as George Mikan – ‘the First Big Man’; Bob Cousey and Bill Russell Other great stars that followed were: Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West, Julius Erving, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan.

Many of the top players came from the United States, but not all. Some were international players. Such players include players like: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Leandro Barbosa, Paul Gasol, Manu Ginobili and Dirk Nowitzki.

Others include Tony Parker of the San Antonio Spurs; Peja Stojakovic a Serb who won awards at home before switching to north America and the Russian, Andrei Kirilenko who was called the AK-47. He also won European awards before relocating to the States.

Yet other well-known international players are Yao Ming who was chosen for the Houston Rockets in 2002 and Andrea Bargnini who was chosen to play for the Toronto Raptors in 2006.

The teams in the NBA are arranged into two conferences with three divisions in each. 29 of these teams are based in the United States and one in Canada.

The Eastern Conference consists of the Atlantic Division, the Central Division and the Southeast Division.

The Atlantic Division has: the Boston Celtics, New Jersey Nets, New York Knicks, Philadelphia 76ers and the Toronto Raptors.

The Central Division has:the Chicago Bulls, Cleveland Cavaliers, Detroit Pistons, Indiana Pacers and Milwaukee Bucks.

The Southeast boasts: the Atlanta Hawks, Charlotte Bobcats, Miami Heat, Orlando Magic and the Washington Wizards.

The Western Conference consists of the Northwest Division, the Pacific Division and the Southwest Division.

The Northwest Division has:the Denver Nuggets, Minnesota Timberwolves, NBA Oklahoma City, Portland Trailblazers, and Utah Jazz.

The Pacific Division has the Golden State Warriors, Los Angeles Clippers, Los Angeles Lakers, Phoenix Suns and the Sacramento Kings.

The Southwest Division has: the Dallas Mavericks, Houston Rockets, Memphis Grizzlies, New Orleans Hornets and San Antonio Spurs.

The NBA basketball league can now be watched all over the world by subscription on the Internet, although the Internet connection speed is too slow in some countries to make it viable.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with London Olympics 2012 venues. Click a link if you are interested in 2012 London Olympics Volunteers.

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The Football Association Challenge Cup

Saturday, May 28th, 2011

The FA Cup, or Football Association Challenge Cup to give it its full title, is the oldest football competition in the world. It was begun in 1871, when it was proposed that “a Challenge Cup should be established in connection with the Association”.

Merely eight teams were entered for the first round which was played on the 11 November 1871. The final was played at the Oval on 16 March, 1872 and was won by The Wanderers who defeated The Royal Engineers by the only goal of the match.

Not only is the FA Cup the oldest association football competition in the world but it is also one of the biggest. It is open to teams who play on most degrees of the English football league system and during the 2009 – 2010 season, 762 teams entered the competition.

Because it is the one competition that mixes teams of all degrees of playing ability, it does allow for the occasional ?upset? when a ?minnow? from a lower league defeats one of the more fancied upper echelon teams.

Whilst at least one such giant killing act will occur in any given season, no non-league club has ever won the tournament since Tottenham Hotspur won the trophy in 1901 while playing in the old Southern League.

For some reason, certain clubs appear to acquire a reputation as giant killers and Yeovil Town holds the current record for most wins against teams playing in the league. There are a number of sporting records associated with the FA Cup, some of them standing for a considerable length of time .

One name connected with many early records is that of Lord Kinnaird. He played in the second final in 1873 and then played in a further eight, thus setting up a record which still stands to this day of playing in nine finals. He played on the winning team no fewer than five times, a further record which is still unbroken.

However he is also accredited with a less happy record, that of scoring the first ?own goal” in cup history in 1877. He was playing in goal and involuntarily stepped back over his own goal line.

In 1886 Blackburn Rovers became the second club to win three successive finals, and is the sole club still in existence who can assert this feat as the first club to do so. The Wanderers went out of existence in 1883.

The record for the greatest win in FA Cup history is held by Preston North End who in 1887 defeated Hyde 26-0. One of the longest standing sporting records was finally surpassed in 2009 by Everton?s Louis Saha whose 25 second goal beat that of the 30 second goal scored by Bob Chatt of Aston villa in 1895 . A record which had stood for 115 years!

After a period of seven years when the Cup final was played at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, while the new Wembley Stadium was being rebuilt, The Cup Final has returned to its traditional home at Wembley where it has been played since 1923 when the famous ?White Horse? took place between Bolton and West Ham. This match also holds the record for fan attendance when an estimated 200,000 fans packed in.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on several topics, but is at present concerned with tickets for London Olympics. Click a link if you are interested in 2012 London Olympics Volunteers.

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