Last Man Picked. Do Mainstream Historians Need to Play with Sports Historians?

This polemical essay explores whether ‘mainstream’ political and social historians need to engage with the history of sport. It recounts the coercive nature of the author’s encounters with sports and sports history and suggests that greater integration of the history of sport into histories of Britain relies on a mutual understanding of the imperatives of academic historians, not least in the world of the Research Excellence Framework and the ‘impact’ agenda.