Day and night, night and day …relentlessly the football season slurps on through the January mud — mud and money, slurp, slurp — transfer ‘windows’, raucous headlines, phoney passions torn to tatters, ‘hot’ news stories cold and discarded in a blink. British professional football preens itself as pre-eminent in the culture, and broadcasting and the public
Ruminating here a couple of weeks ago on those whom the wretched reaper had gaily swiped down last year, Christmas deadlines had a trio of significant hall-of-famers missing: both the Oz horseman Scobie Breasley and the British runner Sydney Wooderson died on 21 December, and a week later the oldest surviving English Test cricketer, Norman
If you thought you’d got away with one ruddy World Cup in 2006, then brace yourself: there are two of them in 2007, so obviously a double helping of the baloney which accompanies them. Cricket’s World Cup is staged in the Caribbean through March and April; rugby’s in France in September and October. Anniversaries to
Requiems for heavyweights: sporting history’s seven super-dupers who died in 2006 were, at 79, football’s Ferenc Puskas, cricket’s Fred Trueman (75) and Sir Clyde Walcott (80), US boxer Willie Pep (84) and his compatriot, double Olympian Bob Mathias (75), rugby’s sprinter Ken Jones (84), and Dr Kevin O’Flanagan (86), who played international tennis and golf
Ashes to ashes. Oh, England our England! First the football, then the rugby …and now the prettiest balloon of them all has been well and truly pricked so soon after its jingo-jangled and so jauntily buoyant launch. I sense blame about to be heaped on the wives and girlfriends, the dreaded Wags. Cricket’s lot have
This year’s Sportsbook of the Year is Unforgivable Blackness (Pimlico) This year’s Sportsbook of the Year is Unforgivable Blackness (Pimlico), a vividly enlightening new biog of Jack Johnson, the first black American boxing champion, by Geoffrey C. Ward, the US hist-orian who pockets the £18,000 prize plus a £2,000 free bet with the award’s loyal sponsor,
Football’s European Champions’ League awaits the serious new year stuff once a few loose ends are tied on Wednesday. Football’s European Champions’ League awaits the serious new year stuff once a few loose ends are tied on Wednesday. Arsenal and Manchester United each need only to draw, respectively against Porto and Benfica, and only abject
How goes it at the Gabba? We shall know by now how the first Ashes Test is panning out. Have radio’s pre-dawn choruses from Brisbane already been ruining your days? Or making them brighter? Was it a dramatic start on Thursday? Who leapt headlong from the traps? Have England kept their nerve? Are the Aussies
A perennial sucker for feature films with sporting references, I suppose I’ll drag myself to Sixty Six, in spite of the verdict by the Spec’s Deborah Ross that, for all its occasional charm, it is ‘a comedy without any good jokes which takes itself too seriously’. It concerns a Jewish family’s dilemma, particularly 12-year-old Bernie’s,
At Shrewsbury School a couple of weeks ago, with nice ceremony, they opened a swish new indoor cricket centre alongside what Neville Cardus once called ‘the most beautiful playing fields in England’. At Shrewsbury School a couple of weeks ago, with nice ceremony, they opened a swish new indoor cricket centre alongside what Neville Cardus
Beginning this weekend, we are lumbered with the close combat of international rugby union just about all the way to next October and the World Cup final in Paris. Today Wales play Australia in Cardiff; tomorrow at Twickenham the lately pallid English lillywhites steel themselves to take on the sombre might of New Zealand’s All
Football’s European club matches, which continue next week, have so far tiptoed around in such predictable outline that only the obsessed have been bothered — leaving the headline writers to continue their lather over recriminations about the serious head injury to Chelsea’s goalkeeper Petr Cech, when he dived to save from an onrushing opponent in
No end of hot air already surrounds next month’s rugby internationals in which each of the ‘home’ countries look to repel boarders from the southern hemisphere. Those contests round off a long tough season for all the visiting teams; for us in the north I suppose these autumn openers will establish an early pecking order
Football is intrusive, all right; but mightily persuasive as well. It is impossible to steer clear of football, but at the same time — I speak for myself — it is hard not to be fondly enamoured of it. For sure, there is no remote escape from both the obviously besotted obsessives who ration tightly
Football’s overblown autumn overtures have been interesting enough, I suppose; and the rugger buggers have been lining up their wicked big hits for the upcoming long stretch of mud and gloom and gloaming. The domestic cricket season was not done and dusted till the final match and at once, next day, publication of the first-class
The last telephone call from Michael Marshall was in midsummer. Should we sit together at the half-century dinner of the cricket-writers’ club at Lord’s? Sorry, I hadn’t booked. I wish I had. Sir Michael died this month at 76. For a devout Yorkshireman, I suppose having to be Conservative MP for Arundel for 32 years
Golf’s Ryder Cup is uniquely irresistible. Like most show-stopping spectaculars, the biennial challenge boasts ‘a full supporting cast’, in this case the two distinctive dolled-up distaff teams — a shapely sorority of Stepford Sindies vs a bevy of Barbies — devoted cheerleaders geeing up their frowning fellows as they go about the sombrely obsessive business with
This week they named the men to defend the Ashes. The trumpets of 12 months ago are muted, the martial drumbeats muffled. It has not been a good year. I fear the worst. England’s batting now looks fitful, the bowling feckless. Of the three champions, the flighty daredevil Pietersen might win you a Test match,
There occurs next week (8–12 September) a sobering little anniversary. Remember 12 months ago and that heady aura of innocent joy and optimism all around? At the end of an enthralling Ashes cricket series through the summer of 2005, England and Australia were locked in a riveting decider in south London. A celebration of cut-and-thrust
While Sunday’s Test farce reverberated far beyond Surrey’s Oval, that county’s favourite son, veteran Mark Ramprakash, was serenely toasting his achievement in becoming the first English batsman to score 2,000 first-class runs in a summer since he did the very same 11 years ago. Good show. It used to be a routine mark for leading