Cricket

You couldn’t ask for a more amiable man than Rob Key to run English cricket: affable, shrewd and universally liked, he has the look of a recalcitrant monk, nipping out the back for a quick drink and a fag. Whether he’s any good is another matter, but let’s hope so for all our sakes. The sequence of events seems a bit upside down though – appointing a managing director first, then a chair and CEO. Without coming over all corporate, surely the MD is the next CEO’s biggest appointment. And wouldn’t the new MD, Key, want to know who he’s working with? One man I hope he will soon be

It’s a game for the ages all right, City against Liverpool on Sunday as the Premier League moves to its most exciting climax in years: two magnificent managers, two awe-inspiring collections of players. Both teams are so far in front that the rest are nowhere. There’s more to come as they face each other the following weekend at Wembley in the FA Cup. And both are involved in Champions League quarter-finals. The money must be a help, but still we are blessed to have Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp here, both at the height of their powers. But for how much longer? Anyone who loves football will be dreading the

Rugby Union, bloody hell. We’ve got to talk about Eddie, but before that, what about something much cheerier? Just when it seemed the game was for the big bruisers of northern Europe and the southern hemisphere, Italy show us that it ain’t necessarily so. It seemed impossible that anyone could upstage France’s victory parade on the last day, but that is just what Italy’s heroic XV did, by upsetting the only team that had come close to bringing down Antoine Dupont and his crew of Gallic legends. Already the best try of the tournament – and the sporting highlight of the year so far – has been set to ‘Nessun

If you were one of the sharp-suited head honchos at CVC Capital Partners, the private equity megalith that has ploughed £365 million into the Six Nations, you might be wondering whether you had got your money’s worth. Sure, all the games are sellouts, from the Twickenham all-day piss-up to the gathering of the clans at Murrayfield to the joys of the Stadio Olimpico because, frankly, who doesn’t want a weekend in Rome? But the rugby’s another matter. It wasn’t the interminable scrum resets at Twickenham that did it for me, nor the endless water breaks, nor the turgid first half, but the shambles the next day in Italy’s forlorn battle

Well, there’s a surprise: Nike have cancelled their sponsorship of the Manchester United and England footballer Mason Greenwood, who is engulfed by a series of very unpleasant allegations involving an 18-year-old girl. There’s a lot that can’t be discussed about this distressing saga but one aspect that’s worth looking at is the fact that Greenwood, like so many prodigies, was snapped up by a Premier League club at an extraordinarily young age, in his case just six. But in its obsession with signing up talent that has only just learned to walk, is football missing a trick? How many hidden gems are there in the lower leagues who were passed

Full homage to the nail-biting cricketing miracle in Sydney, while bearing in mind that miracles, like lightning, rarely strike twice and it’s a toss-up whether England’s Test team or Novak Djokovic was more deserving of deportation from Australia earlier this week. But only Test cricket could conjure up such a climax after five days of fierce competition where one of the greatest batters the world has seen had just six balls to try to dismiss one of the greatest bowlers. Cricket eh! Bloody hell. The BBC’s desertion of red-ball cricket has played a major role in sidelining the game Breathtaking tension — think Arsenal having to beat Liverpool in 1989

Sport and politics have always been intertwined, but this was the year they became joined at the hip. Yorkshire racism; the growing protests about China’s sportwashing at the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022; anger about the Saudi takeover of Newcastle United; and the long-simmering anxiety about the Qatar World Cup. And with it, growing and very welcome, activism from sports-people: Lewis Hamilton’s rainbow helmet for gay rights in Saudi Arabia, Marcus Rashford’s indefatigable campaigning over child deprivation, and Michael Holding’s powerful interventions over everyday racism. But the gutless performance of the year should go to men’s professional tennis, which has resolutely failed to join the Women’s Tennis Association in boycotting

Not so much the hair dryer: more a gentle home perm. Contemplating the increasingly less youthful visage of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer as he looked on powerlessly while his very expensive Manchester United side were dismembered by Liverpool, you couldn’t help wonder what Sir Alex Ferguson, glowering and irascible in the stands above, would have done with those players. He would certainly have got something more out of the infantile and malicious Paul Pogba, sent off for a mean tackle which betrayed his manager and his teammates. But as Solskjaer was clearly a Ferguson appointment, shouldn’t the old bully take a share of the responsibility? With a weak board and a

Any English person with a love of cricket knows life has its ups and downs. But until now we have had no need to feel truly ashamed. The decision by England to scrap a mini-tour of Pakistan feels like one of those watershed moments from which any reputation for fair play will never recover. The men’s tour would have been four or five days at most, to play a couple of T20s. It’s hardly a trek across the Antarctic. And this against Pakistan, a country which, more than any, needs international cricket at home. And a country which bailed England out last year, when Britain was in the grip of

In London, the weather is a gentle sashaying mockery. An Indian summer reminds us of the sullen apology of summer which we have just endured. Soon it will be winter, and ‘A cold coming we had of it’. As always, poetry is a respite. My first resort is usually Yeats. In English, no one except Shakespeare is better at turning language into music. I have probably apologised before now in these columns for using those ravaging Yeatsian lines which have become a cliché because they are so true, so powerful, such an epitome of the post-1914 world and its agonies. ‘The best lack all conviction / The worst are full

Forgive the personal question, but how long does it take you to, you know, go to the gents, ladies, non-binary? Quite what Stefanos Tsitsipas was doing in there in any of his numerous toilet breaks during the epic first-round US Open encounter with Andy Murray at Flushing (geddit?) Meadows is anybody’s guess. It clearly riled Murray — never the hardest thing to do — who was playing as well as ever, and is the ironman, quite literally, of Grand Slam tennis. He has also rather wittily pointed out that Jeff Bezos can get into space and back again more quickly than Tsitsipas can go to the loo. There is something