Football

If there is anything more pointless than signing a five-year contract to be Emma Raducanu’s coach, it is the effort to inject some excitement into England’s interminable qualification campaigns for major football tournaments. Everyone knows they will qualify, almost certainly as top of their group, which usually contains such giants as the Moon, Chad and Tierra del Fuego or, as now, Latvia, Albania, Andorra and Serbia. Good luck, Mr Tuchel, with learning much from those fixtures, though Serbia should be interesting. Sport needs jeopardy: there needs to be doubt about the outcome. Here there’s none. There are marginal debates: is Phil Foden too far out on the right? What will

The confused world of Duhan van der Merwe must seem more confused than usual after last weekend. The Scotland winger with an accent that sounds more Western Cape than Western Isles found himself crowned man of the match despite Scotland’s defeat by England at Twickenham, while at the same time being scapegoated as the man who lost the game and the Calcutta Cup for his adopted nation. Van der Merwe, who at 6ft 4in and nearly 17 stone could easily be mistaken for a lock forward, was roundly criticised for cutting away from the posts rather than towards them when he ran in the try right at the end of

I’ve just returned from Colombia, where I’ve been visiting my daughter. She’s doing a modern languages degree and has to spend her third year in a Spanish-speaking country either working or studying. Instead of opting for a university in Barcelona or Madrid, which would be the normal thing to do, she decided to get a job in Medellin. Can’t think where she gets that rebellious streak! So that’s why I’ve spent the past week in South America. Colombia is quite a long way to go for such a short trip. To get to Medellin, I flew via Madrid, which meant departing from Gatwick at 10 a.m. and arriving at about

Addressing the past Angela Rayner announced that Grenfell Tower will be demolished. What happened to Britain’s other notorious addresses? — 10 Rillington Place: scene of the murders for which Timothy Evans and John Christie were hanged in the 1950s (although many believe that Evans was innocent of the murder of his wife). The street was initially renamed Ruston Close and the house was pulled down in the 1970s. Now a memorial garden, not far from Grenfell Tower. — Ronan Point: east London tower block which partially collapsed in 1968 after a gas explosion. Was rebuilt but demolished in 1986 after continuing safety concerns. — 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester: Fred and Rosemary

Winter’s almost done and spring’s on the way. We can tell because the Six Nations is about to muscle into view – with the battle of the world’s best national anthems as Wales meet France at the Stade de France on Friday evening. This year’s tournament could be even better than last year’s, but we always say that – and if France live up to some of the rhapsodic predictions the whole thing could go flat as a wet weekend in Calais as Les Bleus romp to a runaway victory. Some pundits have been advising the other five nations to send out for white flags ready to run up the

Have you booked your tickets for the World Test Championship yet? Did you even know it’s on? What seemed like a pretty good idea has become mired in the mind-numbing complexity of the scoring. Currently England, who you might think of as quite a good Test-playing nation, are languishing in sixth place, not least because the Bazball bludgers have lost three of their last five matches. England lie just above Bangladesh, who have won only one of their last five. Ben Stokes seemingly hates the competition because his team are penalised for slow over rates, though he would change his tune if England had a chance of winning it. What

You would have to be living a very sheltered life not to have noticed that the Premier League this season is one of the best and the brightest for years. Mainly because it is not permanently dominated by the Big Six – though admittedly one of Liverpool, Arsenal or Chelsea is almost certain to win the title. But exciting, unpredictable, well-managed sides like Nottingham Forest, Bournemouth, Fulham and Brighton mean that more or less any side can beat any other. Sam Konstas is pencil thin and doesn’t look old enough to get served in the Bush and Tucker tavern in his native Sydney Though bafflingly Manchester City can hardly be

I was in Sweden a few weeks ago, where my music was presented in Stockholm in the most recent International Composer Festival. One of the orchestral works performed was my football-themed ‘Eleven’ (11 players, melodies of 11 notes, chords of 11 pitches and various football chants woven into the fabric of the score). I’m not the first composer obsessed with the beautiful game. Bohuslav Martinu’s ‘Half-time’, written in 1924, was inspired by the supporters of his team, Sparta Prague. And more recently there have been bold examples by English composers Mark-Anthony Turnage (who worked chants for his beloved Arsenal into his orchestral piece ‘Momentum’) and Benedict Mason, in whose opera

It was quite a year for some of the worst of sport – America’s golfers, already among the richest and greediest men on the planet, wanting a massive extra bung to pitch up for the Ryder Cup and, equally noisome, Bill Sweeney, chief executive of the Rugby Football Union, paying himself £1.1 million while announcing a loss of £37.9 million. That salary included a performance-based one-off payment of £358,000. Performance? Well may you ask. As Francis Baron, a former RFU chief, observed sagely: ‘We are paying stellar salaries for junk-bond performances.’ Fair enough in my view, and that’s not even looking at the England rugby team’s less than stellar showing.

The last time I took my wife to watch Millwall play a home game, a gentleman a few rows in front of us took grave exception to the behaviour of an opposing player and identified him, very loudly, as the author of The Critique of Pure Reason – repeatedly and with venom. Having vented his spleen, he turned to sit down and caught sight of my wife. An expression of contrition spread across his face and he said to me in a conciliatory tone: ‘I am very sorry for using such language in front of your lovely lady.’ The apology, you will note, was to me, not to my wife.

It’s a crying shame that we will no longer hear the insightful and original opinions of Gary Lineker. No more comprehensive and judicious appraisals. No more balanced verdicts delivered in an authoritative yet amiable manner. No longer will we witness Lineker draw from his deep well of experience and knowledge to deliver his considered conclusions. Saturday evenings will never be the same again. Yes, I am of course talking about Gary Lineker the popular television football pundit, not Gary Lineker the unpopular political thinker. While the first version can lay claim to be – or once could have claimed to be – a national treasure, the newer, other iteration has

When my youngest son Charlie was seven he was talent-spotted by a QPR scout who saw him playing football in the park and invited to try out for the junior academy. I struggled to take this seriously – he still couldn’t ride a bicycle – but duly turned up at a ‘sports academy’ in Willesden, a secondary school, where the trials were held. To my astonishment, a QPR coach told me Charlie had potential and offered to enrol him in a programme that involved spending two hours every Wednesday evening at this school. This wasn’t the junior academy, but a level below. Charlie was keen and after talking it over

Last Saturday, I made the 400-mile round trip to Burnley with my 16-year-old son Charlie to see Queens Park Rangers play the Clarets. Quite a long way to go, given that Burnley was one of three teams relegated from the Premier League last season and are expected to go straight back up, while QPR are struggling to remain in the second tier. Nevertheless, we managed to hold them to a goalless draw, which the visiting fans celebrated as if we’d just won the FA Cup. ‘Worth the trip,’ declared Charlie as we embarked on the four-hour train ride home. The cabinet of killjoys can’t stand the fact that the beautiful