Football

Difficult to know quite what to make of The Hundred, which has the feel of being knocked up on the back of a packet of Senior Service and anyway sounds like a film about a heroic battle rather than the name of a new cricket thrash coming to a Test ground near you sometime in 2020. My only hope is that the ECB will call on the bikini girls to march round the ground signalling the change of overs. But I’m old-fashioned like that. The tournament is scheduled for the ‘school holidays’ to pack in the kids, but in my day the school holidays were when people went away, to

Every now and again my Tube ride to work on the District line is enlivened by children on a school outing. Presumably they are heading for the Science Museum or possibly the National Gallery. Often, they have different coloured badges stuck to their jumpers. As far as I can work out, if, for example, you are a red, then you’re meant to sit with other reds, and sometimes the teacher barks instructions such as: ‘Could the reds try to be a little quieter please?’, or asks: ‘Blues, how many more stops until we get there?’ This last question gives rise to a piercing shriek as a dozen or so blues

The death of Zac Cox is more than a horrible industrial action but a metaphor for modern sport: the scale of its corruption and the readiness of  its fans to tolerate the intolerable as long as we are entertained. Mr Cox was 40 and working on a World Cup stadium in Qatar when a catwalk collapsed underneath him. He fell 130 ft and didn’t stand a chance. To the authorities he was a nobody, and his death was an embarrassing inconvenience. A report into the accident was completed within 11 days, but the firms building the stadium did not pass it on to his family in Britain. One of the

Last night, a tiny and almost penniless Swedish football club beat Arsenal 2-1 at home. The story of Östersund Football Club is quite unlike any other in sport: I wrote about it in my Daily Telegraph column a while ago when they hadn’t really featured on a British radar. This morning, with Arsene Wenger in despair at his team’s complacency, a lot of people will be wondering what happened. The answer is an inspiring one, full of lessons for politics and life in general.  Östersund is a tiny vodka-belt town in the frozen north of Sweden with a population smaller than the capacity of the Emirates stadium. It has no football tradition, or didn’t

They’ve got this new thing in football. It’s called the Video Assistant Referee and it is designed to make the game, at the highest level, pristine and free from human error. This is, to my mind, a mistaken aspiration in a game that relies on human error for its excitement, especially when the England goalkeeper Joe Hart is playing. Anyway, what happens is this. When the referee isn’t sure about some crucial incident on the pitch, he summons another referee via a headset to help him. The other referee is many miles away, watching the match on the television. The ref stops the game and wanders over to have a

On this week’s episode, we examine Twitter’s mob mentality, get to the heart of PTSD, and look at how Russia is preparing for this year’s World Cup. First up: At the end of 2017 it would’ve be hard to guess that the name of everyone’s lips during the sunrise days of the new year would be Toby Young. But thanks to a government appointment and a series of ill-advised tweets, his brief stint at the Office for Students has dominated the news cycle. In the magazine this week, Lara Prendergast writes about how our digital footprints could come back to bite us, whilst Rod Liddle laments the rise of trial

Authoritarian regimes love grand international sporting events. There’s something about the mass regimentation, the set-piece spectacle, the old-fashioned idea of nation states competing for glory that appeals to leaders who wish to show off the greatness of their country to the world. Berlin ’36, Moscow ’80, Sochi ’14 — nothing says ‘we’re here, get used to it’ better than a giant sporting jamboree. The 2018 football World Cup doesn’t offer quite the same degree of validation as an Olympic Games. But for Vladimir Putin, it’s still a major opportunity to demonstrate not only Russia’s new-found greatness but also its continued membership of the civilised world. For what Putin yearns for,

England, Belgium, Tunisia, Panama: it doesn’t make an acronym as alluring as the ‘England Algeria Slovenia Yanks’ headline The Sun ran at this stage in 2009, but English football fans will have breathed a sigh of relief after being placed in a group we might call BTEC – Belgium Tunisia England Canal folk (Panama) – because it certainly wasn’t the hardest option out there. A cautious optimism must now seep into the England set-up. Encouraging draws against Germany and Brazil proved that this generation are more dour and pragmatic than the extravagant ensemble that preceded them. Even at managerial level, the contrast between unfashionable Gareth Southgate and his predecessors is stark:

What a privilege it is to watch Manchester City in the age of Pep Guardiola. I can’t recall a club side so lauded so early in the season, but the lavish praise seems justified. Could his Midas touch be young England’s best hope in Russia? Noel Gallagher, yes him, has been speaking about the ‘cosmic’ football City are playing under Pep, and who are we to argue? Guardiola seems to be getting the best out of Stones, Walker and Sterling. These three plus the Tottenham backbone of Kane, Dele Alli and Dier bringing their club form to the national team, along with the young England talent that did so well

So West Ham took the least surprising option and sent for David Moyes. Same old same old. I have a feeling that if Theresa May fell on her, or anyone else’s, sword, we’d send for David Moyes and that familiar figure would be shuffling up Downing Street with his wrinkly-eyed grin, proclaiming outside No. 10: ‘We’re in a relegation battle here.’ He wouldn’t be wrong either. Looking at West Ham’s lacklustre performances, with players sometimes putting on a bit of a reluctant jog in vague pursuit of opponents sprinting past, it’s easy to imagine them in the dressing room with a fag and some of owner David Sullivan’s old top-shelf

In my Daily Telegraph column today, I write about the incredible story of Östersund football club. It hasn’t quite been picked up in Britain yet, but I suspect it will one day be made into a Moneyball-style film: about how a small-time English coach was hired to move to a small subarctic town in Sweden with a small budget, and assembled a team of misfits on £600-a-week. But his tactics, and his faith in his ability to get the best out of people, saw them not only win the Swedish Cup but they are now taking on the biggest clubs in Europe. So this town, the size of Inverness, a

Rugby’s autumn internationals are almost upon us and dark thoughts hover over lovers of the sport. One day soon a professional rugby player will die playing the game. The players are fitter, bigger, stronger, faster and too powerful and it is no longer a 15-man game. It is a 23-man game: more than half the team gets replaced so the intensity and impact never subsides. Rule changes around the breakdown to encourage attack have had the opposite effect, meaning that defences line up across the pitch, no space is created and every game is 80 minutes of unsustainable collisions. Seasons go on longer, players get no rest and they keep

During a riveting session at the Cheltenham Literary Festival with sporting brainboxes Mike Brearley and Matthew Syed, discussion touched on the Ringelmann effect. This is the tendency for members of a group to perform less well together than individually. Old Ringelmann observed it in tug-of-war in the early 20th century. On their own the athletes pulled a big weight. In a team they grunted, grimaced but didn’t pull so much. They were skiving; sheltering behind teammates. You can bet Ringelmann would be rubbing his hands over the state of the England football team. After a seemingly interminable World Cup qualifying campaign full of the dreariest football imaginable, England flopped across