Football

When Patrice Evra and the French national football team lined up at Wembley last night, it was a moment of poignant defiance which earned an instant place in sporting iconography. I shed a tear, but I didn’t sing La Marseillaise. When horrendous things like the attacks on Paris happen, our first instincts are to offer solidarity and what help we can. And, yes, to hit back. The night after the attack, France launched 20 separate air strikes on what it said were Isis strongholds in Syria. And at home, an extra 115,000 gendarmes were deployed across France, leading to hundreds of raids with dozens of arrests.  In the days following attacks on the West,

As Angela Merkel approaches her tenth anniversary in power, Germans are talking about a possible Kanzlerinnendämmerung — a ‘twilight of the chancellors’. Anger is growing at Merkel’s handling of the migration crisis. Germany, which has only recently reconciled itself to the idea that it is a ‘country of immigration’, must now integrate vast numbers of asylum seekers, beginning with the million who are expected to arrive this year. At the same time, the country has been hit by two huge corruption scandals, involving Volkswagen and the DFB, the German football federation. The odds are that Merkel will survive — it’s hard to see at the moment who can replace her.

The roar of the Premier League is beginning to drown out everything else in sport (there’s even Friday night football now: another blissful resting place occupied. Shouldn’t we ring-fence some time — greenbelt-style — that football can’t colonise, say 2 a.m. on a Monday, that’s preserved from football’s endless development?) But while there’s a chance, let’s not lose sight of a great Englishman and a great English achievement. This Ashes series has not been a good contest; they often aren’t. But with his modesty, determination and resilience, it has been a personal triumph for the captain Alastair Cook. Not long ago, a chorus of self-appointed cricket ‘legends’ in the media

The BBC’s Creative Director, Alan Yentob, seems to have spent the last week or so dashing from studio to studio in an attempt to influence the corporation’s broadcasters from saying nasty stuff about a charity of which he was, until it imploded, chairman. The incompetently-managed Kids Company is now mercifully defunct. Yentob has subsequently admitted to having contacted Newsnight before the programme broadcast an investigation into the charity. He also harangued BBC correspondent Lucy Manning and stood in the cubicle watching as Today attempted to cover the story. If anyone else in the BBC had demonstrated such a magnificently brazen conflict of interest, they’d be out. But as a former

What a terrific summer of sport it’s been: a wonderful Wimbledon, a rollicking Royal Ascot, an absorbing Ashes series that still has the best part of two Tests to go. And now along comes football, barging its way on to the back pages, shoving the other sports aside, sniggering all the way to the bank. Every August, the ‘beautiful game’ reasserts itself as the playground bully. Football is the most popular sport in this country — and the nastiest. It has become a cesspit of greed, debauchery and racism, especially in Britain. It is crude and overbearing and has all the subtlety of a disco at Holy Communion. I feel

On Sunday morning, I was kicking a football in the back garden with my grandson. I had bought him his first pair of football boots, Optimum Tribals, junior size 11, blue and orange, each boot furnished with six very adult-looking steel studs: four on the sole, two at the back of the heel. We were shirtless. With a football at his feet and his shirt off, my grandson is transformed from an intelligent, biddable boy who is perhaps overly concerned with questions of right and wrong into an arrogant, argumentative liar given to pettish sulks. He tackles like a terrier gone berserk during a rat hunt. It wasn’t long before

My favourite moment in the crisis engulfing football’s governing body, Fifa, came with the intervention of a man called Manuel Nascimento Lopes. Manuel is the Fifa delegate from Guinea-Bissau, an African country which occupies 130th place in the Fifa world rankings but which, far more importantly in this context, punches well above its weight when it comes to institutionalised corruption. Thirteenth in the world, according to the organisation Transparency International — not a bad showing for a smallish sub-Saharan rathole which has been almost permanently engulfed in civil war since the Portuguese got the hell out. Manuel suggested that to vote against Sepp Blatter remaining as boss of Fifa would