Football

The Lib Dem conference is always a chance to see which side of the party is winning the debate internally. Normally, the Left dominates the grassroots – which is why the party leadership always makes a bigger deal of criticising the Tories than it does although last year the economic liberals in the party tried to assert itself a little more. This year, the motions that members are debating do suggest that the Left is still coming out tops. Take a look at the text of this motion, passed yesterday afternoon, called ‘Protecting Public Services and Making them Work’, which includes the line: ‘Ending the role of the Competition and

It has become a weary cliché to say that a book’s publication is eagerly awaited, but when an event is this momentous — the October arrival, thanks to the good offices of Random House, of the long anticipated autobiography of a football legend, perhaps the football legend, Roy Race, or Roy of the Rovers, as he was known wherever football fans gathered — then only cliché will do. It was an illustrious career with Melchester Rovers of the First Division: countless League titles, eight FA Cups, three European Cups, a Uefa Cup, and many Cup Winners’ Cups. He made several international appearances, but never when it mattered. Roy put this

Imagine you bought a ticket for the opera and then a copper told you how you may travel to the opera house. You absolutely may not drive there, he says, nor take public transport, nor walk. You must go on a licensed coach, crammed in with all the other opera-lovers, under the watchful eye of the boys in blue. Yes, that’s right, the police will escort you to the opera, monitor you through the performance, and then escort you home. You got a problem with that? I imagine you would. You might feel that your right to get from A to B however you please had been curtailed. Now you

Thank god for the Commonwealth Games: at least they gave us a brief respite from football transfer stories. Instead of having to read about an 18-year-old defender being bought by Overambitious Wanderers for the GDP of a medium-sized African nation, we could delight in Norfolk Island beating South Africa at lawn bowls, Kiribati and Nauru winning medals in weightlifting or Sri Lanka sharing a rugby pitch with England and Australia. It was a reminder of the brotherhood (and sisterhood) of sport and made me nostalgic for the days before the money men took over football, rugby and cricket. (Yes, especially cricket: have you noticed we don’t have a drinks break

Yes, alright. It turns out that Germans are pretty good at football. But they aren’t quite so good at everything, as our Barometer column this week points out. Here are some things Germans aren’t very good at: Making reliable car engines. According to a survey by Warranty Direct last year, Audi came bottom, BMW seventh from bottom and Volkswagen ninth from bottom out of 36 manufacturers for engine failures. Making love. According to a spurious website survey of 15,000 women in 2009, German men were the world’s worst lovers, the main complaint being that they were ‘smelly’. (Englishmen were second worst.) Cricket. But they are not the worst. Germany lies between Ghana and Japan in division 8 of the ICC

The best team won, and the best two teams reached the final. This is a comparatively rare event at a world cup. And it was a fine world cup in general, with plenty of things to gladden the heart – the hammering of Spain by the Netherlands, the hammering of Brazil by Germany, the eviction at stage one of teams who think too highly of themselves, the emergence of doughty underdogs (Iran, Ghana, Chile, Costa Rica). The Netherlands remain an enigma; they are either wonderfully fluent or suddenly turn into England. But their record, for a country with a fifth of our population, is excellent. The most distressing thing about

If you’re walking through any built-up area in England between 8 and 10pm this Sunday and you hear a cheer you can be pretty sure it means one thing – Germany have scored yet again. One of the great myths we were fed as children in the 1980s and ‘90s was that the English don’t like the Germans, and in particular the living representatives of all things Teutonic on earth, the German national football team. We love ‘em, and I imagine most English people will be supporting Germany on Sunday. I remember being stuck in the countryside in 2006 and watching the Argentina-Germany quarter-final in a pub; the place went

Can there be anything more perfect than early July in London, when the sun is shining, the sky a cloudless azure and the temperature hovers in the mid-seventies? Sorry, I still do Fahrenheit. It’s party time everywhere, with all the annual events happening, but I don’t do Ascot any more, too waggish, or Henley, too wet, or Wimbledon, too warm. The former has changed radically over the last 20 years, when I was fiercely censured for borrowing another woman’s Royal Enclosure badge, on a dare that no one would recognise me. Now these high jinks would be deemed innocent in comparison to the behaviour that goes on: people snogging, passing

For the moment we only have one genius song by Tom Rosenthal, Hey Luis Don’t Bite Me (hear it below), but surely a full-blown musical isn’t far away. In the meantime we can’t wait for Hey Luis to hit the football stands: ‘There’s a party in your brain, no one is invited and no one ever came, what is going on? what on earth is going on in there? There’s magic in your feet. Diamonds in your feet, wolves in your eyes, Wait for the surprise, wait for the big surprise. Hey Luis Luis don’t bite me, Tough to be a genius, tough to be a man, tough to be a horse,

What a fabulously boring England performance. I watched it only because I had this to write and now feel resentful towards you, which is unfair. Because I don’t suppose you want to hear anything about it, really. The inquest into our national team’s appalling performance at this World Cup (“I couldn’t have asked for any more from the players” – ©Roy Hodgson, every game. Well in which case, mate, you’re the wrong bloke for the job.) has of course already begun. It is being said that Woy has been given an easy ride – which is a way, I suppose, of not giving him one. But when we look for

Still going on, is it, the World Cup? There have been some fine games and some poor games with surprisingly thrilling conclusions. Ronaldo, with possibly the worst haircut I have seen on a human being ever, provided a wonderful chipped cross for Portugal to equalise against the USA; neither team, one suspects will trouble the big boys and I doubt the Portuguese will get out of the group. Good! Russia may also fail to do so and have been exactly as boring as Russia always are when it comes to the final stages of a World Cup. Belgium, meanwhile, look rather less menacing than all the experts suggested they would

The pundits will be doing some quick revisionism. Far from ‘making progress’ if not being “quite the finished article” (© everyone), England has performed less well than they did in the last tournament in which we took part and when everyone agreed we were shite. In fact so far this has been England’s worst ever performance in a world cup. Again – wasted set-pieces, defensive torpor and vulnerability and a complete absence of wit in attack. These are fairly serious flaws, to which you can add another woeful performance from the ubiquitous Stevie G. I think it is a delusion to suggest that progress has been made. I notice some