Football

Friday

Sam McPhail

What happened to Italian football?

Neither Sandro Tonali nor AC Milan wanted to part ways. The young midfielder is from the outskirts of the city, has been a fan since boyhood and his dad’s an ultra. He wanted to become a Rossoneri icon like his hero Gennaro Gattuso. The top brass at Milan saw him as a future captain. Tonali was instrumental to the club winning Serie A ­– Italy’s top league – last year and reaching the European Champions League semi-final two months ago. Milan’s legendary manager from the 1990s, Fabio Capello, says Tonali is ‘the recipe to win’ and that he could have played in ‘the great Milan teams’ from 30 years ago. But no

Saturday

Friday

Graham Miller

So long to Luton’s old stadium

I’ve been following Luton Town FC since the singer Helen Shapiro was ‘walking back to happiness’ in the 1960s. Luton is the bungee club of English football. Since reaching the 1959 FA Cup final, they’ve been boldly bouncing up and down the leagues. It’s only now that Helen’s words are coming true. ‘Say goodbye to loneliness’ – Luton is back in the top flight. The promised land of the Premier League. Few seats at the ground are without a pillar blocking some part of the pitch Typically, when they were last in Division One 30 years ago, they voted for the introduction of the EPL – only to be relegated

Tuesday

Mark Mason

Gruesome British folk sports – from cheese-rolling to Hare Pie Scramble

‘Two mobs of men fighting over possession of a ball in a freezing, muddy river in Derbyshire,’ writes Harry Pearson, ‘is the British equivalent of the Rio Carnival.’ He’s not wrong. Brazil may have the sun, but we’ve got the capacity for mindless violence. It’s a trait expressed in many of the folk sports covered in this highly entertaining book. The mass football games (such as the one in Ashbourne), which take place over pitches several miles long, aren’t quite as vicious as they once were. In a Georgian contest between the Men of Suffolk and the Men of Norfolk, nine players died. In Jedburgh, they used an Englishman’s severed

Thursday

Roger Alton

Is Uefa just useless – or is it worse than that?

It’s not clear how many readers of this journal will be affected, but anyone planning a stag weekend in Prague ought to steer clear of the first week of June. That’s when the city hosts the Uefa Conference League final at the 20,000-capacity Eden Arena, home to Slavia Prague. The finalists are West Ham – average home gate a 60,000 sellout – and Fiorentina, average gate 25-30,000. Which raises the question: is Uefa just utterly useless or is it worse than that? This game could have filled Wembley twice over; now it’s like holding the coronation in a parish church Both finalists have been allocated 5,000-odd tickets, with the remainder

Wednesday

Melvyn Bragg

My lunch with Salman Rushdie

I have just come back from spending some days with David Hockney at his house in Normandy. We are making a film about him – the longest film about a single subject I have ever attempted. Like Monet’s, Hockney’s environment is his subject. The great sequence of ‘The Four Seasons’ is from his grounds. He finds all the different blossoms he needs there, and there is a river and a pond. His friend has turned an old barn into a magnificent studio. David is in his mid-eighties but is as sharp as he was the first time I interviewed him for The South Bank Show in 1978. Since then, there

Thursday

Tom Goodenough

TV dramas like Welcome to Wrexham are spoiling sport

Wrexham had never seen anything like it: thousands of fans cheering their team as an open-top bus made its way through the city’s streets. On board, Wrexham’s footballers celebrated their side’s promotion back to the English football league. The club’s star owners, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, were there too – and with them, as usual, came the cameras. The rise of Wrexham has become the subject of a hit Disney+ documentary, Welcome to Wrexham. It’s a feel-good story about Ryan and Rob, two rich and handsome actors from the other side of the Atlantic, taking over a down-and-out club in a depressed industrial heartland and giving it hope. Wrexham

Wednesday

John Armstrong

What the Royal Society of Chemistry gets wrong about free speech

Why has the Royal Society of Chemistry published a 37 page opinion piece entitled ‘Academic free speech or right-wing grievance?’ in their new journal Digital Discovery? Digital Discovery publishes ‘theoretical and experimental research at the intersection of chemistry, materials science and biotechnology’ focusing on ‘the development and application of machine learning’. So it is a little surprising for them to publish a piece that ‘argues that those who wish to have an honest debate about the limits around freedom of speech need to engage that conversation in a manner that avoids resonance with the language of White (heterosexual, cisgender male) supremacy, lest their arguments provide intellectual cover to those who

Tuesday

William Leith

Was this footballer killed for scoring against the Nazis?

Vienna, April 1938. To mark the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by the Third Reich, the German football team plays a match against the Austrian team, which will cease to exist when the match is over. The Austrians are much better, but can’t seem to score – aha, the match has been fixed by the Nazis. And then, in the 70th minute, Austria’s best player, Matthias Sindelar, can’t take the pretence any more and puts the ball in the German net. At the end of the match, to underline his feelings, he performs a victory dance in front of the Nazi dignitaries. This might sound like fiction but it really

Wednesday

Piers Morgan

Sorry Harry, I’m the real media intrusion victim

What an emotional wringer the royal family has put us through in the past two years, from the sadness of Prince Philip’s death to the joyful Platinum Jubilee, then Queen Elizabeth II’s own extraordinarily moving funeral, and now the coronation of her son. I’ve felt so privileged to have been at Buckingham Palace for the last three events, anchoring Fox News coverage in America. After we came off air on Saturday, I mused with my two US co-presenters about what may be the next major royal occasion: a wedding, a funeral, a silver jubilee (Charles would have to live as long as his grandmother for that to happen)? Or God

The Spectator

Letters: The real AI threat

Irreligious tolerance Sir: Your editorial ‘Crowning glory’ (6 May) celebrated the religious tolerance in Britain that will permit a multifaith coronation. However, it didn’t acknowledge that in modern Britain nearly half of people have no religious belief. This acts as a buffer, making religious differences of opinion of less importance. Britain is one of the least religious countries in the world. In more strongly religious countries, such tolerance is harder to find. Michael Gorman Guildford, Surrey Admirals on horseback Sir: If Admiral Sir Tony Radakin only had to march at the coronation (Admiral’s notebook, 6 May), he was fortunate. At the 1953 coronation, Lt Cdr Henry Leach (later Admiral of the

Wednesday

Tuesday

Mark Solomons

The joy of non-league football

On a cold Tuesday night, as the wind whipped in from the North Sea, I joined 220 hardy souls to watch a game of football. Less than a mile away from the Sizewell nuclear plant on the Suffolk coast but light years away from the lurid lights of the Premiership, Leiston FC were playing Ilkeston Town in the Pitching In Southern League – Premier Division Central. As the old joke goes, the attendance was so small it would have been easier to name the crowd changes than the team changes. Welcome to non-league football – in this case the seventh tier of the game’s pyramid system of promotion and relegation.

Thursday

Andrew Downie

Rest in peace, Pelé, the undisputed King of football

When Lionel Messi won the World Cup for Argentina earlier this month, it not only filled the last hole in his trophy cabinet, it also seemed to end the debate over who was the greatest footballer of all time. Football fans have debated for years about whether Messi was equal to Pelé and Diego Maradona, the two long-standing candidates for one of sport’s most futile and yet most sought-after titles. By finally winning the World Cup, fans and pundits the world over ruled en masse; Messi was now the greatest. Pelé’s death on Thursday will reopen that debate and hopefully give pause to those who have sided with the Argentine

Tuesday

John Sturgis

In defence of supporting both England and Wales

Michael Sheen has had a problem with the royal family for some time – and it’s only got worse since William was appointed Prince of Wales. The actor, best known for playing Tony Blair but somewhat to the left of him politically, has criticised the notion of an Englishman being nominal head of the principality. Sheen has lately carved out a niche as a pound-shop Richard Burton addressing motivational monologues to the Welsh football team, to little effect thus far. And he predictably stepped up his campaign ahead of the World Cup: how could William, he asked, reconcile his role as President of the English Football Association with his position

Friday

John Sturgis

The curse of Belo Horizonte

When England play the USA this evening in Al Khor, Qatar, it will be the twelfth time the two sides have met. England have had the upper hand in most of the previous 11, winning eight and recording scores as comfortable as 10-0, 8-1, 6-3 and 5-0. We easily beat them 3-0 at Wembley just three years ago.  And after their respective opening games in this tournament – England thumping Iran 6-2 in their best-ever start to a World Cup, the USA nervy and stuttering by the end of a 1-1 draw with Wales – most neutrals would expect nothing other than a routine win for England. The bookies make England

Monday

Lukas Degutis

In defence of the One Love armband

Wales’ football manager Rob Page was clear about why his team’s captain Gareth Bale would wear the ‘One Love’ armband at the Qatar World Cup: it was about demonstrating support of LGBT rights in a country where there are none. Whatever the pushback from Fifa, Page insisted last month that the armband would be worn: ‘That’s what we believe in, that’s what we stand up for’, he preached. The Welsh team were not alone in taking part. Football captains of eight other European nations – including England’s own Harry Kane – were vocal about their plans to wear the armband to promote inclusivity in a host nation where homosexuality is

John Sturgis

The curious case of the Asian Maradona

When England line up against Iran in Doha today, the VIP seats should be studded with former players from both sides. But one who almost certainly won’t be present is a player with a solid claim to having been the greatest Iranian footballer in history. Because Ali Karimi is a wanted man. The 44-year-old is hugely influential in Iran – he has 13 million social media followers there. But he has positioned himself as such an overt critic of the country’s regime that he’s now living in exile, threatened with arrest – and worse – should he return to or be forcibly taken back to Iran.  An equivalent situation here

Tuesday

Julie Burchill

It’s a lonely life for Wags

As ocean-going metaphors go, the news that a £1 billion cruise liner (usually charging £2,434.80 – love that 80! – for a nine-night jaunt, complete with a shopping mall, 14 jacuzzis, six swimming pools and the longest ‘dry-slide’ at sea) will host England’s Wags during the World Cup in Qatar could not have been more splashy.  This is a particularly bad time for football. The England players are off to Qatar, along with LGBT-friendly football personalities – led by ‘gay icon’ David Beckham – to shill for a country where migrant workers are treated like chattels, women are treated like children and homosexuals are treated like criminals.  Like many greedy charlatans, Premier League footballers appear to

Sunday

Philip Patrick

Football’s problems run far beyond the Qatar World Cup

Are there any redeeming features of the Qatar World Cup? Perhaps one: the tournament has a sane and logical format. Having 32 teams reduced to 16 after the group stage, followed by a straight knock out is easy to understand and should produce an exciting third round of games and plenty of thrills thereafter. But if you do have the stomach for Qatar 2022 savour this comforting crumb: it could be the last time a major tournament is organised in a way that makes sense from a footballing – rather than a revenue generating – standpoint. For let’s look ahead to USA 2026. There might not be human rights concerns