Football

Not so much the hair dryer: more a gentle home perm. Contemplating the increasingly less youthful visage of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer as he looked on powerlessly while his very expensive Manchester United side were dismembered by Liverpool, you couldn’t help wonder what Sir Alex Ferguson, glowering and irascible in the stands above, would have done with those players. He would certainly have got something more out of the infantile and malicious Paul Pogba, sent off for a mean tackle which betrayed his manager and his teammates. But as Solskjaer was clearly a Ferguson appointment, shouldn’t the old bully take a share of the responsibility? With a weak board and a

‘Dad, why is it that whenever we go anywhere, we’re always running to catch a train?’ asked Charlie, my 13-year-old. This was just over a week ago and Charlie and I, along with 16-year-old Ludo, were running from the Holiday Inn Express in Birmingham to Snow Hill station in the hope of catching the 7.25 p.m. to the Hawthorns. Miss that and we’d be in trouble because the next one wasn’t until 7.57 p.m. and we’d be late for kick-off. We were there to watch QPR play West Brom and the match started at 8 p.m. Charlie’s right. He and I have vowed to go to as many QPR games

The fighting started just as Caroline turned right on to the Uxbridge Road after emerging from QPR’s stadium on Loftus Road. About 25 football fans began punching and kicking each other in the middle of the road, forcing the pedestrians on the crowded pavement to surge backwards to avoid being caught up in the mêlée. Caroline suddenly found herself pinned against a shop window along with two of our sons, barely able to move. I was still on Loftus Road with our third son, struggling to re-attach the wheel of his bicycle, which he’d left locked up outside the stadium. I glanced up when I heard the commotion and saw

Before the television presenter Guto Harri took the knee live on air — which cost him his job at GB News last week — he explained that his understanding of the gesture had changed. Having initially thought of it as political with a capital ‘p’, he now realised that in the eyes of most people, including England’s young football players, it is simply a way of expressing your opposition to racism, as well as solidarity with its victims. It is not an expression of support for the Black Lives Matter organisation or its more controversial aims. In retrospect, that seems pretty obvious. Professional footballers, who tend to be multi-millionaires, drive

Late on Sunday night, less than an hour after England lost on penalties to Italy in the European championship final, a mural of the United striker Marcus Rashford was defaced in his hometown of Withington in south Manchester.  Shortly afterwards the defaced part of the mural was hidden by black bin-liners and an online campaign was launched by the artist to repair the mural. Mr S believes the first report from the Manchester Evening News described the vandalism as ‘indecipherable lettering, daubed in blue paint on Sunday night, [which] can barely be seen over the powerful black and white image.’ On Monday morning, Greater Manchester Police released a statement which

I failed a moral test last weekend. A friend offered me a free ticket to the Euro 2020 final and I accepted, knowing my 13-year-old son Charlie would be bitterly disappointed. I had told him I’d try to get two tickets so I could take him, but all my efforts had come to nought and we were resigned to watching it at home. When I broke the news that I’d be going but not taking him, he looked heartbroken, as I knew he would be. I spent hours trying to justify it to myself afterwards. Surely, if he’d been offered a ticket by a friend, he would have taken it?

Thank goodness that’s over. The Euros were fun and all that but now, please, can we get back to real football instead of this Disneyfied version of the game that brings out the best – and worst – of us? From little cars that bring the footballs on to the pitch to those toe-curling TV idents for Alipay and other sponsors, it’s time to put away the over-glorified spectacle of England losing and concentrate on watching real football with real football fans. That means getting depressed every other week instead of every other year; looking down our noses at anyone flying a flag from their car or eating popcorn at

No sooner had Bukayo Saka’s penalty kick thudded into the gloves of the Italian goalkeeper than you could see it coming. Racists were not going to miss the opportunity to attack the England team. And sure enough, within hours the sewer that is Twitter (even at the best of times) had become a torrent of effluent. I don’t know a great deal about coding, but I can’t think it is really all that difficult to pick up certain words and remove them Yes, it does show there is still an underbelly of racism in English society — even if the charge that we are a country of ‘systemic racism’ left