Sport

The confused world of Duhan van der Merwe must seem more confused than usual after last weekend. The Scotland winger with an accent that sounds more Western Cape than Western Isles found himself crowned man of the match despite Scotland’s defeat by England at Twickenham, while at the same time being scapegoated as the man who lost the game and the Calcutta Cup for his adopted nation. Van der Merwe, who at 6ft 4in and nearly 17 stone could easily be mistaken for a lock forward, was roundly criticised for cutting away from the posts rather than towards them when he ran in the try right at the end of

It’s easy to not quite get the Super Bowl. What exactly is it: a sporting event, a music show, a fashion parade for the world’s coolest pair of shades, a new version of the Chippendales with the hunks wearing tight trousers and skid lids? Or, in its latest incarnation, a chance for the world’s most frenetic law-maker to sink his last putt in a round of golf with Tiger Woods, board Air Force One and say: ‘Fly me to New Orleans.’ Or is it a chance to watch several vast and amiable black guys bulging out of their suits and bantering away about a possible three-peat, while Trombone Shorty plays

A good place to catch the highbrow sports journalist in action is the ‘Pseuds Corner’ column of PrivateEye, where he (and it’s always a ‘he’) regularly appears. Here you will discover that to contemplate Manchester City’s mid-season loss of form is ‘like sitting in Rome in 410 and watching the Visigoths pour over the horizon’, warm to the spectacle of Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk ‘striding about the place like the 17th Earl of Egham with a quiver of pheasants over one shoulder’, or learn that the mothers of the former Everton manager Sean Dyche and the French national coach Didier Deschamps both worked in the textile industry, which may explain

Winter’s almost done and spring’s on the way. We can tell because the Six Nations is about to muscle into view – with the battle of the world’s best national anthems as Wales meet France at the Stade de France on Friday evening. This year’s tournament could be even better than last year’s, but we always say that – and if France live up to some of the rhapsodic predictions the whole thing could go flat as a wet weekend in Calais as Les Bleus romp to a runaway victory. Some pundits have been advising the other five nations to send out for white flags ready to run up the

Have you booked your tickets for the World Test Championship yet? Did you even know it’s on? What seemed like a pretty good idea has become mired in the mind-numbing complexity of the scoring. Currently England, who you might think of as quite a good Test-playing nation, are languishing in sixth place, not least because the Bazball bludgers have lost three of their last five matches. England lie just above Bangladesh, who have won only one of their last five. Ben Stokes seemingly hates the competition because his team are penalised for slow over rates, though he would change his tune if England had a chance of winning it. What

Luke ‘The Nuke’ Littler, born two weeks after the first iPhone was unveiled, stormed the Professional Darts Corporation world championships last week to become, at 17, the sport’s youngest ever world champion. How Littler behaved after his win shows how different young sports stars are today. Littler didn’t celebrate by going out drinking; no hotel rooms were trashed. Instead, within hours of his quarter- and semi-final victories, he was on the video-game streaming website Twitch via phone call to his red-headed gaming friend Morgan Burtwistle – known online as ‘AngryGinge’. Streaming is the new drinking for semi-celebs and it’s not something they grow out of AngryGinge, 23, is one of

You would have to be living a very sheltered life not to have noticed that the Premier League this season is one of the best and the brightest for years. Mainly because it is not permanently dominated by the Big Six – though admittedly one of Liverpool, Arsenal or Chelsea is almost certain to win the title. But exciting, unpredictable, well-managed sides like Nottingham Forest, Bournemouth, Fulham and Brighton mean that more or less any side can beat any other. Sam Konstas is pencil thin and doesn’t look old enough to get served in the Bush and Tucker tavern in his native Sydney Though bafflingly Manchester City can hardly be

It was quite a year for some of the worst of sport – America’s golfers, already among the richest and greediest men on the planet, wanting a massive extra bung to pitch up for the Ryder Cup and, equally noisome, Bill Sweeney, chief executive of the Rugby Football Union, paying himself £1.1 million while announcing a loss of £37.9 million. That salary included a performance-based one-off payment of £358,000. Performance? Well may you ask. As Francis Baron, a former RFU chief, observed sagely: ‘We are paying stellar salaries for junk-bond performances.’ Fair enough in my view, and that’s not even looking at the England rugby team’s less than stellar showing.

Under a dark sapphire sky, tearing across grass as green as a lick of new paint, Mitchell Starc raced in to launch the first ball of the latest Australia vs India Test series last Friday. The murmur from the crowd of more than 30,000 at Perth’s Optus Stadium grew louder with every stride the tall, lean quickie took as he neared his point of delivery… is there anything more exciting than Test cricket at its best? In countries that still take the five-day game seriously, big crowds stillfill big arenas Most sporting contests start slowly – the cautious boxers circling each other, the centre forward tapping the ball backwards from

Tedious narcissist blowhard Jake Paul will fight Mike Tyson on Saturday in a meaningless freakshow in Texas that will likely – thanks to the fact it is being internationally streamed by Netflix – be the most watched boxing match in history. Naturally, both men will make millions.  That the contest has little to do with sport but rather is being summoned into existence as ‘content’, the term now used for anything (dwarf tossing, unboxing videos, weird mukbang eating shows) that can be streamed digitally for the purpose of attracting eyeballs and selling advertising or subscriptions, is a point so obvious it hardly needs stating. Sadly, it makes it no less

When it comes to dishing out God’s gifts, you feel the Almighty could be a little more even-handed. Take Joseph-Aukuso Suaalii for example. He is the extraordinary young centre who helped steer Australia to that exhilarating victory over England at Twickenham last weekend in one of the most thrilling games ever seen there. Suaalii was playing his first ever senior match in rugby union at the age of just 21. As a youngster his school had to seek special dispensation for him to play in the first XV as he was under 14. He later switched to rugby league and at 17 made his debut for the Sydney Roosters in

When my youngest son Charlie was seven he was talent-spotted by a QPR scout who saw him playing football in the park and invited to try out for the junior academy. I struggled to take this seriously – he still couldn’t ride a bicycle – but duly turned up at a ‘sports academy’ in Willesden, a secondary school, where the trials were held. To my astonishment, a QPR coach told me Charlie had potential and offered to enrol him in a programme that involved spending two hours every Wednesday evening at this school. This wasn’t the junior academy, but a level below. Charlie was keen and after talking it over

Your starter for ten: who was the last English manager to win the top flight of English football? Treat yourself to a half-time pie and a mug of Bovril if you said Howard Wilkinson, who took the First Division championship with Leeds United in 1992, the final season before the formation of the Premier League. Since then nothing: now the top four teams in the country are managed by a Spaniard (Guardiola at Man City), a Dutchman (Arne Slot at Liverpool) and two more Spaniards (Mikel Arteta and Unai Emery at Arsenal and Villa). The only three English managers in the top flight are Eddie Howe at Newcastle (currently 12th),

Sailing’s very own ubermensch Sir Ben Ainslie has every right to be considered the world’s most competitive bloke. Those who knew him as a teenager say he always had just two ambitions: to bag a sackful of Olympic medals, and to win the America’s Cup for Britain. Well he didn’t have much trouble becoming the most successful sailor in Olympic history, with four golds and a silver. The America’s Cup, however – the ultimate challenge for yacht-racers – is proving a bit trickier. The America’s Cup is pursued by some of the planet’s most steely-eyed sportsmen You might think this is a preposterous event, bearing little relationship to anything you

It’s a sunny October morning at a bull-breeding ranch north of Seville, and 82-year-old Frank Evans is preparing to step into the ring. Born in Salford, Evans is one of the few British men ever to become a professional bullfighter, or torero. There is something of the retired rock star about him. He is dressed in the traditional matador’s outfit of black trousers, white shirt and red-and-black waistcoat. Although a little frail, he is toned. His thinning hair is dyed brown but still reaches his shoulders. ‘There are a million people in the local cemetery who’d love to have my eye problem’ Evans and I are here for a tienta

Double jab, right, hook body, duck, right… Right, left, right, upper, four hooks… Ten straight punches… And ten more… Twenty roundhouse kicks… Now the other leg… When I tell people that I’ve started kickboxing, they tend to think they’ve misheard. It’s true I’m not who one might think of as a typical fighter. I’ve spent my life working with books and now along with the books I juggle three kids and a dog. The closest I usually get to fighting is when I drag my whippet away from a scuffle in the park, or get elbowed out of the way in the school bake-sale scrum. Although I always seem to