There occurs next week (8–12 September) a sobering little anniversary. Remember 12 months ago and that heady aura of innocent joy and optimism all around? At the end of an enthralling Ashes cricket series through the summer of 2005, England and Australia were locked in a riveting decider in south London. A celebration of cut-and-thrust
While Sunday’s Test farce reverberated far beyond Surrey’s Oval, that county’s favourite son, veteran Mark Ramprakash, was serenely toasting his achievement in becoming the first English batsman to score 2,000 first-class runs in a summer since he did the very same 11 years ago. Good show. It used to be a routine mark for leading
Why does this cricket team select itself? In batting order: George Emmett (capt.), Peter Bowler, Ian Ward, Roger Twose, David Shepherd, Roger Tolchard, Jeff Tolchard, Chris Read (w.k.), John Childs, Jack Davey, Len Coldwell. Seven of them played Test cricket. A serious clue to the county they represent is that guest 12th man is recent
Football’s got a nerve: the Premiership resumes business next week and is already blaringly full of itself, its conceited luminaries strutting about as if England’s abject World Cup show was nothing to do with them. Sanest way to continue enjoying the summer is to ignore anything that concerns football till the clocks go back in
It may be fast and noisy still, but it has become drearily predictable, uncompetitive and even, you might say, totally un-hairy. Even obsessive vroom-vroomers, I fancy, are completely cheesed off with their sport. Certainly to the casual follower, Formula 1 Grand Prix motor racing has just about vanished from the radar. Yet on it drones
Barbados promises a hectic carnival jump-up this weekend in celebration of Sir Gary Sobers’s 70th birthday. I trust the island takes it easy on the literal backslapping of their favourite son. When the Queen knighted him at Bridgetown racecourse that heady day in 1975, the jubilations became too hearty even for the convivial new knight
Ninety years ago this weekend the battle of the Somme had settled into its ghastly inexorability. The excruciating debacle of its opening offensive on 1 July — 19,240 killed, 35,493 wounded, 2,152 missing, the British army’s highest casualty rate in a single day’s fighting — was already logged as a grievous scar on future generations
Yorkshire buried their Fred in his beloved Dales last week. Umpire Dickie Bird gave the main moist-eyed address. Brian Close remembered their debutants’ county curtsey in 1949, both just 18, against Cambridge at Fenners. At the snooty University Arms, the dinner menu was in French. The haughty waiter hovered. Bewildered Brian, the Guiseley mill-worker’s son,
Forget the football, a bizarrely exotic touch of history reverberates around the World Cup final in Berlin’s Olympiastadion tomorrow evening. Listen to this: ‘Berlin was crowded with foreigners and the streets beflagged. Went for a walk down the Unter den Linden, an avenue of banners blowing in the breeze, and everywhere the radio booming achtung
The prediction racket is a sportswriting staple. When the World Cup kicked off three weekends ago this corner boldly blogged the prophecies for The Speccie’s website: that is, the England team would be home for the first week of Wimbledon; the Berlin final on 9 July would finish Argentina 2, Czech Republic 2 (the latter
The Wimbledon tennis begins sharp at 2 p.m. Monday and, as has often been the case, competes with a haughtily oblivious lack of concern against the football World Cup in Germany. The tennis will make for far better telly, and see if I’m not right a fortnight today when what Wimbers still refers to as ‘the
Last Saturday afternoon in Frankfurt’s tent-like Waldstadion, British football writing’s dumpling eminence Malcolm Brodie, 80 next birthday, laid out his pad and his pencils at his pressbox desk. ‘What’s new?’ he could have been excused for muttering in that tinny Ulster snort of his, but the rheumy eyes, deep set in his weathered, walnutty old
In the euphorically barmy delusions of upcoming World Cup invincibility — the English never used to be so insanely carried away when their teams even had a real chance of winning the ruddy thing — I was taken by one nicely observant line on how manager Sven-Goran Eriksson’s qualifying syntax invariably hedges the bets with
Hosepipe bans? Standpipes in the streets? Ah, yes, I remember them well. Prepare for a host of anniversary paeans from us old sweats of 30 summers ago. ‘Sweat’ being the word, or ‘Phew!’ as the headlines had it all through that heatwave summer of 1976, the most relentlessly parched since records began in 1727. By
For football’s partisans, a string of cup finals have been fraying nerves, stirring spirits, salting wounds and jerking tear ducts. For football’s partisans, a string of cup finals have been fraying nerves, stirring spirits, salting wounds and jerking tear ducts. Now it is rugby’s turn. This afternoon’s European club final — the Heineken — delivers a
Romantics as well as purists will be lucky if today’s FA Cup final in Cardiff riddles the cockles and stirs the spirits. Romantics as well as purists will be lucky if today’s FA Cup final in Cardiff riddles the cockles and stirs the spirits. The knockout rounds might have been compelling enough, but for some
Blossom by blossom, the season changes. So should the headlines. Fat chance. Weird times: roll up, roll up for a Lord’s cricket Test even before the mudlarks of winter have picked the teams for their end-of-term deciders. The hanging-baskets and bunting (and the boaters and blazers) might be in colourful place for the opening overs
Any day now, soccer’s World Cup will obliteratingly dominate every back page Any day now, soccer’s World Cup will obliteratingly dominate every back page (although this one, it goes without saying, shall be soberly discriminating). On Monday week (7 May) Sven, Sweden’s sexpot sphinx who coaches England, nominates his first batch of players, to be
Last two standing. For the muddied oafs of winter, this is the cruellest week. So near, yet…. Defeat in a semifinal, they say, is the hardest to bear. There are a lot of them about. Today soccer stages its two FA Cup semis. In the European Champions’ League, Arsenal played the first-leg semifinal this week,
Two white-coated codgers bent over some sticks in north London yesterday morning. One cleared his throat and, in ritual tone of relief and contentment refound, undramatically announced, ‘Play!’ Considering everything, all was well with the world, and the 2006 first-class cricket season was officially under way at Lord’s — MCC v. Nottinghamshire; today begin six