A friend organised a blithely bonny evening of boxing nostalgia last week in Herefordshire’s little Welsh border town of Leominster to honour one-time British and Empire welterweight champion Cliff Curvis, who has close connections with the area. It is 60 years since the Swansea stripling of 17 first answered the bell for his opening round
England’s cricketers are up on the High Veldt, not only taking on South Africa in the fourth Test match, but also their own demons as they strive to reinvigorate all the suddenly evaporated boastful optimism about giving the Australians a run for their money in the Ashes contest in the summer. As England fannied and
There is a calming domestic languor about new year sport. Pleasant. Like things used t’be. Olde tyme talk is of minnows and giant-slayers and the ‘magic’ of the Cup, and this weekend’s FA Cup third-round matches are bound to provide — as they have been doing for a century and beyond — a few memorable
With 2004’s multinational motley done, dusted and delivered, other activities can bloom. The jingo-jangle palaver and babel of the Olympics, European soccer, and the Ryder Cup are now consigned to musty files, and a happy new year is herald to less hyperbole and ballyhoo. The world athletics gala at Helsinki in August will work up
‘Del Boy’ Trotter, television’s engagingly endurable (and perpetually replayed) comic Cockney character created by actor David Jason, forever dreams of putting Peckham on the top-notch international map. Didn’t the wide boy of Mandela Mansions once bid to stage the Miss World competition? ‘I can see it now, Rodney …first Rome, then New York, and after
I fancy football’s most satisfying kick of the year has not been any particular jingo-jangle or hype-hype hooray on the pitch itself, but the cold-eyed gunslingers’ rivalry between two middle-aged obsessives — Sir Alex Ferguson and Monsieur Arsène Wenger, respectively the managers of Manchester United and Arsenal. As an irresistible sideshow it gets better and
These days, I suppose, they would call it a gap year. In my case, it was nearer two. Idling around Africa with a rucksack, that is. Zimbabwe was called Southern Rhodesia then, and in 1961, in my early twenties, I chased a haughty blonde Virginia Veitch from London’s Earls Court, whose pa worked for Barclays
This Saturday, 20 November, and next, Twickenham’s presumptuous clan gathers its travel-rugs round its knees and bays for colonials’ blood. Likewise, the hipflasks will warm cockles and loosen throats to raise the rafters for the boys in green, blue and red to strut the hard yards in Dublin, Edinburgh and Cardiff. While rugby’s autumn internationals
Six Jones boyos were picked for the Wales rugby union XV which played South Africa last Saturday — Adam, Dafydd, Duncan, Ryan, Stephen and Steve. BBC commentator Eddie Butler said the knack had been to identify them by their hair — ‘blond, dark or ginger’. Eddie’s a better man than me — five of them
Wise guys steer clear of soccer till the clocks go back. The long muddy slurp and slog of winter are now properly under way. Mind you, this time autumn’s warm-up lap has offered an instructive preamble if not, as we shall doubtless see by Easter, a necessarily telling one. In England, the cosmopolitan London strut
Thirty years ago this very day took place what some sages nominate as the greatest single happening in the whole history of sports. Which I reckon is stretching it a bit. Just consider a few hundred other back-page occurrences — from Genesis Kid Cain v. Sugar Boy Abel to, well, last week’s Boston Red Sox