Sport

Tuesday

8 Nov 2022
Julie Burchill
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 have used the Black Lives Matter movement as a cover for their own venality, kneeling to indicate that they were part of the solution to social injustice rather than part of the problem.

It’s a lonely life for Wags

Thursday

3 Nov 2022
Roger Alton
Roger Alton
The future of sport is in the Middle East

When the burly honchos of the Rugby League World Cup gushed about taking the game to new heights, no one was actually thinking about the Golan Heights – but that’s where we are. What sounds like a fascinating quarter--final takes place on Friday (as I write) when the dominant team in global rugby league, Australia, take on Lebanon in Huddersfield – the birthplace of the game. Amid the blizzard of sporting world cups currently taking place across the globe, this match has it all. The Lebanese team, known as the Cedars, are coached by Australian Michael Cheika, one of the world’s most eminent coaches and a former boss of the Wallabies’ rugby union side. That’s an awful lot of rugby in the mix already. And in an eye--watering bit of multitasking, after the game in Huddersfield, Cheika sets off for London where the rugby union team he now coaches, Argentina, will be England’s opponents at Twickenham on Sunday.

The future of sport is in the Middle East

Wednesday

19 Oct 2022
Roger Alton
Roger Alton
Rugby union needs its own Richard Thompson

Dear oh dear, as exasperated kings are known to murmur – just look at the state of rugby union. But if our monarch had to pass judgment on the catastrophe enveloping the game in England, you imagine his language would be stronger than that. Mind you, a decent king is just what rugby needs: heads have to be seriously knocked together – off the field – if the game is to survive in anything like its current form. This column feels no shame in returning to this theme; after all, it’s not often that a major sport finds itself looking down the barrel. It’s clear that the current organisational structures don’t work: the two big beasts, the Rugby Football Union and Premiership Rugby, have in some ways mutually exclusive interests which can’t be good for the game.

Rugby union needs its own Richard Thompson

Wednesday

5 Oct 2022
Roger Alton
Roger Alton
English rugby is in crisis

Make no mistake: the game of rugby, which many of us love so much, is in serious trouble: it will have to change or die. The game’s scarily existential issue on the field – especially the brain health of those who play it – is one thing. But what is going on inside the heads of those who run the sport? The financial clouds hovering over English rugby are as menacing as Billy Vunipola coming on to the ball at full speed from the back of the scrum. Worcester Warriors are just the start: Wasps are in trouble, and Bristol could be next. There will be more. Only Leicester, Northampton and Harlequins seem out of the woods. Too much money is going out from the clubs and not enough coming back in. It’s as simple as that.

English rugby is in crisis

Wednesday

21 Sep 2022
Roger Alton
Roger Alton
Will Erling Haaland score 50 goals this season?

Don’t bother watching those gazillion-dollar TV prequels to The Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones. Who needs gratuitous nudity, multiple dragons and surprise beheadings when the real Nordic legend is bang in front of us, his mighty frame squeezed into the light blue of Manchester City and devouring the grass of the Etihad? (Though not literally, yet.) He is an outlandish--looking creature from the far north, clearly designed by some dotty scientist, faster, bigger, stronger and more ruthless than anyone else in football and effortlessly leaping higher too. Quick to smile, often at awkward moments, he moves effortlessly with that curious stiff-armed gait as he outruns everyone else on the pitch. He is more or less the perfect creation apart from a tiny bug in some computer’s language programme that means his English is slightly awkward, a bit otherworldly, unlike most Norwegians who speak English better than you or me.

Will Erling Haaland score 50 goals this season?

Saturday

17 Sep 2022
William Skidelsky
Roger Federer is the Shakespeare of tennis

It was the news we were supposed to be ‘dreading’: the confirmation that Roger Federer was finally hanging up his racket. But when I heard the announcement on Thursday, my feelings were more akin to pained relief. For a long time now, being a Federer fan has felt a bit like being in a relationship which remains officially ‘on’, but which in most meaningful senses has expired. Where once it was replenished by a steady stream of matches (virtually every week, a brand-new tournament, a new opportunity to revel in the powers of the man), it had long since become an expertise in retrospection, a matter of replaying (yet again) those YouTube videos of past glories: that triumph over Nadal in Australia in 2017; that wonder win over Djokovic at Roland Garros in 2011.

Roger Federer is the Shakespeare of tennis

Thursday

8 Sep 2022
Roger Alton
Roger Alton
Drama at Lord’s: Stumped is a treat for cricket fans

So farewell to cricket’s The Hundred tournament, or what seemed by the end to be beefy South Africans in ‘Butterkist’ shirts belting sixes over cow corner off some fairly inoffensive county seamers. Does anyone remember a single result? Or really have any loyalty? Fine, have it as a marketing exercise to raise a few quid for the game, but there aren’t enough great players. It felt a bit like some upgraded pub cricket – and it’s going to be with us for years. What could be massively more significant for the game in the long term is over the Atlantic, where the former England star Liam Plunkett is one of many former players attached to a new £100 million plan for a professional T20 league in America next summer, in six big cities.

Drama at Lord’s: Stumped is a treat for cricket fans

Thursday

25 Aug 2022
Roger Alton
Roger Alton
I fancy Emma Raducanu’s chances at Flushing Meadows

British tennis fans famously only acknowledge the sport exists for a couple of weeks in the middle of summer in SW19. But they ought to think about changing the habit of a lifetime over the next couple of weeks, as Emma Raducanu prepares to defend her US Open title at Flushing Meadows. It’s been a dizzying year for Bromley’s best. Her journey from star-struck ingenue when she went to New York a year ago to her arrival back there this week as the champion and the face of a thousand magazine covers must have felt like a rocket ride to the Milky Way. But now she has to prove herself all over again. Since winning the US Open a year ago at just 18, she has failed to win another singles title and has won just 12 matches out of 28 on the WTA tour.

I fancy Emma Raducanu’s chances at Flushing Meadows

Thursday

11 Aug 2022
Roger Alton
Roger Alton
What Richard Thompson can do for English cricket

Well alleluia, English cricket doesn’t seem able to put a foot wrong these days. After hitting three cherries with Rob Key, Brendon McCullum and Ben ‘Bazball’ Stokes, they may well have struck the jackpot with the appointment of Richard Thompson, the Surrey chairman, to take over as head of the English Cricket Board, something this column has long advocated. Thompson has plenty going for him: uniquely perhaps among the game’s administrators he is both traditional and forward thinking. Traditional enough to have realised the Texan conman ‘Sir’ Allen Stanford, with his million-quid pile of money on the Lord’s outfield, was a wrong-un. And forward thinking enough to have championed the women’s game, as well as diversity, with Ebony Rainford Brent’s African--Caribbean engagement programme, more quickly than you can say ‘Yorkshire we have a problem’.

What Richard Thompson can do for English cricket

Thursday

28 Jul 2022
A.S.H. Smyth
Why Falklanders are the ones to watch at the Commonwealth Games

Stanley, Falkland Islands I’m not saying the Falklands is a tiny place, but last month, over the course of just a few hours, I had my hair cut by one international athlete and then my passport processed by another. Soon-to-be international athletes, anyway. They’re both part of the Islands’ team for this year’s Commonwealth Games, which is taking place in Birmingham this week. The Falklands has despatched 16 competitors across four sports: badminton, table tennis, cycling and bowls. For many participants, this is their first Commonwealth Games. For some, thanks largely to Covid, it will be their debut international appearance. The youngest, 15-year-old Ben Chater, has not only never competed internationally before, but has only ever played badminton in one place: Stanley leisure centre.

Why Falklanders are the ones to watch at the Commonwealth Games

Friday

8 Jul 2022
Damian Reilly
Damian Reilly
The only thing stopping Nick Kyrgios is himself

It’s hard to watch Nick Kyrgios for long without the sense he wants the world to know he considers everything beneath him. Clearly, journalists are beneath him and he treats them with open contempt at every opportunity, but so too are the officials he abuses, the opponents he mocks and even tennis itself. 'I don’t really like the sport of tennis that much. I don’t love it', he has stated publicly, claiming instead that his real affection is for basketball. To say Kyrgios has failed to realise his talent for tennis is one of sport’s great understatements, and something he seems to accept. 'I thought my ship had sailed,' he said this week about the prospect of ever winning a Slam. When he announced himself on the international stage aged 19 in 2014 by defeating then world number one Rafa Nadal in the fourth round at Wimbledon, having qualified by wildcard, he was hailed as the best young player since Roger Federer.

The only thing stopping Nick Kyrgios is himself

Friday

1 Jul 2022
Damian Reilly
Damian Reilly
The glorious return of the England cricket team

Let civilisation fall apart if it must. I no longer care. The England men’s cricket team is suddenly playing with such swaggering magnificence that everything else – endless culture wars, inflation, even the threat of hypersonically delivered nuclear annihilation from Russia – pales into insignificance. I just want to watch my heroes – Ben Stokes, Joe Root and the rest – play the game I love like deities. If Putin is going to press the big red button then so be it. As the temperature rises to a million degrees celsius here in Putney, I will console myself that at least I witnessed Jonny Bairstow’s transcendentally perfect innings at Trent Bridge earlier this month. We deserve this, don’t we? We England cricket fans who over many decades have suffered so much.

The glorious return of the England cricket team

Wednesday

29 Jun 2022
Freddy Gray
Freddy Gray
Why I fancy Emma Raducanu’s chances of winning Wimbledon

I just stuck £15 on Emma Raducanu to win Wimbledon at 22/1 — and I think you should too. I’m no tennis expert, far from it, but I’ve a reasonable sports betting record and like many others I’ve watched Emma with patriotic enthusiasm over the last two years. It’s quite easy to see when she’s hitting form. And, in her victory last night over Alison van Uytvanck, we saw that raw and ridiculous talent that propelled her towards the US Open title last year coming back. Raducanu is a hot streak player — and her hottest streak yet came in America last year, when she just started blasting her way past various high quality opponents to become the first singles qualifier in the Open Era to win a grand slam. Emma struggles with nerves, famously.

Why I fancy Emma Raducanu’s chances of winning Wimbledon

Monday

27 Jun 2022
Simon de Burton
Should Wimbledon ditch its all-white dress code?

As this year’s Wimbledon Championships will demonstrate, tennis has moved on a bit in the past half-century: rackets are no longer wooden, ‘Hawkeye’ settles the ‘You cannot be serious’ moments and the winner of the ‘gentlemen’s singles’ competition will trouser £1.7m (compared with the measly £5,000 Stan Smith took home in 1972). But what happened to those great outfits from the days of Smith, Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors? The striped shirts, the short shorts, the groovy track tops. Where did all the style go? The answer dates back to the late 1990s when the organising committee tightened-up the dress code, side-lining the previous protocol requiring clothing worn on court to be ‘predominantly white’ in favour of a ’90 per cent’ rule.

Should Wimbledon ditch its all-white dress code?

Saturday

18 Jun 2022
Eleanor Harmsworth
‘I’d ride out probably still drunk’: an interview with champion jockey Oisín Murphy

Oisin Murphy is seen as a bad boy of flat racing. He’s one of the best riders in the world but he keeps getting into trouble. He’s been banned from racing for 14 months for breaching coronovirus protocols by going to Mykonos and he failed two alcohol tests last year.  Oisin is now taking some time, as he puts it, to reflect. This year he’s at Royal Ascot without his riding boots for the first time in his career.  I find him in the Parade Ring. A horse obsessive, he immediately starts talking me through the details as the jockeys begin to mount. ‘It’s a very warm day so it’s natural for the horses to sweat,’ he says in his thick Irish accent, pointing to the foam that is beginning to appear under the saddlecloths, ‘but it’s so important to keep them as calm as possible.

‘I’d ride out probably still drunk’: an interview with champion jockey Oisín Murphy

Monday

13 Jun 2022
Alec Marsh
Why the English love lazy sports

Once upon a time, when the fingerprints on the Wimbledon trophy were more or less exclusively British, you could win in SW19 whilst wearing trousers. Even a tie if you go back far enough. But then, back in those days, tennis was a no-sweat sport. Well, perhaps a drop or two, but essentially there was much less of it around than today, when sweatbands, perspiration and frequent towelling off are part of a fetishised display of effort and strain – one that’s often accompanied by verbal ejaculations of sometimes rather alarming severity. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s been forced to mute Wimbledon at times because of the repetitive baseline grunting. But it wasn’t always this way. Long before the relentless moaning, women once played tennis bowling underarm while dressed like Downton Abbey dowagers, while the men, like thrice-1930s winner Fred Perry, even wore sweaters.

Why the English love lazy sports

Wednesday

8 Jun 2022
Theo Davies-Lewis
A new era of Welsh football has begun

As Britain toasted seven decades of the Queen’s reign outside Buckingham Palace, the Welsh basked in their 1600-year survival. Dafydd Iwan, the republican nationalist folk singer, bellowed Yma O Hyd around the Cardiff City Stadium as Wales took on Ukraine in their World Cup qualifier. A simple title – We’re Still Here – makes you want to weep and, then, fight.  What was once a marginal protest tune, composed at the height of Thatcherism after Wales rejected devolution in 1979, is now an apt anthem for spurring on Welsh footballers. Until recent years they were not a celebrated or well-known species but Gareth Bale, Aaron Ramsey and Joe Allen have changed all that. A surprising ascent during Euro 2016 (when the country reached the semi-finals) created excitement for the future.

A new era of Welsh football has begun

Friday

6 May 2022
Mark Mason
The truth about Three Lions

During last year’s European Championship, England football fans switched, for some reason, from ‘Three Lions’ to ‘Sweet Caroline’ by Neil Diamond (‘so good, so good, so good’). If anything can make them switch back it’s the Football Association, who this week said they were thinking of dropping the Baddiel and Skinner anthem as England’s official song, because it could be seen as ‘arrogant’. Football fans are like children, and as any parent could have told the F.A., if you want to make sure someone does something then just tell them not to do it. The F.A. quickly had to issue a statement confirming there were no plans to change. David Baddiel himself feels the F.A. have long disliked the song. ‘I think it’s the notion – misinterpreted by many people – that “football’s coming home” means that England owns football and we are the homeland of football.

The truth about Three Lions

Thursday

14 Apr 2022
Robin Oakley
The glorious return of the Grand National crowd

How wonderful after three years to have the crowds back to enjoy the glorious concoction of skill, bravery, razzmatazz and tear-jerking emotion Aintree’s Grand National meeting always provides. Having begun my working life on the Liverpool Daily Post in the days when developers’ greed nearly destroyed this national treasure, I relish my annual pilgrimage. Competition is almost as hot as at the Cheltenham Festival but somehow it comes without the angst. ‘You feel like it’s a party,’ said trainer Dan Skelton. ‘You are part of a carnival. I don’t drink but those who do tell me that they do that well here too.’ ‘Cheltenham is about pressure,’ said Grand National-winning trainer Gordon Elliott. ‘Aintree is more relaxed.

The glorious return of the Grand National crowd

Tuesday

5 Apr 2022
Theo Davies-Lewis
Why the Welsh are turning their backs on rugby

In the space of a few days last month, two games were held a mile apart in Cardiff. The first was the concluding episode of the Six Nations tournament, the second a crucial World Cup football qualifier. Beyond jubilation and disappointment, the occasions exposed the gulf between the two most popular sports in Wales: the former highlighting the crisis of datedness that has engulfed rugby, the latter demonstrating why football has gone on to reflect a more confident, vibrant and relevant Welsh identity. The age-old debate of what is Wales’ national sport has never been so easy to settle. Gareth Bale’s talismanic triumph over Austria was a stark contrast to the lethargic response of the Welsh XV to the Italians, who overcame the embarrassing hubris that had seeped into a Wales team too busy basking in the glory of milestone caps for Alun Wyn Jones and Dan Biggar.

Why the Welsh are turning their backs on rugby