Spectator Life

Glorious Goodwood has hopefully saved the best until last with two fabulous days of racing still to come. The detractors will point out that too many races on this undulating, turning track have hard-luck stories and the draw is often all-important as well. However, when the sun shines, this meeting is hard to beat in terms of highlighting flat racing at its best. I am already heavily invested in the Coral Golden Mile (today 3 p.m.) in which it’s a huge advantage to be drawn in single figures. Johan bucked the trend on soft ground last year when he won from stall 18 but the previous seven winners were from berths 1, 3, 3, 3, 2, 5 and 2. Those who love statistics will be in no rush to back a horse with a double-figure draw.

Mondays and Thursdays are my days. Eight a.m. Before breakfast. The pool opens at seven for those zealous souls who like to swim before going to work. They’re gone by eight when the pool is divided into five lanes with arrows telling you which way up and which down. I like lanes. You know where you are with lanes. Let those mad fools in the fast lane work up a storm with their splashy-flashy butterfly, the sexy crawl, the somersault flip back to the beginning and off again. I’m in the slow lane. It could be a metaphor for my life. I like lanes. You know where you are with lanes I grew up by the sea and learnt to swim when I was six.

I was standing in a filthy sports hall at the back of the local leisure centre. A bony man with a shaved head handed me a green belt. ‘Well done, Master Zak,’ he said. Ten-year-old me bowed and walked towards the wall of parents. They had been stood there for three hours, watching other people’s children take turns punching the air, shouting a few mispronounced words of Korean. Someone played ‘Eye of the Tiger’ through a tinny speaker. One of the bug-eyed ‘instructors-in-training’ gave me a toothy grin and a thumbs up. I’m almost certain he worked there for free. Sitting in the back of the car on the way home, dobok still on, I realised that after four years of combat sports and a variety of colourful belts, I had learnt nothing about defending myself.

Take a bow, SUMMERGHAND. Trainer David O’Meara’s gallant old warrior will be participating in his 100th race tomorrow when he contests the Moet & Chandon International Stakes over seven furlongs (Ascot, 3 p.m.). The achievements of this gelding are remarkable since he made his racecourse debut at Doncaster in May 2017. He has won 17 of his 99 starts and amassed more than £624,000 in prize money. Those victories, all of them over six furlongs, include the Unibet Stewards’ Cup at Glorious Goodwood in 2020 and the Virgin Bet Ayr Gold Cup in 2022. At the height of his powers, Summerghand was running off an official mark of 113 whereas tomorrow, aged ten, he will be running off just 91.

Trainer David O’Meara loves heading down from his North Yorkshire stables to plunder some of the big summer handicaps with his best horses. At the top of his list of aims are the most valuable contests at Glorious Goodwood and he doesn’t mind running three or four of his string in the same race to increase his chances of landing a nice prize. O’Meara has won two of the last four runnings of the Coral Golden Mile and, with a first prize of more than £77,000 this year, there is no doubt the handler will be targeting the race again in two weeks’ time. My strong fancy for this contest on 2 August is BLUE FOR YOU who returned to form last Saturday when he won the John Smith Racing Handicap at York for the second year running.

It’s 1 a.m. in our small cathedral city and car horns are honking in jubilation. From down the street comes the sound of smashing bottles, and a deep bellowing roar, growing louder as the ‘whooahs’ and the chants echo off Georgian terraces. Well, it’s a country town on a Saturday night; a certain amount of lairiness is priced in. But God, this lot seem loud. Football? Rugby? I’m sure I read somewhere that an Olympics is due. One thing is clear, though: the sports people are doing sports stuff again and no power on earth will stop them. All you can do about it – all you’ve been able to do about it for your entire adult life – is tug the duvet about your head and wait for it to go away.

Many previous football tournaments have had a signature motif: the Mexican wave in 1986, the irritating vuvuzelas in South Africa 2010, the firework up the backside in London in 2021. At Euro 2024, that motif has been the hurling of plastic beer glasses. They have been thrown, in celebration or anger, by the Croatians, the Serbs, the Albanians, the Dutch, the Spanish, by our German hosts and by the excitable Scots. The latter would doubtless have thrown more had they had cause, or stuck around longer. But it was their use as projectiles by England fans which attracted most media attention – and which is likely to result in a fine from Uefa’s Control, Ethics and Disciplinary Body.

Forget the extraordinary achievements – the reason we’re going to miss James Anderson is that, as a man, he’s so ordinary. Yes, he’s played more Tests for England than anyone else (188), and taken more wickets (701 and counting, at least for another day or two). Indeed his haul is easily the best by any fast bowler in the world – only the spinners Muttiah Muralitharan and Shane Warne did better, Warne by a very slim margin. Goodbye then, Jimmy, you routine superstar, you everyday hero Anderson has bowled more Test maidens than Phillip de Freitas bowled Test overs. (This is a tribute to the former rather than a dig at the latter, who played 44 times for his country.) Shoaib Bashir, one of his teammates in this final match, wasn’t even born when Anderson played his first.

Ian Chappell, the flinty Australian captain, has said that after giving cricket to the world the English did nothing further to develop the game. That original gift, it might be argued, was a fairly significant bequest, but Chappell could point to postwar history. In his lifetime, cricket has been shaped by Australians, West Indians, and Indians. Oh, the ghastliness of English football! The dim players, detached from the world in their grim mansions It is harder to challenge the view that the English, who codified the laws of Association Football in 1863, have spent the last century resting on their oars. The national team has won the World Cup once, in 1966, when the country served as host, and has never won the European Championship, though that may change this week.

It’s impossible not to like and admire Charlie Fellowes: he is one of those people who gives 100 per cent to whatever he sets his mind to. The Newmarket trainer’s enthusiasm for racing and the horses in his care is infectious, and he is always willing to talk to the media about plans for his stable stars.  In short, Fellowes is a wonderful ambassador for the sport and he deserves all the big-race success that he has enjoyed in his first decade as a trainer. By his own high standards, Fellowes has had a relatively quiet season so far but I am convinced that the second half of his season will be better than the first half for him. My thinking partly comes from the fact that the astute handler is adamant that he has some really promising two-year-olds among his 65-strong string.

Just after Andy Murray made the winning pass that won him Wimbledon for the first time in 2013, he looked up to the sky in pain. Not laughing with joy as Djokovic does when he wins a slam or weeping graciously as Federer did before he quietly put on his Rolex, but a sheer plea of existential pain. And wasn’t pain what Andy Murray was really all about? The emotional pain of the press conferences where he could barely conceal his dislike for the journalists, the pain of a nation’s expectation on his shoulders, and, latterly, the endless physical pain that he spoke of so often. His audience knew his pain too.

Stuttering England aside, it’s been a great Euros so far: the comedy of Scotland, the tragedy of Croatia, the miracle of Georgia. Now that the knockout rounds are upon us, I intend to see every remaining game live in full. This is when the memorable moments will begin in earnest, in these win-or-go-home games: last minute twists, astonishing upsets, penalty shoot-outs. I can’t wait. There’s just one little problem with this plan to saturate myself in football for the next fortnight: Steve and Katrina’s wedding today (Saturday). They are former colleagues of my wife who went on to become good friends and we’ve had the invite stuck by magnet to our fridge door since last summer – since before the Euros qualifying stages had even been completed.

Unless I am being kept in the dark, Spectator Life has no intention of following the lead of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in scrapping their regular racing tips. That said, those sacked are usually the last to know – even when they are paid to predict the future. Kelvin MacKenzie, the legendary former editor of the Sun newspaper, once dismissed his astrologer with the words, ‘As you will no doubt have foreseen… you’re fired.’  Without getting overconfident on the safety of my position, I will continue as normal until told otherwise. Newcastle’s JenningsBet Northumberland Plate card tomorrow is the one and only time each year that I bet on the all-weather surface and that’s because this is a really classy card with some competitive racing.

The day after the Serbia vs England match, while sunbathing on my balcony, I espied an interesting vignette taking place on the lawns beneath my apartment block. A little boy was playing football with a man I took to be his father, who looked like a hipster of the kind you can see by the score in Brighton and Hove; goatee, vintage t-shirt, Converse sneakers and a facial expression strongly implying that he’d been to places which made Planet Earth look like a one-horse town.  You’ve got to really love something naturally, in your bones, to hate a song about a robin The little lad was having the time of his life, kicking the ball at his dad. He was totally living in the moment. The dad? Not so much. In one hand he held a mobile phone which made him a poor goalie.

Lambourn trainer Jonny Portman is a splendid ambassador for horse racing: he is talented, charming and witty. Television presenters and newspaper journalists love interviewing him because his dry sense of humour invariably comes to the fore. Addressing some challenging times for his stable in 2022, he told a racing journalist, ‘I’ve had four owners die this year and I know two more are planning on it. So I do worry.’ Portman invariably gets the best out of his horses – he currently has 45 in training – and, if he had a couple of big-spending owners, he would undoubtedly be competing for the sport’s top prizes more often. Two Tempting is this season’s star for the yard, winning four of his five races and picking up some £120,000 in prize money along the way.

Perhaps Gareth Southgate’s greatest achievement at the England helm has been to inculcate a sense of togetherness in his squads. This had been noticeably absent in teams under those who preceded him: at one point, for example, the first-choice central defence partnership, Rio Ferdinand and John Terry, refused to even talk to each other, while the two best midfielders, Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard, seemed unable to play together.  Strangely, this change was symbolised by some inflatable unicorns. The players were photographed laughing and messing about in a swimming pool during Southgate’s first tournament, the 2018 World Cup, at which he took his team further than any England outfit had in decades.

Aidan O’Brien’s four-year-old colt Auguste Rodin is talented and infuriating in equal measures. When last year’s Betfred Derby winner is good, he is simply superb but when he is bad, he is very poor indeed. He is a nightmare for punters to evaluate because he has been stone last in two of his last five runs but there have been two impressive winning performances during that time too. My big hopes today lie with my two strong fancies for the Kensington Palace Stakes All in all, I am happy to take him on in today’s feature race at Royal Ascot, the Grade 1 Prince of Wales’s Stakes (4.25 p.m.). I am no keener to back Inspiral at skinny odds either after her uninspired comeback when fourth at Newbury, even though I accept that race was very much a prep run for Royal Ascot.