In those fresh, expectant springtimes of long ago, the last week of April was the very quintessence of the changeover — the week he would have bid adieu to the raucous wintery fever-pitch of Highbury and its stately marble halls, sling his football boots into his London landlady’s cupboard, and whistle chirpily down to Paddington
A vibrantly challenging final in Barbados today (Saturday) might at least — and at last — put a smile on the face of cricket’s dismally tedious World Cup. The England team will doubtless be watching at home, behind closed curtains. Let’s hope their new coach has more oomph and isn’t such a stubborn sourpuss as his
Chelsea vs Manchester United: the long-running grudge which has defined English football’s Premiership for most of the winter (and last) could yet be extended to a fevered and passionate play-off decider in Athens on 23 May in the European Cup final itself. Travel agents are rubbing their hands and, doubtless, Greek policemen are anxiously fondling
I daresay bonny Barbados and some blazing cricket in its final fortnight might retrieve disenchantment with the 2007 World Cup. But I doubt it. Bob Woolmer’s calamity still beggars belief but, that apparent outrage aside, the event as a whole has been one of drawn-out, sanitised tedium. The manner in which the colourfully spontaneous joie
Eight teams, and scarcely 10 points between them for months. While the Premiership title has long been an unchallenging two-horse race between Manchester United and Chelsea, the top of English league football’s second tier, the Championship, remains thrillingly, feverishly congested. The frantic, concertina’d eightsome are (alphabetically is safer, so regularly do the leaders change) Birmingham
The appalling crime in Jamaica still has the cricket world in shock, and it was harrowingly eerie this week to be coldly attempting to relish Wisden’s latest arrival, hot off the press. In it, of course, Bob Woolmer features prominently. The new almanack includes a poignant full-page close-up picture of a desperate Bob brandishing (in
Once more unto the breach! Harfleur, Dunkirk and all that guff is being desperately evoked by the public prints and broadcasters. Goodwill may be suffering from donor fatigue but for one more time the nation entreats the England football team to get a grip. Victory in Tel Aviv against Israel today (Saturday) is crucial to qualification
Cricket’s World Cup will be an interminable slog in every sense. It began on Tuesday, 13 March; the final is still six weeks away (28 April). With only a month to sort out 32 bristlingly competitive teams, football’s World Cup is comfortably more user-friendly, while rugby’s version already has plans in hand to compress itself
Six Nations rugby musters for its last convulsive heaves this weekend and next. Today (10 March) in Edinburgh, the appealing Irish XV should confirm their latest Triple Crown, while victory at Twickenham tomorrow will, to all intents, settle yet another championship for France. Both their matches next Saturday, respectively against Italy and Scotland, should each
By next Wednesday evening, uniquely, five British clubs could be in the last eight of the European Champions’ Cup. There is still, as they say, a lot of football to be played, but I suppose even the possibility remains testament to the strength at the top of the British club game. Mind you, only a
Football’s relishable League Cup final at Cardiff tomorrow has Arsenal and Chelsea, the big guns from London, intriguingly squaring up for what is, officially, the last time English clubs play a showpiece event in a ‘foreign’ country. Well, that’s the plan anyway. Personally, I wouldn’t bet on it. I fancy it is still anyone’s guess whether
There was generally bonny acclamation as the French rugby team ran out to play Ireland at Dublin’s Croke Park stadium last Sunday. I forecast a significantly tauter edge to proceedings next Saturday when the English XV takes to the Republic’s hallowed sports field and lines up in front of the Irish Army Band to belt
Ignore an atoning little flurry at the death, England’s cricket winter has been a ghastly shambles. Embarked upon with such overweening bumptiousness — an arrogance admonished by this corner in the autumn, I might add — the expedition has long been a wrecked write-off all round. The Ashes urn was spinelessly surrendered — against admittedly a
Predicting last week’s raging gales would subside in time for the Saturday football programme, a BBC weatherman forecast, nicely I thought, ‘a weather-free sports weekend’. Sixty years ago this week it was by no means that as an unrelenting 48-hour Arctic blizzard on Thursday and Friday, 23 and 24 January 1947, entombed Britain in a monochrome
Day and night, night and day …relentlessly the football season slurps on through the January mud — mud and money, slurp, slurp — transfer ‘windows’, raucous headlines, phoney passions torn to tatters, ‘hot’ news stories cold and discarded in a blink. British professional football preens itself as pre-eminent in the culture, and broadcasting and the public
Ruminating here a couple of weeks ago on those whom the wretched reaper had gaily swiped down last year, Christmas deadlines had a trio of significant hall-of-famers missing: both the Oz horseman Scobie Breasley and the British runner Sydney Wooderson died on 21 December, and a week later the oldest surviving English Test cricketer, Norman
If you thought you’d got away with one ruddy World Cup in 2006, then brace yourself: there are two of them in 2007, so obviously a double helping of the baloney which accompanies them. Cricket’s World Cup is staged in the Caribbean through March and April; rugby’s in France in September and October. Anniversaries to
Requiems for heavyweights: sporting history’s seven super-dupers who died in 2006 were, at 79, football’s Ferenc Puskas, cricket’s Fred Trueman (75) and Sir Clyde Walcott (80), US boxer Willie Pep (84) and his compatriot, double Olympian Bob Mathias (75), rugby’s sprinter Ken Jones (84), and Dr Kevin O’Flanagan (86), who played international tennis and golf
Ashes to ashes. Oh, England our England! First the football, then the rugby …and now the prettiest balloon of them all has been well and truly pricked so soon after its jingo-jangled and so jauntily buoyant launch. I sense blame about to be heaped on the wives and girlfriends, the dreaded Wags. Cricket’s lot have
This year’s Sportsbook of the Year is Unforgivable Blackness (Pimlico) This year’s Sportsbook of the Year is Unforgivable Blackness (Pimlico), a vividly enlightening new biog of Jack Johnson, the first black American boxing champion, by Geoffrey C. Ward, the US hist-orian who pockets the £18,000 prize plus a £2,000 free bet with the award’s loyal sponsor,