Sport

It’s easy to be sceptical about top sportsmen turning to psychologists for help. A bit precious, no? After all, what’s wrong with the good old Fergie hairdryer treatment to unmuddle the thinking of some bewildered player? But when you hear Rory McIlroy extolling the virtues of the man who gets inside his cranium you start to think a little differently. Dr Bob Rotella, a craggy sports shrink from Vermont, is, it turns out, one of the key members of McIlroy’s team and they have been working together for years. McIlroy paid a very handsome tribute to Rotella after his second successive Masters victory. Say what you like about Rory, but

It’s not the newest joke in the world, but worth a quick rerun right now after the latest in a stream of near-fatal road accidents. What’s the difference between a Range Rover and a golf ball? Tiger Woods can drive a golf ball straight for 300 yards. The extraordinary story of Woods’s decline is written in his face: how the lean, mean athlete of the 1990s has developed into a puffy-faced drug user and sometime drunk is something we once associated with former footballers and boxers. Woods is evidence that no one, not even the prodigiously rich and talented, is immune to the destructive power of addiction. Even during his

It certainly never happened to me when I was a lad – even after a particularly insightful essay on the causes of the English Civil War – but there’s a remarkable TikTok film purportedly showing Max Dowman, the Arsenal boy wonder, arriving at school on Monday (don’t forget he’s still only 16), and being applauded to the rafters by pupils and staff. It might of course be AI nonsense, but if it’s not true, it should be. Dowman has long been talked about for his extraordinary ability, and he finally burst into the public’s mind on Saturday with 23 minutes as a substitute in Arsenal’s nervy 2-0 win over Everton.

There’s something ineffably endearing about Harry Kane (though I am sure plenty of Bundesliga defenders would disagree), a sort of old-fashioned Englishness that was apparent in Captain Mainwaring. But unlike Mainwaring, he clearly gets on well with Germans. Even more important, he combines an apparent guilelessness with a canny understanding of how to do his job with distinction, which has made him the second most famous old boy of Chingford Foundation School after David Beckham. He has transformed centre forward play, distributing the ball from midfield with breathtaking ability  Far be it from me to quarrel with James Graham, heavily garlanded chronicler of more or less everything, but his wildly

If you can remember Pink ’Un newspapers and the days when FA Cup shocks really were shocks, then God bless you, you’ve got a few miles on the clock. Pink ’Uns (occasionally Green ’Uns, as in Sheffield and Bristol) were Saturday evening regional newspapers carrying results and reports of Football League matches that, in a miracle of newspaper production, mesmerising to behold, were on sale on the streets while spectators were still leaving the grounds after the final whistle. All closed now of course, along with the demise of the Saturday 3 p.m. kick-off. Who needs papers anyway when football fans can discover the state of play in matches at

So what was the best bit of this dispiriting Ashes series? Lucky you if you’ve found one, but for me – at the time of writing, before Jacob Bethell was belatedly allowed to unfurl his brilliance – it was the moving homage to the heroes of the Bondi massacre at the start of the Sydney Test. It was flawlessly executed, unlike a great deal of the cricket: a group of first responders, including paramedics, lifeguards, police and Ahmed al-Ahmed, the shopkeeper who disarmed one of the terrorists, were given a guard of honour as applause and cheers flooded the ground. If it didn’t bring a tear to the eye, check

There’s tetchy, and then there’s Ben Stokes ‘tetchy’ – pulling out his mic and stomping off cursing, or so I’m told, after Jonathan Agnew asked a disobliging question. Admittedly it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Stokes, an inspirational leader on the pitch who had just seen his team skewered in two days in Perth in one of the most brutal (and thrilling) Ashes Tests in history, and then had to do a live BBC interview. But this was the ever-courteous Aggers, for heaven’s sake, the nearest thing to a secular saint for TMS.  There’s no need for a four-letter outburst. He was asking what were standard if faintly

And so it begins, as Donald Trump likes to say, though not usually about cricket. He was offering his thoughts on the New York mayoral elections, which is not as much fun as the Ashes. Pleasingly, the goading is reaching volcanic levels as the Perth Test gets ever closer. Who needs Trump? The West Australian is not a paper many readers will be familiar with but its pages have been plastered with pictures of English players making their way through arrivals at Perth airport. A large photograph of Ben Stokes pushing his luggage trolley was headlined ‘BAZ BAWL’, with the subheading ‘England’s Cocky Captain Complainer, still smarting from “crease-gate”, lands