For 40 years Glasgow has held the power in Scottish football. Since Alex Ferguson’s Aberdeen won the league in 1985, Celtic have won 22 titles and Rangers 18. No other team has had a sniff. But this year, Edinburgh’s Hearts are the best team in the league. With 16 games to go, they have a
The second half of the Premier League season is brimming with stories and subplots. Hundreds of players are hoping to secure places in their national team squads ahead of the World Cup; Sunderland and Leeds are trying to buck the trend for promoted teams to head straight back to the Championship; Manchester United’s permacrisis has
The longest postscript in sport is finally over. On the eve of the first Ashes test, which began on 21 November, English pundits were talking up their team’s best chance of winning down under in 30 years. Australia were old, slow and injured. Mark Wood, Jofra Archer and Josh Tongue would rough up the hosts with genuinely quick bowling. And Bazball, the only-good-vibes philosophy
‘The numbers are putrid, to say the least,’ harrumphed commentator Maura Ranallo at the start of the fourth round of last night’s fight between British boxer Anthony Joshua and American YouTuber Jake Paul. For the first three rounds, Paul skittered around the edges of the unusually large ring, evading Joshua’s every attempt at a setup.
There is a lot of death in the latest, and potentially last, book on boxing by the South African journalist Donald McRae. In less than two years he loses his sister, both his parents and his mother-in-law. To cope with the trauma he returns to the sport that has sustained his life and work for
Wimbledon’s starched whites, manicured flower beds and hushed silence enable tennis to present itself as a genteel sport. But Wimbledon only represents tennis in the way that an Olympic 100m final represents athletics. It is the best players in the best setting for a brief period. Actual tennis, the day-to-day life of a regular player
Formula 1 is having a moment. Its global popularity is soaring off the back of a wildly successful Netflix docuseries, Drive to Survive, and the launch of glitzy races in Miami and Las Vegas. It is even drawing attention away from other sports. The most significant move of European football’s January transfer window was Lewis
As humans, we are supposed to have an aversion to slime. It should repel us. Objects and organisms that might be harmful trigger feelings of disgust which keep us away. And, according to the biologist Susanne Wedlich, the common denominator of ‘wide-ranging microbial threats, covering sickness, sex, death and putrefaction’ is their sliminess. It is
