Roger Alton

There’s a chant they sing at Anfield to the tune of Yellow Submarine — ‘We all dream of a team of Carraghers...’. And so they should. The doughty old Scouser has emerged as something of a hero. There was his gift of £10,000 to Andy Burnham’s Labour leadership campaign, one of the most startling acts of political activism since Robbie Fowler showed his ‘I support the Dockers’ T-shirt. Carragher ended his international ‘retirement’ to turn out for England and Fabio Capello in the World Cup, so his gift shows that his appetite for lost causes is undiminished. Even more surprising, and engaging, was his warmth towards the England manager. Everyone has been lining up to give the Italian a bashing, but not Jamie Carragher.

Well, at least one Rooney did well this summer. That’s Martyn of course, one of the second tier of Britain’s medal winners at the European Athletics Championships who played a blinder to pick up an individual bronze and a relay silver in the 400 metres. The meeting was a simply glorious celebration of multi-ethnic harmony in Barcelona that was more or less enough to lift the nameless sense of dread that assails the soul at the prospect of a new football season.  Interviewed in a pair of mock giant black-rimmed glasses, Rooney explained that the whole team wore them one day as a tribute to their Dutch coach Charles van Commenee, who, said Rooney, found it all a bit of a giggle.

Quite the best piece about any sport you’re likely to read in a long time is a vibrant profile of Roger Federer in the New Yorker the other day by the octogenarian art critic Calvin Tomkins. In the course of it the Fed observes: ‘The problem with experience is that you become content with playing it safe. I have to push myself to stay dangerous, like a junior player — to play free tennis, but with the mental stability of an older player.’ Before the World Cup Bayern Munich’s Thomas Müller had won just two caps for Germany, Werder Bremen’s Mesut Özil had made five appearances for his country, as had his fellow midfielder Sami Khedira.

The veteran Himalayan mountaineer (70 next year) and now indefatigable fundraiser for his Nepalese charity, Doug Scott, held a packed audience spellbound at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington last week describing the moment he was swept from west ridge of K2, second only to Everest in height but far more dangerous. ‘I thought, this is the first time I have been in an avalanche,’ he said. ‘And then I thought, I am going to die.’ He added he felt very serene. Scott had already endured the world’s highest bivouac, without tent or sleeping bag, just below the summit of Everest, and the year before in Pakistan’s Karakoram crawled down the Ogre with two broken legs. So he’s not a man to take lightly.

If anything can, even temporarily, fill the gaping hole left by the absence of 24 from our screens, then I suppose a World Cup will just have to do. My 10-year-old godson got it about right the other day, returning from Tesco with a stash of England-branded Mars bars. ‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about,’ he said. ‘They’re not going to win.’ Well, almost certainly not, but England do have one of a handful of world-class managers in the tournament. The others are Spain’s Vicente del Bosque, humble, unassuming, hugely successful and far, far more than just a plump bloke with a moustache, and Italy’s Marcello Lippi. Everyone loves Spain, and under del Bosque they’ve lost just one game in 25.

There was a remarkable picture in the Independent’s sports section the other morning showing a lone cyclist tearing up a mountain road in the Italian Alps. The high pastures were thronged with people — thousands of them — and most are cheering like crazy. The eye is caught by a green, white and red tricolore, held resplendently aloft. The race was the Giro d’Italia, second only to the Tour de France in the ranks of great stage races, and the cyclist was the 32-year-old Italian Ivan Basso. He was surging back into contention for the maglia rosa — yellow jerseys in the Tour but pink in the Giro — by climbing the fearsomely steep Monte Zoncolan some four minutes ahead of his nearest rivals.

The last Wednesday in May will never be the same. What always used to be an annual highlight, the European Cup, now Champions League Final, has been brought forward to the weekend before — on the say-so of ever-tinkering Uefa chief Michel Platini so that more children, who won’t have to go to school the next day, can watch it. Whoever said sports bureaucrats didn’t have a heart? So at the end of next week (22 May) we can feast on a match of stupendous European pedigree, Louis van Gaal’s Bayern Munich against Jose Mourinho’s Inter Milan in Madrid.

What have Alan Sillitoe, novelist and gritty chronicler of working-class life, who died at the weekend, and Michael Mann, big-screen film-maker and gritty chronicler of Americana on the edge, got in common? Each have been responsible for a great movie about running. Sillitoe’s short story ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’ (1959) was made into a pioneering piece of British new-wave cinema three years later by Tony Richardson, and Michael Mann’s made-for-TV Jericho Mile is still a fantastic piece of sporting drama. What is it about running that captures artists, especially film-makers, and why — since Loneliness and This Sporting Life in 1963 — have we made only one other decent movie about sport in this country (the mighty Chariots of Fire)?

J.L. Carr, that fine English writer, teacher, sports-lover and eccentric, once wrote a book called How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup. It was about a village team which eventually got through to the Cup Final, beating Glasgow Rangers at Wembley. It sold a couple of thousand copies and was eventually remaindered, though Carr later republished it under his own imprint, the pleasingly named Quince Tree Press. It’s a pity Carr’s not still around to do justice to beleaguered, bankrupt, wrecked Portsmouth’s improbable march to Wembley.  I was very struck by a remark of Pompey’s much-maligned coach Avram Grant after the semi-final last weekend against Spurs.

Sooner or later, and certainly before the end of the current F1 season, you hope that the men behind Mercedes Sport, techno-whizz Ross Brawn and cigar-chomping Norbert Haug, will take Michael Schumacher to one side and say: ‘You know Michael, it’s been great having you here, but Corinna’s not such a bad old stick to spend time with, is she? Why not go back to Lake Geneva and take things easy with the missus? We’ll see you at the track next season — but not in a car.’ Because, make no mistake, after the synapse-stunning tedium of the opening Bahrain Grand Prix, the second race last weekend showed that this could be an electrifying year of motor-racing. In Melbourne there was a host of tangy pleasures.

It’s a sad old story when the most enjoyable moments of last weekend’s Calcutta Cup battle at Murrayfield were the frequent TV cutaways to Scotland coach Andy Robinson giving an Oscar-winning performance as the world’s angriest man. In his playing days he was known as ‘Growler’ but there wasn’t much growling here: near demented hysteria, flailing arms, and lip-readable damnation of the referee and all his works. He was one step away from banging his head on his desk. And you couldn’t really have blamed him. The referee allowed England to get away with a whole heap of skulduggery at the breakdown, Dan Parks hit the post twice and a Scottish victory would have had a poetic justice.

Should Britain be setting out to ‘own the podium’ at the London Olympics in two years’ time? I mean — we can’t own it every single event, can we? The last time I looked we weren’t exactly overblessed with weightlifters, and we might have to question our chances in Greco-Roman wrestling. I wouldn’t back us to do too well at water-polo, and as for handball, well… The ‘own the podium’ concept was what brought Canada a record 14 gold medals at the Winter Games that have just ended in Vancouver. If you want a successful Games, went the logic, you have to have the locals behind it, and what the locals want is home success. So you spend what it takes to make sure that happens.

If the impresario, former Corrie and Carry On actor, Everton owner and all-round good-guy Bill Kenwright never does anything else, the nation owes a big debt of gratitude to this last of the old-style football club chairmen for hanging on to his manager David Moyes like a limpet. Moyes is a shining light in the increasingly tawdry saga of English football. He’s been Manager of the Year three times, is almost permanently Manager of the Month, and is the longest-serving British manager in the Premiership by a mile, apart of course from Sir Alex Ferguson. There are two big tests this week, Sporting Lisbon in the Europa League and at the weekend, the Big One, Manchester United at home.

When you sit down next weekend (13 February) to watch the first competitors blast through the starting gate of the men’s downhill, the blue riband event of this year’s Winter Olympics in Whistler, I hope you will spare a moment to think back to a clear but windy day in Switzerland more than 80 years ago. It was in the early morning of 29 January 1928 that a group of passionate British skiers, 13 men and four women, and all members of the illustrious ski racing club, the Kandahar, set out from the village of Murren in the Bernese Oberland. Their target was the 10,000 foot summit of the Schilthorn, well over 5,000 feet above them.

If shrinks don’t have a term like disproportionate response — you know, getting jailed for clearing the snow off your path or some such madness — then they certainly should have. We need it to do justice to the lunatic levels of hoo-ha, from players, commentators and fans, over Graeme Smith’s referral and phantom snick in the third Test at Johannesburg. As Michael Vaughan, bless, had to point out, it was only a cricket match; nobody had died. It’s pointless bitching that Smith should have walked: I mean, does he look the kind of guy who walks? Mark you, some might think Hashim Amla doesn’t look like the kind of guy who walks, but he absolutely is, every time.

New Year starter for ten: who said this? ‘When you hear people on TV talking about you in the same breath as people like Steven Gerrard or Freddie Flintoff, you look at it as if they’re talking about someone else. It’s weird. It’s very humbling and gives you a lump in your throat.’ No, not some brand new novice champion, but the great and charmingly self-effacing Phil Taylor, after winning his 15th World Darts Championship in breathtaking style. Someone should give The Power a deal puffing ludicrously expensive watches, or standing in for Thierry or Tiger as one of Gillette’s poster boys, earning squillions.

Forget the Spectator Parliamentarian Awards, or the Oscars for that matter, it’s the annual Spectator Sports Awards that count. Indeed in Hollywood, the Oscars are known as the Spectator Sports Awards of the film industry. Our judges have been busier than Rachel Uchitel’s lawyers sorting out our shortlists, and now finally a roster of winners has emerged, representing the best and the brightest of this remarkable sporting year. First up is a new category, the Plaxico Burress Award for Shooting Yourself in the Foot, named after the New York Giants wide receiver who took a gun into a Manhattan nightclub and accidentally put a bullet into his own leg: there were two hugely deserving candidates here.

Sprawling, cheesy, gimmicky, full of toe-curlingly embarrassing interviews — but still the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award, dammit, lifts the spirits in a way few other events in the sporting calendar manage. Sunday night. Pull up a chair. Grab a drink. It only needs that theme tune to strike up for me to break out in goosebumps. What is it about the old SPOTY? Well, there’s the dramatically lit auditorium full to bursting with the sporting great and good, all in their finery, this time up in Sheffield.

Of all the many incidental pleasures of the Spectator Editors’ Dinner last week, one of the most enjoyable was sharing a main course with Coleraine businessman Ken Belshaw and his wife Iris. Ken, a passionate rugby man, was filling me in on the glories of Irish sport, ironically at exactly the same time as, unknown to us all, Thierry Henry was manhandling Ireland’s football team right out of the World Cup. But Irish friends who were in Paris that night broadly take the Roy Keane line: time to move on. It was clearly a brilliant evening: I watched the game after the dinner and the Irish played out of their skins. Robbie Keane’s goal was beautiful, almost Brazilian, and he and Duff had good-as-gold chances, which they fluffed. But the Irish should have won, no question.

Amid the great and the glamorous sipping champagne at Sotheby’s recently when Sebastian Faulks launched his new novel, A Week in December, one diminutive figure caught the eye as he moved effortlessly among the mini-burgers and drizzled tuna, exchanging a pleasantry here, a smile there, chatting to teenage boys, rock stars, highbrow literary types and even the odd politician. It was Fulham boss Roy Hodgson, well-known book-lover, friend of Faulks and arguably a man who should be football’s manager of the month in perpetuity. As my friend Mike points out, ‘These are the good old days at Craven Cottage.