Roger Alton

The wonder horse Every so often a sportsman comes along of such supreme brilliance you can only watch and admire. Ian Botham was one — he could shut down offices when he went out to bat; so was George Best for a few wondrous years; Pele too; Roger Federer in his golden years when no

Cricket’s ‘golden age’ You have to hand it to Kevin Pietersen. He’s certainly got chutzpah — or should that be a death wish? Just when you might think he’d be happy, having finally won the battle to take part in the Indian Premier League, he’s gone and started another fight, but this time it was

Without the hysteria-inducing presence of a World Cup, 2008 has been a year in which countless other major and minor sports have flourished. It has been a year of immense sporting achievement — thrills, excitements and real courage, with a series of ‘That Was the Best Ever…’ moments hurtling by, one after the other, like

There’s got to be some direct relationship these days between the bad behaviour of the Twickenham crowd and the feebleness of the English team. When the Twickers faithful launched into an insanely enthusiastic rendition of ‘Swing Low’ as the All Blacks went into the haka last weekend, you knew there was trouble in store. The

This wisdom of crowds stuff has always seemed a bit double-edged: for every silent and courageous candlelit throng gathering outside the cathedral in Leipzig in the 1980s before eventually bringing down the Berlin Wall, there are always far more examples like the braying boo-boys at Twickenham last weekend doing their bit to damage our reputation

Kevin Pietersen was peculiarly charmless, even by his own high standards, shortly after leading England to one of their most abject performances in any form of cricket in the Stanford 20/20 match. Did he mention how well Sir Allen Stanford’s West Indian team, an adept mix of old sweats and feisty tyros, had played as

It’s showbiz As anyone with an unhealthy addiction to Saturday Night Live and presidential debates can tell you, Americans stage a contest like no one else. And that doesn’t just apply to the race for the White House. So if you find yourself in the mood for a slice of Uncle Sam as an election

Reasons to be cheerful The evenings are getting darker, someone called Libor has nicked all our money, and Scarlett Johansson’s got married. There’s little to smile about. So in a spirit of pro bono here are some reasons to be cheerful. For starters, rugby is becoming absolutely fantastic. Not quite the new football, but I

Crying games So what was Nick Faldo blubbing about a week ago when he was talking to the media about his European Ryder Cup team’s meeting with Muhammad Ali on the Valhalla course at Louisville, Kentucky? He doesn’t strike one as the weeping kind, though he has form. I seem to remember him reaching for

Remember the Wightman Cup? For anyone under 40, this was the annual women’s tennis tournament between Britain and the US, which eventually passed away, largely unmourned, at the end of the 1980s. The reason? Extreme lack of interest. Not just among the audiences, but the players too. We were all tired of Chris Evert, Martina

The last time I saw Darren Gough in action was on the Strictly Come Dancing Christmas special last December. The ruddy-cheeked stalwart of the Yorkshire and England fast-bowling attack doesn’t look like a natural for the more skinny-limbed athleticism of ballroom dancing, but he won the show with alarming ease, twirling across the floor with

You can’t help feeling for Sergio Garcia. At Carnoustie last year, he lipped out on the last hole to throw away an Open title which had seemed his on the last day. And who was waiting for him at the play-off? Why Padraig Harrington of course. And when Sergio lined up his second shot on

You need a PhD in astro-physics to work out what’s going on in cricket at the moment, so time for some simpler fare. Here are 10 good reasons, and I know no sane person should be thinking about this right now, why the next football season could be the most exciting ever. 1. The chance

Grass-court tennis eh? A bit boring? Just serve and volley, ace, serve and volley? Well not any more. And sometimes old-style serve-return, bish-bosh, really did get a bit tedious. Go on, admit it. Obscure studies by people with a bit too much time on their hands proved that once you’ve factored in breaks between games,

If Gordon Brown really wants to make people start liking him, he could do a lot worse than turn to whoever’s giving mighty Andy Murray some advice these days. For what was obvious in that stunning, thrilling, epic, heart-pumping comeback to beat France’s Richard Gasquet in what was basically a night match on the Centre

I used to play squash with a distinguished veteran film critic, currently plying his trade on the London Evening Standard. I would force the ball to his backhand but the diminutive master of cinema would simply flick his racket from his right hand to his left and smash it back past me as a forehand

As hard luck stories go, it might not be up there with Oliver Twist, but dammit last weekend my Sky went down. In that pathetic, fat-arsed nerdy way I had been planning the ideal weekend: bouncing happily from the climax to the 20/20 Indian Premier League, to Wasps and Leicester in the Rugby Premiership final,

Tim Henman famously spent a lot of his time trying to convince us he wasn’t as nice as all that. So when Henman called Andy Murray a ‘miserable git’ at a charity do the other day, we ought to listen. Though, bless him, when Murray was asked about this he did say, ‘Well I suppose

The infinite capacity of men to talk utter balls about football should never amaze, but the level of spiteful twaddle spouted about Chelsea’s Avram Grant, which started at volume 11, is laughable. This decent, courteous, humorous and intensely honourable man was put in charge of a team of highly gifted, absurdly paid, over-ego’d individuals who

Being a sports fan is, as Max Mosley knows too well, a painful and often expensive business. I knew my cavalier investment in Bernard Hopkins to beat Joe Calzaghe on Saturday night, despite Hopkins at 43 being almost as old as I am, was heading where the sun don’t shine as soon as Tom Jones