Roger Alton

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

Blizzards have been sweeping the country, so it must be the start of the cricket season. And sure enough MCC play Sussex, the champion county, in the annual throat-clearing match at Lord’s today: thermals at the ready please. Though quite why that has always opened the season is beyond me. And ask yourself where would

Ashley Cole is a difficult man to warm to. The friends of Ashley, like the friends of Heather Mills, are small isolated groups emerging only after dark. But it’s just possible that this tiresome berk may have sparked a revolution that will improve football. The man who nearly crashed his car in fury when told

Two dismal showings by England teams in less than 24 hours make the strongest hand reach for the Paracetamol. What on earth are England playing at? Stuffed by the Scots in a Six Nations match of mind-numbing tedium, then a few hours later the cricketers humiliated on the other side of the world by New

With Shilpa Shetty, Lachlan Murdoch, Aussie feist-meister Andrew Symonds and more Indian billionaires than you can shake a stump at, the eye-watering player-auction for the new Twenty20 Indian Premier League (IPL) in Mumbai last week was never going to be something tailored for the Long Room at Lord’s. But this should be good for cricket,

My friend Simon has a lovely bench in his garden made up of the blue-painted wooden seats he sat in with his dad when they went to Rugby League decades ago. He bought them when the old Swinton ground was knocked down. That’s what a lot of sport’s about: you mustn’t let the past disappear.

First Serb Like this journal’s esteemed High Life commentator, I too have been spending too much time watching the last fortnight’s Australian Tennis Open from Melbourne — but unlike my colleague I found it an absolute revelation, with potentially lethal levels of thrills, shocks, gut-wrenching excitement and great grace in victory and defeat. For most people