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 one could come near him; Borg as well, cold and mysterious; Usain Bolt, who can destroy the best sprinters in the world in a few metres. Bradman by all accounts. They are sportsmen who can’t be explained in any normal way. Now we have one more great athlete, though this time with four legs. If you haven’t seen Master Minded, the six-year-old French-bred bay gelding trained by National Hunt maestro Paul Nicholls, then you’re missing one of the wonders of the world.

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 one he was going to lose. There are two ways of viewing his bloody and shambolic feud with Peter Moores, the England coach (sorry, make that the former England coach), that’s ended with all the main players lying dead, centre stage. One is that Pietersen’s a natural born winner, a man who will stop at nothing in taking his side to victory, and that with the Ashes coming down the track, he just wanted what’s best.

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 dominoes. I can’t think of a year like it. And the key to it all, the glory of great sport, is that you just didn’t have a clue what was going to happen from one minute to the next. When Sean Connery was asked if anything made him cry, he replied ‘Athletics’. And you can understand why: the great man, like most of us, would have needed emergency supplies of the Extra-Strength this Olympic year.

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 haka should happen in relative silence, just like the national anthems — though the crowd has taken to booing them as well. Do the Twickers massive think their borrowed slave song has greater resonance than the utterly authentic haka? As the Barbour and hip-flask brigade trundled back to the shires on Saturday evening, they might have thought it wasn’t such a good idea to irritate the All Blacks.

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 for sportsmanship. But if Britons have been collectively enlightened and witty enough to vote in their thousands, week after week, to keep John Sergeant in what is after all a dancing contest, not a political reporting contest, then let’s hope that the people mobilise once again in the name of a different cause: ensuring that Rebecca Adlington, and not Lewis Hamilton, wins the BBC Sports Personality of the Year.

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 they whopped England? Not a word. He didn’t mention that the Stanford team had outbowled, outcaught, outfielded and out-thought England at every stage. This series has brought out some of the worst in grumpy English sportsmanship. Talking to the press after the game, Pietersen said: ‘We concentrated too much on the peripherals... There were just a lot of distractions... Coming into this week there was huge, huge uncertainty.

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 curtain-raiser this weekend, tune in to the American football. Or — if you can swing yourself a ticket somehow — go to Wembley and see for yourself. The NFL is coming to London, with the San Diego Chargers taking on the New Orleans Saints on Sunday. It will be a perfectly packaged event too, four hours of banging entertainment: that’s what the Yanks do so well.

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 wish. With a packed crowd in the purpose-built stadiums at Worcester, Leicester or Northampton you get a better atmosphere than at Old Trafford with a quarter of the numbers. The standard of the top games is awesome, and with someone like Dan Carter at Perpignan you can see the best players in the world on tap. And this weekend the superlative Heineken Cup gets going.

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 the man-size after tapping in to win the Open at Muirfield in 1992. And we’re used to sportsmen cracking up during the event (remember Darren Clarke red-eyed and tender at the K Club two years ago, only a few weeks after his wife had died). But before, a whole day before?

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 Navratilova and Pam Shriver coming over and ripping apart, say, Jo Durie, Anne Hobbs and if memory serves the now lustrously big-haired Annabel Croft. Year after year after year. Now I don’t want to sound mad but I think there is a real danger that the Ryder Cup, reconvening next week in Kentucky, could go the same way. So here are five reasons why even the greatest Europhiles should want America to reclaim Sam Ryder’s elegant golden goblet. 1.

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 a light-footed sureness as if gravity didn’t exist (rather like Usain Bolt at the Olympics, come to think of it, who runs as if the ground wasn’t there). The Dazzler still turns out for Yorkshire (he’s club captain, best recent figures 2-62 off eight overs) but more to the point, he also presides over one of the best sports programmes around, Darren Gough’s Cricket Show (Radio 5, Thursdays, 8-9.30 p.m.).

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 the fiercely hazardous 16th at Oakland Hills, the US PGA title was again his for the taking. He needed to par the last three and the gutsy Spaniard’s first Major was in the bag. He opted for an insanely ambitious drive to the right of the flag and the ball bounced back into the water. Title gone. And who was waiting to pick up the pieces. Padraig Harrington, natch.

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 to watch Deco every week at Chelsea: this brilliant, cultivated Portuguese midfielder is one footballer you won’t be seeing fall out of Chinawhite in the small hours. And he plays with a smile on his face too. 2. Over at Manchester City expect Mark Hughes to build up a genuine big-city rival to Alex Ferguson’s United. Hughes was a rough, tough, robust but always fair player and has brought the same to management.

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, towelling down, or getting ready to bounce balls, top grass-court players would only spend four or five minutes per hour actually playing tennis. Very definitely not any more. Do you know how many times Rafa Nadal served and volleyed in that quite extraordinary, thunderously brilliant epic of epics in the gloom of SW19 last month? Just once, in the last game of the final set. What’s happened of course is the game has changed.

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 Court is that the great Scot has turned himself into a thorough crowd-pleaser. Later, munching sushi and taking a call from Tim Henman while talking engagingly about the match in a live radio interview, he must have won over millions more.

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 drive. He was a keen cricketer too, but I don’t think he ever tried to do what Kevin Pietersen did to a bemused Scott Styris up in Durham on Sunday. The hoo-hah about Pietersen’s astounding switch-hit has been wondrous. Is it within the laws? (Yes, for now.) Is it within the spirit of the game? (Hmmm.) Can anybody do it? (Come off it.

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, then the mid-point of the French Open on Eurosport, and thrumming along nicely in the background the second Test between Australia and West Indies. So what I was left with last weekend was a rugby league quarter-final, and even my life’s not that sad, and some halfway decent racing with the effortlessly brilliant Ryan Moore steering home Major Cadeaux in a Group 3 at Haydock, despite his saddle slipping off.

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 I am a miserable git really.’ But it’s the heart of the clay court season next week, with the start of the French Open, and isn’t it about time this prodigiously talented young Scot started to deliver? Sure he has beaten Roger Federer twice, but in tennis terms the Swiss World No. 1 is almost at bus pass age. Murray needs to start putting one over his exact contemporaries — the brilliant Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic.

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 were capable of playing profoundly tedious football and has turned them into what is easily right now the most attractive team in the Premiership. But still fans whine and experts carp. God, it’s awful stuff. So why isn’t Avram Grant getting the respect, admiration and, er, love he deserves?

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 popped up in the ring to sing the Welsh national anthem. Crikey, he’s good. It made my hairs, what’s left, stand on end so God knows what it did for Calzaghe let alone the flag-loads of Welsh fans ringside in Vegas. In truth it was a nasty, tight, uninspiring fight. Now Calzaghe has said he’s going to fight Roy Jones, 39, and the official ‘Fighter of the Decade’ — though that decade was the 1990s.