A few tips for Straussie
If you watched England’s three-day Test defeat by the West Indies in Barbados the other day to the bitter end…
Come on you blues. Or, er, reds
Here’s an election-winning idea for Dave: forget about Aston Villa (or West Ham) and become a full-on Bournemouth fan. They…
Cricket’s glorious dead
He’s a tall man, Kevin Pietersen, and he casts a long shadow. It loomed large over the Long Room at…
Can McIlroy become the magnificent seventh?
The grand slam in golf is a feat almost impossible to imagine now. It meant winning all four golfing majors…
New heights
For anyone who knows or cares about rock climbing — a minority sport if ever there was one, albeit pretty…
Sacré Bleus! At least the food is good
It used to be such a treat of a winter weekend, sitting down to watch France against Wales in Paris…
Little teams mean a lot
Graeme Swann arrived late for the last cricket World Cup. His wife had given birth before the tournament and he…
A cheerleader to swear by
It wasn’t that long ago when the most exciting event in any British tennis fan’s life was whether Jeremy Bates…
Bats out of hell
What a remarkable innings that was in Johannesburg earlier this week when South Africa’s admirable Hashim Amla carried his bat…
Myths and legends
‘As a leader and a man, he is incomparable to anyone I have ever worked with.’ Obviously quite some guy,…
Fifteen things we learned about sport this year
It was the year of KP, Keano and the Kiwis; of Federer, Froch and Phil the Power (no change there…
Tackling Jim Murphy
The author of a rather brilliant little book about football could just hold the key to Labour’s otherwise negligible prospects…
Cricket must return to Pakistan
In a tiny courtyard just off the teeming alleys of Lahore’s old town, a young Pakistani boy in a gleaming…
Is Test cricket heading for its last innings?
Lions and weasels The Archers and Test cricket: words you rarely find in the same sentence and more’s the pity…
Pietersen’s unlikely Passage to India
A typical Merchant-Ivory film, their biography informs me, features ‘genteel characters’ whose lives are blighted by ‘disillusionment and tragic entanglements’.…
Enjoying the Ryder
Well, that was a lot of fuss wasn’t it? The Ryder Cup is a strange old creation, only fractionally less…
They don’t make footballers like Roy Race any more
It has become a weary cliché to say that a book’s publication is eagerly awaited, but when an event is…
Those ‘traditions of English football’ in full
That excitable but likeable hombre, Everton manager Roberto Martinez, took it upon himself to give a stern lecture to the…
Putting Fletcher in the shades
Some years ago, when the last Conservative government was limping towards defeat, someone published a book called 101 Uses for…
Squash hits
Thank god for the Commonwealth Games: at least they gave us a brief respite from football transfer stories. Instead of…
Why the crusade against Alastair Cook?
A jaw-dropping moment on the front page of Her Majesty’s Daily Telegraph the other day: ‘How to fix England’, read…
England’s World Cup: the post mortem
Iran, eh: who knew? Last time I checked it was the great Satan, locking up its own people, stamping out…
A new England
A revealing handwritten letter emerged at the weekend from the England scrum half Danny Care, who wasn’t playing in the…
Team games
Ah teamwork! There’s no me in team, as David Brent used to observe sagely, but there are often plenty of…
A real winner
Sport is all about streaks, winning and losing, though whether one of the gloomiest runs in world sport — England’s…
