Roger Alton

Come on you blues. Or, er, reds

30 April 2015 1:00 pm

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

16 April 2015 1:00 pm

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?

2 April 2015 2:00 pm

The grand slam in golf is a feat almost impossible to imagine now. It meant winning all four golfing majors…

New heights

19 March 2015 3:00 pm

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

5 March 2015 3:00 pm

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

19 February 2015 3:00 pm

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

5 February 2015 3:00 pm

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

22 January 2015 3:00 pm

What a remarkable innings that was in Johannesburg earlier this week when South Africa’s admirable Hashim Amla carried his bat…

Myths and legends

8 January 2015 3:00 pm

‘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

11 December 2014 3:00 pm

It was the year of KP, Keano and the Kiwis; of Federer, Froch and Phil the Power (no change there…

Tackling Jim Murphy

27 November 2014 3:00 pm

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

13 November 2014 3:00 pm

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?

30 October 2014 3:00 pm

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

16 October 2014 2:00 pm

A typical Merchant-Ivory film, their biography informs me, features ‘genteel characters’ whose lives are blighted by ‘disillusionment and tragic entanglements’.…

Enjoying the Ryder

2 October 2014 1:00 pm

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

18 September 2014 1:00 pm

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

4 September 2014 1:00 pm

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

21 August 2014 1:00 pm

Some years ago, when the last Conservative government was limping towards defeat, someone published a book called 101 Uses for…

Squash hits

7 August 2014 1:00 pm

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?

10 July 2014 1:00 pm

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

26 June 2014 1:00 pm

Iran, eh: who knew? Last time I checked it was the great Satan, locking up its own people, stamping out…

A new England

12 June 2014 1:00 pm

A revealing handwritten letter emerged at the weekend from the England scrum half Danny Care, who wasn’t playing in the…

Team games

29 May 2014 1:00 pm

Ah teamwork! There’s no me in team, as David Brent used to observe sagely, but there are often plenty of…

A real winner

15 May 2014 1:00 pm

Sport is all about streaks, winning and losing, though whether one of the gloomiest runs in world sport — England’s…

What’s right with Saracens– and José’s Chelsea

1 May 2014 1:00 pm

It’s hard to love Saracens rugby club — their centre is called Bosch, a word that also describes their bulldozing…