Cricket
Why Ben Stokes should be picked for Perth
And so to a cloudy, chilly Adelaide, more like London in October than Australia in the early days of high…
Let’s give young Ben Foakes a chance to sweep out the Ashes
So the Ashes has finally got over the line, and not a minute too soon. At the time of writing…
Death hovers over the scrum
Rugby’s autumn internationals are almost upon us and dark thoughts hover over lovers of the sport. One day soon a…
Playing it safe
BBC1’s latest Sunday-night drama The Last Post, about a British military base in Aden in 1965, feels like a programme…
Close of play
This retiring is a hectic business. When I said in June that it was going to be my last year…
Swagger and squalor
This is a monumental but inevitably selective survey of all that occurred in Britain, for better or worse, in the…
Which way will Lord’s leap?
In the rarefied circles of the sporting establishment a decision will soon be made affecting not just the future of…
England’s new heroes were real Test Match specials
The weather forecast last Saturday promised 100 per cent likelihood of rain. I like that formulation: it doesn’t leave much…
What stopped Stoppard?
Two programmes this week presented two radically different world views, or rather ways of life. Aditya Chakrabortty’s series for Radio…
Test of time
I first walked into the Oval as a small boy in the early 1950s. My family home was in Brixton,…
The keys to the kingdom await
Give them all peerages as far as I’m concerned: if you can pick up a gong for bunging a few…
High life
A funny thing happened on my way to lunch last week. I opened the Daily Mail and read a few…
Barometer
Gorilla warfare Harambe, a 17-year-old gorilla, was shot at Cincinnati Zoo after he started dragging away a boy aged four…
A blueprint for English cricket
No place for the faint of heart, Headingley, and certainly not for some sketchy Sri Lankan batsmen at the back…
The Foxes have little to teach us
A few years ago a motivational speaker brought out a smart little book called Legacy: What The All Blacks Can…
Intolerable cruelty
It was a toss-up on Sunday between the atmosphere in the Radio Five Live Sports Extra studio in Kolkata for…
Reasons to be cheerful, parts one, two, three…
Well the sun is out, the sky is blue, and poor Boris Johnson is taking such a pounding from Matthew…
Two big hitters leave the crease
Two great men have just bowed out from their chosen trades and it is bloody sad. The New Zealand cricket…
Cricket needs the West Indies
In the north of Antigua, just by the medical school, is a neat little cricket ground. It was a bit…
Game over
If sport loses the public’s faith – and it’s starting to – then all its power and glory will fade
Elite sport
The England team may be riding high, but state schools have all but abandoned cricket
Add Ben Stokes to the world’s greatest batsmen
On Sunday morning a friend texted: ‘You watching the big bash, or the domestic stuff down in Australia?’ On one…
From the dismal to the delightful: the year in sport
So long, then, to another thrilling year of sport in which the full range of human possibility — from the…
From the archives: W.G. Grace’s legacy on the Western Front
From ‘W.G.’, The Spectator, 30 October 1915: The late Dr. W.G. Grace had become in his lifetime a legend, and he is…
Sir Ian Botham is a hero – and a fool
Mark Mason 28 November 2015 9:00 am
In 1981, when I was ten and Ian Botham was 26, I thought he was God. Now, the week after…