Football

Saturday

Nick Hilton

The return of football marks the return of normality

With parliament in recess, silly season is in full swing. In fact, silly season would be an apt name for the transitional period between the dying days of the previous Premier League season, and the Bacchanalia that greets the opening weekend of the next one. Football’s silly season is a time when Slovenian journalists can sentence Jose Mourinho to three years in jail, when Wales can become (arguably) the third best team in Europe, and when Manchester United can decide that a player – any player – is worth €100 million. That last, silliest of silly season traditions, is the essential contradiction that greets the start of a new season.

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Fever pitch | 28 July 2016

It cost just £4/10s for 19-year-old Alan Dryland to buy a season ticket that would take him inside the stadium for all ten of the World Cup matches held in London in that magical summer of 1966. The pound was falling, the Vietnam war raging, but England made it through to the final and the Beatles and Rolling Stones were battling it out to top the charts. If nothing else, 66: We Were There, Radio 5 Live’s affectionate look back at that tremendous victory, proved that Sixties music was brilliant. The producer’s choice on Saturday was pitch-perfect, from the Lovin’ Spoonful’s ‘Summer in the City’ to Chris Farlowe’s ‘Out of

Friday

Simon Read

Premier League? The football finance deals that should be relegated

Finance firms love taking football fans for suckers. The latest is Virgin Money which has this week launched a Manchester United savings bond. It pays just 1.25 per cent for 12 months which is roughly two-thirds the interest you could get at the current best buy account. So far, so rubbish. But it has a neat gimmick designed to reel in optimistic fans. If Manchester United win the title next season, the interest rate paid doubles to 2.5 per cent. Sound attractive? It’s meant to. But in reality it’s a total con. And it’s just the latest in a long line of football-related finance deals that take fans for mugs.

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: when sportswriting turns purple

The invitation to supply a report on a Uefa Euro 2016 match written in the florid style beloved of some sportswriters produced entries of inspired awfulness. How about this, from Mike Morrison: ‘The craven defence unravelled like cartoon knitwear, enabling Dottirdottir, the archetype of stoic strategy, to blithely torpedo the decider through the enmeshed architraves of triumph.’ John O’Byrne, Josh Ekroy and Derek Morgan were on impressively toe-curling form too, but were pipped to the post by those entries printed below which earn their authors £25 each. Adrian Fry pockets the extra fiver. Adrian Fry Spain’s three-nil defeat of Turkey demonstrated how, in Spanish hands at least, soccer is a

Thursday

Taki

High life | 7 July 2016

I am trying to decide with some friends which is worse, English weather or English football. The former is improving as I write, but the latter’s problems are terminal. There are too many ‘directors of development’ and other jargon-packed non-jobs that interfere with the very simple process of developing football. Send them all to Iceland, bring on a dentist, and cut footballers’ salaries by 90 per cent, and you just might one day learn to win. But on to far more important things than ghastly football, like the wonderful garden party given by my friend Richard Northcott that brought back some very pleasant memories. There’s something rejuvenating about running into

Thursday

Roger Alton

Blessed are the goalscorers

‘I am grateful to the gaffer for the opportunity and to God for letting me score,’ said Daniel Sturridge after his last-minute winner for England against Wales in Euro 2016 last week, a goal that certainly made me seriously question the Man Upstairs: I had invested quite heavily in the draw. What an enviable feast of attacking options Roy Hodgson has available at his fingertips for that tricky meeting in the round of 16 on Monday: Harry Kane, Raheem Sterling, Jamie Vardy, Marcus Rashford, Sturridge himself, of course, and God. Not to mention Wayne Rooney, who is better used in a deeper role, but could be pressed into service up

Wednesday

Tom Williams

Show business

Sport has never held much appeal for me, so I rarely venture into stadiums. But I do appreciate their peculiar power: I was present at the 2012 Paralympics when George Osborne ill-advisedly turned up to award a medal while engaged in a campaign against disability benefits, and was roundly booed by the entire stadium. It was a transporting lesson in the joy of crowds and the proudest I have ever felt to be British. The stadium, ostensibly a facilitator of mass spectatorship, is actually a machine for producing such feelings. The Greeks were explicit about the ritualistic, community-forming function of their games, but it was the Romans who secularised the

The Spectator

Barometer | 22 June 2016

Big game hunt Wales beat Russia 3–0 to finish above England in their group at the European Football Championships. Which is bigger in Wales, football or rugby? — The Football Association of Wales was founded in 1876, five years earlier than the Welsh Rugby Union. However, rugby then took off rapidly in south Wales while football remained stronger in the north. — Wales lost their first matches to England in both football (2–1) and rugby (8–0). — Rugby and football matches have both filled Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium (capacity 76,000), though in a recent Wales Online poll, rugby was still reckoned more important, by 56% to 44%. Tall poppies A group

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 22 June 2016

Before dashing out of the door and driving to Nice airport, I gave my eyebrows a quick trim with the electric grooming razor Father Christmas gave me. In my tearing haste, however, I forgot to clip on the length regulator and in two sweeps shaved them right off, leaving two bald white strips. I was last to board the plane. While everyone else queued in the stifling airbridge while the plane was prepared, I had remained in my comfortable seat in the sunny departure lounge reading Sir Michael Holroyd’s hilarious life of Augustus John. Seat 9F was the aisle seat of a row of three, and the pair of chaps

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 16 June 2016

Houses of ill repute The Austrian interior minister has suggested that his government will demolish the house where Adolf Hitler was born in 1889. Some other properties which have succumbed to the architectural equivalent of the death penalty: — 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, home of Fred West, was demolished in 1996 and turned into a pathway into the next street. — 5 College Close, Soham, where Ian Huntley murdered the schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, was razed in 2004 and is now a patch of grass. — The cottage in Ceinws, Powys, where Mark Bridger murdered April Jones was demolished in 2014. — 10 Rillington Place, home to the serial killer

Saturday

Tom Goodenough

The Spectator podcast: Brexit – the first 100 days | 11 June 2016

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. The EU referendum on June 23rd looks set to be one of the most important political moments in a generation. But if Britain does vote out, what would the next 100 days actually be like? The Prime Minister has predicted disastrous consequences, saying Brexit would plant a bomb under the economy. And we’ve been warned that house prices will crash and everything from air fares to ice cream will cost more. So, would Cameron step down straight away and watch the pound tumble?

Thursday

Toby Young

Confessions of an England fan

[audioplayer src=”http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/268140526-the-spectator-podcast-brexit-strategy-what-would-the.mp3″ title=”Toby Young explains his excitement at Euro 2016″ startat=1096] Listen [/audioplayer] If you’re a proper football supporter, getting excited about England on the eve of a major tournament is considered uncool. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to engage people in conversation about England’s chances, only to be greeted with a look of bored condescension. ‘I’m not really interested in international football,’ is the inevitable reply. Well, sorry, but I’m pretty fired up about the Euros — although, to be fair, I do conform to the stereotype of the inauthentic, prawn-sandwich-eating fan. When people are polite enough to respond to my opening gambits, it

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The Spectator podcast: Brexit – the first 100 days

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. The EU referendum on June 23rd looks set to be one of the most important political moments in a generation. But if Britain does vote out, what would the next 100 days actually be like? The Prime Minister has predicted disastrous consequences, saying Brexit would plant a bomb under the economy. And we’ve been warned that house prices will crash and everything from air fares to ice cream will cost more. So, would Cameron step down straight away and watch the pound tumble?

Martin Samuel

Paris notebook

In the few days I’ve spent in Paris, I’d say the terror alert level is fluctuating between a little antsy, really quite nervous and eye-twitching, hair-tearing, run for your lives woo-woo. People still go about their business, but there are wary looks on the Metro and a palpable sense that they could really do without the stress of hosting a major international football tournament, what with so many nutters running about and the Belgians useless, as usual. Last week, a colleague covering the French Open was travelling to Roland-Garros when a couple began having a domestic which cleared the carriage at the next stop. I had a similar experience shortly

Saturday

Andreas Campomar

Why Juan Villoro is the best football writer you’ve never heard of | 28 May 2016

Football, unlike cricket, has for the most part been ill served by its writers. For every Brian Glanville and Ian Hamilton (the latter having employed his critical authority to become a first-rate reader of the game), the purveyors of hackneyed analysis are legion. In recent years there has been a propensity to celebrate tactics and formation (i.e. pedantry) over poetry. Latin Americans, however, have always fared slightly better with their writers — as they do with their players — who tend not to make the distinction between literature and sports writing. Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, both Nobel laureates, took to writing about the game early on in

Friday

James Forsyth

Vote Leave’s £50 million question

If you ask most people if they wanted to win £50 million, the answer would be: where do I sign up? That’s why Vote Leave has launched a competition this morning (here’ the link to enter) offering £50 million to anyone who can correctly predict the result of every game in this summer’s European football championship, if no-one scoops the whole prize,£50,000 will go the person who came closest. Why is the prize £50 million? Because that’s what Vote Leave say the UK sends to the European Union each day. Vote Leave hope that this competition will get one of its key messages, the cost of EU membership, out to

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 26 May 2016

A man in full A relic said to contain a fragment of St Thomas à Becket’s elbow arrived from Hungary for a tour of London and Kent. Where to go to see some of his other bits: — St Thomas of Canterbury Catholic church, Burgate Canterbury: fragments of vestment, bone and finger are in a glass case above the altar. — Church of St Maria Maggiore, Rome: shirt and fragments of bone and brain. — Most of him was interred in Canterbury cathedral until the shrine was destroyed by Henry VIII in the 1530s. Bones and a skull were discovered in Canterbury cathedral in 1888, but a later study concluded the

Roger Alton Roger Alton

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 end of a cold damp week in May with the two best seam bowlers in the world swinging away. Nobody liked it much on either side, which makes Jonny Bairstow’s big 140 all the more spectacular. Test matches in May are silly. This isn’t the hottest place in the world at any time. I mean, did you catch the opening of our very own IPL, or the Natwest T20 Blast as you might know it? While I watched Essex take on Surrey in the warmth of my sitting room, Sky’s

Andreas Campomar

Why Juan Villoro is the best football writer you’ve never heard of

Football, unlike cricket, has for the most part been ill served by its writers. For every Brian Glanville and Ian Hamilton (the latter having employed his critical authority to become a first-rate reader of the game), the purveyors of hackneyed analysis are legion. In recent years there has been a propensity to celebrate tactics and formation (i.e. pedantry) over poetry. Latin Americans, however, have always fared slightly better with their writers — as they do with their players — who tend not to make the distinction between literature and sports writing. Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, both Nobel laureates, took to writing about the game early on in

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

My take on the England football team

Apologies for the lack of blogs – I’ve been on jury duty for two weeks. Hang the bastard, regardless of the evidence, was my watchword as jury foreman. Anyway, normal service will soon be resumed. In the interim, let me give the few of you who care about football my take on the England team at present, and its chances in France next month. I was of course delighted we beat the hideous, cheating, Turks – and in the end with something to spare. But what we learned was this: Playing Jamie Vardy on the wing is stupid. Put him in the centre with Harry Kane. So that means some