Football

Thursday

Ismene Brown

Losing the plot | 19 May 2016

If a football manager produces a string of losses, the writing is on the wall and out he goes. He’s accountable — to shareholders, to the fans. The director of the Royal Ballet is not a football manager. Nor is it easy to see to whom he would account for his plans and outcomes. The Royal Ballet governors are not like MotD panels unleashing Gary Nevilles and Alan Shearers on the play, or select committees foaming with Tom Watsons and John Whittingdales demanding explanations for the cultural strategy. They are a group of veteran ballet chums, and it appears to be inconceivable that it is their business to turn round

Thursday

Roger Alton

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 Teach Us About the Business of Life. Everyone wanted to know how a tiny country miles from anywhere could dominate the world’s hardest team sport for so long. A lot of it, the book said, boiled down to humility, believing in the collective, going the extra yard, and, crucially, ‘no dickheads’. Better people make better All Blacks, was the message. Now the world is trying to learn from the Leicester City playbook. The key factors in the Foxes’ triumph were a strong, well-balanced squad; a tough but charming manager; a

Tuesday

Nick Hilton

Leicester City’s title win is the worst thing to have happened to football

[audioplayer src=”http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/262486539-the-spectator-podcast-erdogans-europe.mp3″ title=”Roger Alton and Nick Hilton discuss Leicester’s title win” startat=1063] Listen [/audioplayer] Jean-Philippe Toussaint, in his recent book Football, observes that the sport is ‘measured and appreciated’ in the imagination. Toussaint, an intellectually fanatical supporter of the Belgian national team, is used to failure. Indeed, he is an acolyte of the view that football support is built on failure. After all, aren’t the grown men and women on the terraces of English stadia simply not good enough for a place on the pitch? Am I not, in writing passionately about football, merely replacing the frustration of not being the world-class midfielder that I was born to be? Leicester City are living

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

Why pretend that female footballers are as good as male ones?

Yay – Izzy Christiansen! Yay – Beth Mead! I daresay you were as thrilled as I was to see that these two women had been named as, respectively, PFA Women’s Players’ Player of the Year and PFA Women’s Young Player of the Year. Izzy plays for Manchester City, Beth for Sun’lan. You have never heard of either of them. You will never see them play ever. Both are worse at football than the worst player your club has ever employed. Yes, worse than Seth Johnson. Worse than Ade Akinbiyi. And yet they were given equal billing by the BBC at the Professional Footballers’ Association awards with Riyad Mahrez and Dele Alli. I have nothing

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 21 April 2016

What consolation in life can Arthur and I find after that defeat at the hands of Manchester United in the quarter-final replay of the FA Cup, and the manner of it? West Ham and their always hiding fortunes are, and always have been, real life for me; real life, only sport. My father first took me to Upton Park for the first game of the 1966–7 season against Chelsea. I was nine. Even then I had set my face against my father, but the subject of West Ham was a kind of no-man’s land between us, and until the day he died our relationship consisted entirely of conversation about a

Simon Barnes

The fairytale factory

It’s one of the oldest stories of them all, deeply embedded in our nature and our culture. In some ways it’s the story that defines our humanity and we have told it a thousand times in a thousand different ways. It’s in the Bible with Joseph and his coat of many colours, it’s King Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, it’s the ugly duckling, Cinderella, Great Expectations, Moll Flanders and Jane Eyre. It’s Clark Kent becoming Superman, it’s Harry Potter leaving the cupboard under the stairs to become the greatest wizard of them all. It’s Rags to Riches. And it’s the tale of Leicester City. Sport retells all our

Friday

Jonathan Meades

The art of Jonathan Meades

Ape Forgets Medication: Treyfs and Artknacks Londonewcastle Project (28 Redchurch Street, E2), until 23 April Process, means, method: it was these rather than the results which initially fascinated me. There was an unmistakable exhilaration in discovering that I was not merely learning a new language but that I was creating a language peculiar to myself. Given that it was non-verbal the word ‘language’ is inappropriate. In every instance the words, the capricious titles I have appended to the works (the treyfs and artknacks) came after. Treyf signifies that which is not kosher. Artknack is a neoligism which suggests arts, a knack or facility, a knicknack or cheap bling, arnaque (French for a

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Let’s refocus the Panama story on the bad stuff that really matters

There were moments last week when I was ready to give up journalism and retrain in a less unsavoury profession — chiropody, perhaps. It might have been Jon Snow’s bushwhacking of arts minister Ed Vaizey on the subject of the prime minister’s tax affairs, or Snow’s colleague Cathy Newman shrieking questions about offshore companies at Boris Johnson as she chased him in the street. Or one of dozens of reports and articles oozing malice, self–righteousness, hypocrisy and wilful ignorance of the distinction between tax planning as practised by anyone with a sense of obligation to provide for their family and the dirty business of hiding ill-gotten gains. This being open

Tuesday

Tom Goodenough

Brexit won’t ruin Premiership football but it might spoil the Championship

For football fans, June 10th – the day Euro 2016 kicks off – is likely to be a more exciting prospect than June 23rd – when Britain votes on whether to stay in the EU. But could lovers of the beautiful game see English football become unstuck in the event of Brexit? Richard Scudamore, the chief executive of the Premier League has said Britain should stay in the EU; West Ham’s vice chairman Karren Brady has made a similar argument, suggesting that Brexit would have ‘devastating consequences’. But not everyone agrees: former England player Sol Campbell says that with Britain in the EU ‘mediocre overseas footballers, especially from Europe (are)

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 3 March 2016

What might have been Sir: Harry Mount points out that Boris Johnson is two years older than David Cameron (Diary, 27 February). Both, however, began their careers in the same year. On 15 June 1988 I interviewed David Cameron for a post in the Conservative Research Department; on 26 July it was Boris’s turn (‘Johnston’ in my diary). The former was signed up to cover trade and industry issues (memorably forgetting the trade figures when Mrs Thatcher asked him for them). Boris was invited to follow in the footsteps of father Stanley, who had been the department’s first environment expert in the Heath era. But journalism lured him away. Would

Thursday

Roger Alton

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 overgrown and bedraggled when I drove past the other day, but the small stand was still there, the changing rooms, the peeling scoreboard, and the sails of the kite-surfers dancing skittishly out on the Caribbean. It was all different in 2013 when a team of us from the UK played in a T20 match against a student side. The mid-afternoon start was breezy, the outfield rugged, but the ground was quite full of youngsters who had come to watch their friends give a pasting to a bunch of ageing overweight

Thursday

Roger Alton

Don’t cry for John Terry

Just when you were thinking that the Premier League had become a much nicer place without José Mourinho in it, here comes another old friend from Stamford Bridge who can be relied on to pollute the atmosphere. Yes, it’s John Terry again, JT, Captain, Leader, Legend, who issued a tear-stained farewell saying Chelsea didn’t want him any more (sob), it couldn’t be a fairytale ending (sob), and he wasn’t going to retire at Chelsea (hysterical weeping). But so loyal was he that he couldn’t possibly be going to another Premier League club (stately music and solemn applause). Oh please, what a load of tosh. This was Terry, in his inimitable

Thursday

Simon Barnes

Game over | 28 January 2016

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/whysexmatters-thedeathofsportandistheeusinkingwhetherbrexithappensornot-/media.mp3″ title=”Simon Barnes and Alex Massie discuss the crisis in sport” startat=830] Listen [/audioplayer]Like religion, sport can take any amount of passion in its stride. It’s indifference that’s the killer. Sport can be bubbling with incontinent hatred, poisonous rivalries, ludicrous injustice and the most appalling people doing the most appalling things: but as long as people still care, as long as the sporting arguments still echo, as long as newspapers are read from back to front, then sport’s future is safe. But now, as we look forward to an Olympic year, a Wimbledon with hot British contenders in the men’s and the women’s competitions for the first time in

Thursday

Roger Alton

Three sides to our success

In the middle of Oxford is a socking great cinema: once the Ritz, it’s now an Odeon multiplex. Back in 1962, in the intermission of, I think, The Longest Day, the curtain moved and on walked a group of men, young I suppose, though to my 15-year-old eyes they seemed impossibly grown-up. It was the Oxford United team, led by their manager Arthur Turner, and including such titans as Ron ‘The Tank’ Atkinson, his brother Graham, John Shuker and Maurice Kyle. They had just won promotion from the Southern League to the Fourth Division (today’s League Two). They were introduced to the audience, and I have been a fan ever

Thursday

Taki

High life | 31 December 2015

This is going to be one hell of a year, hell being the operative word. It will be the year the greatest Greek writer since Homer turns 80 (but we’ll keep quiet about that for the moment). Our world is so stuck in reverse that a woman who was stabbed in Miami during the Art Basel shindig, and was bleeding and begging for help, was mistaken for an artwork and ignored. The woman survived but will art? Conceptual art must be the biggest con since Bernie Madoff and then some. And speaking of con artists, I’ve never had any respect for Mark Zuckerberg, someone who is reputed to have copied

Thursday

Norman Lebrecht

Musical maestros and football managers have more in common than you think

You don’t have to be a follower of Liverpool Football Club, or football at all, to spot the difference. Two months ago the Reds were running about headless as a newly wrung chook; today they are putting the fear of perdition into the best teams in the land. Or take Leicester City. Last season they were locked in an epic, desperate small-town struggle for Premiership survival. Today, they are top of the League. What changed? Both teams have the same players as before, same strip, roughly the same formation. The only new face is the manager’s. Change the boss and — presto — the mood picks up, tempi get faster,

Thursday

Roger Alton

The Davis Cup will be one final flourish for Andy’s Barmy Army

There’s nothing quite like a sporting celebration, but the lash-up after Britain’s (almost) inevitable victory in the Davis Cup tennis final against Belgium this weekend should be unique. For a start, there will be hardly anyone there: just Judy Murray and Andy, with Jamie popping his head in: ‘Have some Irn-Bru boys, and, take another teacake.’ It’s a funny old team, with -pretty much only one man in the team, but it will be a huge personal triumph for Andy, every bit as special as Wimble-don and the Olympics. What a -triptych! And now David Lloyd is -having a go at him for ‘not giving enough back’ to tennis. Oh

Wednesday

Maurice Mcleod

Why I didn’t sing La Marseillaise last night

When Patrice Evra and the French national football team lined up at Wembley last night, it was a moment of poignant defiance which earned an instant place in sporting iconography. I shed a tear, but I didn’t sing La Marseillaise. When horrendous things like the attacks on Paris happen, our first instincts are to offer solidarity and what help we can. And, yes, to hit back. The night after the attack, France launched 20 separate air strikes on what it said were Isis strongholds in Syria. And at home, an extra 115,000 gendarmes were deployed across France, leading to hundreds of raids with dozens of arrests.  In the days following attacks on the West,

Tuesday

Simon Barnes

The England vs France match was a glorious response to terrorism

Ain’t it rum? Last week sport was morally bankrupt, finished, no longer worthy of taking up an intelligent person’s time for a single minute. This week it’s shining out as one of the glories of the human spirit. And yet sport can cope with the contradiction quite effortlessly. It’s hard to know the worst thing in athletics right now, but it’s either the fact that Russia has been implicated in a state-run doping programme or the possibility that the former president of the sport’s world governing body is accused of taking bribes to cover it up. In football the acronym of Fifa, football’s world governing body, means corruption: nothing more,

Saturday

Freddy Gray

The strange relationship between Islam, violence and French football

It is not so surprising if the jihadists in Paris were targeting an international football match. There has for years been a strange relationship between football, Islam and violence in France. The French football team, les bleus, have long been held up as an emblem of harmony and hope in an otherwise bleak multicultural landscape. The world cup winning team of 1998 consisted largely of the children of African immigrants and was celebrated as a great symbol of how the modern multicultural fifth republic could work. Zinedine Zidane, a Muslim boy from Marseilles, was the star of that tournament. Eight years later, when he was sent off for headbutting Marco