Sport

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

‘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

The Secret Service said it would investigate Donald J. Trump’s longtime butler over Facebook posts laced with vulgarities and epithets calling for President Obama to be killed. — New York Times, 12 May 2016 I had only just risen from a deep slumber, when in shimmied Jeeves with the cup that cheers. ‘Does the day look fruity, Jeeves?’ I yawned. ‘Indeed, sir,’ he assented, opening the curtains to an expanse of cloudless sky, ‘decidedly clement.’ ‘Perfect conditions for a perusal of the racing form in the long grass, would you say?’ ‘I would, sir. However your aunt has asked me to inform you that she desires you to entertain a

Spring is here and the air is alive with the sound of sweaty manmade materials rubbing together, as middle-aged cyclists fill every road, dressed head to toe in Lycra. They whizz along, jumping red lights, weaving in and out of the path of trucks, screaming at pedestrians and taxi drivers; barely evading death three times a morning. Lycra isn’t just a fabric; it’s a state of mind. At work, these often portly, always angry, red-faced individuals might be mild-mannered middle managers who work in marketing. But in their cycling kit they are superheroes who happen to swear a lot. The double Olympic champion Laura Trott was once asked to help

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

In the course of a queasy hour in Harley Street 30 years ago I learned a great deal about the brain — what Woody Allen called ‘my second favourite organ’ — and altered the course of my life in sports writing. Dr Peter Harvey concluded: ‘Boxing is a contest in which the winner seems often to be the one who produces more brain damage on his opponent than he himself sustains.’ Last weekend, after a boxing match for the British middleweight title, Nick Blackwell was in an induced coma with bleeding to the brain. Things would have been a good deal worse if his opponent, Chris Eubank Jnr, had not

Maria Sharapova topped the list for the world’s highest earning female athlete for 11 consecutive years. Not that she has ever been the world’s best female athlete. She isn’t even the best in her own sport. You measure tennis players by their grand-slam singles titles: Sharapova has five, Serena Williams 21. But Sharapova pulled off the win-double of the bimbo-champion, and that’s where the money is. Williams could win another hundred slams and still lag behind Sharapova as an earner, because she’s not even a bit blonde. Before Sharapova won Wimbledon at 17, Anna Kournikova had shown how it was done. Kournikova earned pots more than infinitely better players because

[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

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 damn near 50 years, a summer with a thrilling England cricket team, an England

The world’s tennis elite is up in arms. Roger Federer wants to see proof, demanding that the people behind “allegations that match-fixing is rife” should name names.  Andy Murray has criticised the practice of betting companies sponsoring tournaments. And Murray’s former coach Mark Petchey thinks that betting on lower-grade tournaments should be outlawed – although it isn’t clear how he proposes to enforce that on syndicates in Hong Kong. They are all missing the point. Perhaps that’s because (or why) the entire media cohort did the same thing yesterday, running story after interview about the possibility that tennis matches get thrown for money. All the old clichés came out: how tennis (as a two-person

Just as one Muslim doesn’t represent Islam, Tyson Fury doesn’t represent boxing. But that hasn’t stopped liberal commentators and the morally-outraged Twitterati, who have used the BBC Sports Personality furore to attack the sport. Julie Bindel (who claims boxing is ‘not a sport but a sadistic spectacle performed by men’) wrote in the Guardian: ‘If your job is to knock somebody unconscious, it’s unlikely that they have been raised to think that solving an argument with their fists is wrong. The ethos behind this can also breed dangerous attitudes towards women.’ Does this mean a tennis player will try to solve an argument with a racket? Or a golfer with a club? Boxing

So long, then, to another thrilling year of sport in which the full range of human possibility — from the dismal frailties of the recidivists who run world football to the brazen brilliance of Japan’s rugby players — made for an intoxicating mix. It began and ended with two epic highs. Back in January, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson made the first free ascent of the Dawn Wall in Yosemite, the most difficult route in rock climbing, taking 19 days in all. A truly awesome achievement. Most of us could barely get off the ground; Yosemite is 3,000 ft high. Then, almost at year’s end, another high: the only people who

In 1981, when I was ten and Ian Botham was 26, I thought he was God. Now, the week after Botham turned 60, the 44-year-old me thinks he’s an arse. And that makes me sad. The world is a simple place when you’re ten. There are heroes and villains, victories and defeats. The very best victories are the ones that were nearly defeats. Headingley 1981, for example. No need for the details — you know them already, not just from the match itself but from the hundreds of documentaries made about it since. I still lap them all up like an addict, silently mouthing along as Richie Benaud describes Botham’s six