Sport

Sunday

Simon Barnes

Girl power: give women’s sport the credit it deserves

England won the cricket World Cup for the fourth time. Huzzah! England reached the semi-finals of the European football championship. Huzzah again! Or you can, as some have preferred, say well, it’s not really England, is it? It’s England women — and that’s not the same thing at all. Ten points for observation, eh? I remember when I first noticed. But there’s less power, less speed and it’s altogether less thrilling a spectacle than the men’s versions, they say. Anya Shrubsole, the demon fast bowler who secured the win for England by taking six wickets in the final, only bowls at 70 mph; she’d be cannon fodder in a men’s

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 20 July 2017

Yes to Boris Sir: Get Boris (15 July)! Get Boris to be prime minister, in fact. He is the only possible candidate for the Conservatives who has the flair, the experience, the ideas and the sense of humour to rescue the party and the country from its current malaise. That he has opposition there is no doubt — but then so did Winston Churchill when he was recalled by Lloyd George in 1917 to be minister of munitions, and again in 1940 when he became prime minister. To sideline him at this time would be foolish in the extreme and a further example of the party’s ineptitude. George Burne Woldingham, Surrey

Thursday

Simon Barnes

Is Johanna Konta British?

Have you been cheering for the excellent Johanna Konta at Wimbledon? Go, Jo! Or should that be Go, Yo? Johanna (pronounced Yo-harner) was born to Hungarian parents in Sydney and came to Britain when she was 14; her parents moved to Eastbourne while she went to train in Barcelona. She became a British citizen in 2012. Is she really British, then? Or is she a Plastic Brit, exploiting our great nation for what she can get? Greg Rusedski came from Canada to represent Britain at tennis in 1995, aged 22, even wearing an ill-advised Union Jack bandana. The Lawn Tennis Association (Britain’s national federation) later tried to persuade Novak Djokovic

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

Match made in heaven | 6 July 2017

Tennis is best played with a wooden racket on a shady lawn somewhere close to Dorking. There is no need for trainers, an umpire, or a scoreboard. No need for rules at all. After Wimbledon, the tea-and-jam, grass-stained, Sunday-afternoon scenario from A Room with a View is the only one to emulate. In 1908, when E.M. Forster published his novel, lawn tennis was not yet 50 years old. Although the origins of the game reach back to the 12th century, the version played by Miss Honeychurch and Reverend Beebe and most of us today was said to have been pioneered on a croquet lawn in Edgbaston in 1859. It was

Thursday

Roger Alton

Metal fatigue in the golden generation

Not a bad week for Roger Federer then: first pootling along being cool and rich in a morning suit at the Philippa Middleton wedding, then being named in the world’s tennis top five again, with his increasingly elderly chums. It’s the first time all five (Murray, Djokovic, Federer, Nadal and ‘Stan the Man’ Wawrinka) have been over 30. Indeed, the only player born in the 1990s to reach a grand slam final is Milos Raonic; no spring chicken at 27. This is an astonishing time in tennis; a golden generation indeed. We have come a long way since Lleyton Hewitt beat David Nalbandian 3-0 to win Wimbledon. Nalbandian won just

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 18 May 2017

Veggie skills Forest Green Rovers, described as the world’s first vegan football club, was promoted to the Football League. Some sportsmen who have become vegan: Neil Robinson turned vegan at 23 while playing football for Everton in 1980. Dustin Watton played in the US National Volleyball team in 2015. Peter Siddle, a bowler in the Australian cricket team, turned vegan in 2013. Griff Whalen plays American football for Miami Dolphins. Only vegan food is served at the Forest Green Rovers ground, but some players were filmed scoffing meat pizzas in 2016. Who’s on board? Theresa May wants worker representatives on company boards, if not actual workers. Who were the 1,546 people on

Thursday

Roger Alton

Liverpool’s press mess

The comedian Jimmy Carr is not necessarily a guy you would trust on much, but he was spot on the other day when he said that the Hillsborough disaster was something you would never joke about. Of course not, but it seems you can’t have even a sliver of a divergent view. Now, thanks to the timorousness of one of the world’s major football clubs, and the pusillanimity of the Premier League, a bitter little drama is being played out that could have savage implications for freedom of the press. Early in February this year Liverpool FC announced that the Sun would be banned from all home facilities, Anfield and

Damian Reilly Damian Reilly

Fighting chance

Middle age is OK by me. National Trust membership, a Waitrose loyalty card, lying on the sofa drinking red wine and yelling at the telly — since I turned 40, this stuff all just feels right. But by a mile, the best consolation of middle age I’ve found is the cagefighter Conor McGregor and living vicariously through his kicks, punches and verbal smackdowns. How dull my previous enthusiasms for cricket, tennis and football now seem by comparison with the heroic derring-do of this 28-year-old killing machine, a former plumber from Crumlin in Dublin. Damian Reilly is joined by Matt Christie, editor of Boxing News, to talk up McGregor’s chances: It’s

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 23 February 2017

Big league Lincoln City became the first non-league club since Queens Park Rangers in 1914 to win a place in the FA Cup quarter-finals. But what happened in 1914? — There were only 40 league clubs and QPR won a bye through the early rounds. — They drew 2-2 with Bristol City before winning 2-0 in a replay. — They beat Swansea and Birmingham (2-1 each) to reach the quarter-finals, where Liverpool beat them 2-1. — Liverpool lost the final 1-0 to Burnley, the team Lincoln beat last weekend. — That final was the last held at the Crystal Palace, which had been its venue since 1895. Mega mergers Unilever

Wednesday

Simon Barnes

UK Sport’s brutal funding cuts show that winning is now all that matters

Is sport really so great? Or is it only winning that’s great? UK Sport says a loud yes to question two: and as a result, they won’t be funding half a dozen perfectly decent sports because they’re unlikely to win Olympics medals for Britain – or for Team GB, as they like to be called. Badminton goes from £5.7m a year to zero. Other sports suffering cutbacks are archery, fencing, table tennis, weightlifting, goalball and wheelchair rugby. Rod Carr, chair of UK Sport, said: ‘Would it be more brutal to come back from Tokyo (venue for the 2020 Olympics) with a heavily reduced medal haul because we took some softer

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 26 January 2017

‘If life is a race, I feel that I’m not even at the starting line,’ I said to the doctor in French. (I’d composed, polished and rehearsed the sentence in the waiting room beforehand.) She was a sexy piece in her early fifties with a husky voice. She listened to my halting effort to describe my depression with a smile playing lightly over her scarlet lips as though I were relating an amusing anecdote with a witty punchline lurking just around the corner. I further explained in French that I had been properly but briefly depressed once before, about 15 years ago. Here my tenses let me down badly, and

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Spot the ball

The purest form of radio is probably sports commentating, creating pictures in the mind purely through language so that by some magic the listener believes that they were there, too, when Geoff Hurst scored that final goal, Shergar ran out the field at Epsom, Mo Farah sped ahead on Super Saturday. As Mike Costello said last Thursday on Radio Five Live’s celebration of 90 years since the first outside broadcast from a rugby match on 15 January 1927, ‘We’re all blind when we listen now, just as we were back in the 1930s.’ The technology has changed radically but radio still relies on the skill of an inspired individual to

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 12 January 2017

Freudian slap Sir: In his Notes (7 January), Charles Moore explores the uncharacteristic reaction of Matthew Parris to the referendum result. What is most puzzling about Parris and so many others like him is that their present outrage has so little in common with their rather tepid support for the EU in the run-up to the vote. Such a mismatch of cause and effect suggests a Freudian explanation may be appropriate. When an impulse is felt to be so dire that it cannot be expressed, a new object is substituted and the feelings are thus ventilated. Yet what original threat could be so catastrophic as to provoke such end-of-our-world hysteria

Simon Barnes

A stroke of genius

The picture had been chosen for its utterly gratuitous depiction of female beauty. It showed Justine Henin, the Belgian tennis player who won seven grand-slam singles titles between 2003 and 2007. She was fully dressed for tennis. The gratuitous beauty came from the shot she was playing. It was a single-handed backhand. Henin was five foot six and so slim she had to run round and round in the shower to get wet. She didn’t look capable of hitting the top off a dandelion. But that backhand regularly devastated opponents, fizzing down the line with astonishing power — where did that come from? — or howling across court at a

Thursday

Simon Barnes

Not cricket | 5 January 2017

Sport is a serious matter. If you have any doubts on that score, shed them now, because this is to be a South African year. The South African cricket team comes to England in the summer to play four Test matches, three one-day internationals and three Twenty20 games, and as they do so they will ask a million questions — not only about cover drives and reverse swing, but also about the way to make a society, about the way to redeem a society, about idealism versus practicality, about short-term advantage versus long-term goals and about the nature of justice. There is an argument doing the rounds. It goes like

Michael Henderson

Hit for six | 5 January 2017

Frankie Howerd, the great, if troubled, comedian, was once asked whether he enjoyed performing. ‘I enjoy having performed,’ he replied. Many top-level sportsmen would say something similar. The satisfaction often comes from having done, not always from doing. Performing offers great rewards, but it can also leave scars that heal slowly, and sometimes not at all. Jonathan Trott was a good cricketer in a strong England team that beat Australia in three successive series between 2009 and 2013. Batting at No. 3, he made a century on his Test debut, and became a dependable, if minor-key player in the side that vanquished the Aussies Down Under two winters later. Then,

Thursday

Simon Kuper

Knowing the score

When I come home from work and stick my key in the door, there is a pitter-patter of tiny feet as my eight-year-old twin boys run up to me and shout: ‘Paris St-Germain won 3-1! First he scored, then he missed, then…’ They are suffering from a harmless case of sports geekery. I had it myself as a child, and have gone on to hold down a job, albeit in the dying industry of journalism. The only difference is that as a child I wasn’t encouraged to bore my dad with my findings, because helicopter parenting hadn’t been invented yet. A complicating factor in our family is that we live

Thursday

Taki

High life | 17 November 2016

New York   The only thing worse than a sore loser, I suppose, is a sore winner, but thank God we don’t run into too many of those. Thirty years ago, The Spectator and I lost a libel case that cost the then proprietor and yours truly a small fortune. As it turned out, after the plaintiff had gone to that sauna-like place below, everything that I had written was the truth and nothing but. (The hubby of the woman who sued me came clean after her death, but a lot of good that did the Speccie and me.) The sainted editor at the time was Charles Moore, and in

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Ziggurat of bilge

Ella Hickson’s new play analyses our relationship with oil using the sketch format. First, there’s a candlelit soap opera set in Cornwall, in 1889, with a lot of ooh-arr bumpkins firing witless insults at each other. Next, a bizarre Persian scene, set in 1908, where a Scottish footman (who uses the celebrated Edwardian colloquialism ‘OK’) rescues a ditzy waitress from a sex-maniac serving in the British army. Then we move to Hampstead, in 1970, where a female oil magnate is visited by a Libyan diplomat seeking to nationalise her wells by waving documents at her, in her kitchen, while teenage kids pop in and out performing oral sex on each

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 6 October 2016

Tenement Scots John Cleese referred to the editor of this magazine as a ‘tenement Scot’. Do more Scots live in tenements? — The term tenement became associated in Scotland with 14-storey blocks built in Edinburgh in the 18th and 19th centuries. One collapsed in 1861, killing 35 residents and leading to an Improvement Act which largely did away with the old blocks. — Today, 38% of homes in Scotland are flats or maisonettes, markedly higher than the 21% in England and Wales. But only 14,900 (0.6%) are ‘buildings in multiple occupancy’, with shared facilities like the original tenements. More than a landslide Hungarians voted by 98% to 2% to reject