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Sport

Thursday

Roger Alton

Seven things we’ve learned from the rugby World Cup

New Zealanders can teach the world a lot about sportsmanship. Steve Hansen after last Saturday’s All Blacks defeat by England in the World Cup semi-final showed the uncomplaining loser can be just as impressive as the triumphant winner. As he put it: ‘Winning’s easy…[but] when you lose… you have to show humility, do it gracefully and be honest about it. Sometimes you have to bite down on your gumshield and suck it up.’ The Springboks have put rugby back several decades. Big, beastly, and brutal, they made the first half of their semi-final with Wales almost unwatchable. Afterwards the Wales hierarchy talked about losing the ‘arm-wrestle’: but why are Wales

Thursday

Benedict Spence

It’s not just hooligans – hipsters also love a football shirt

When I was young, from about the age of nine to 13, I went through what my parents recall with a shudder as ‘the football shirt phase’. Where some children rebel by smoking, and others take to eyeliner, my vice was polyester. My first shirt was a quirky one — an early Noughties AS Bari white and red home shirt with an itchy collar. The thing smelled of washing powder no matter how much I wore it — which was daily for the best part of three months one very hot Italian summer. I’d wear football shirts everywhere, from family meals to drinks parties, trips into town and to Mass.

Thursday

The Spectator

Are childhood vaccination rates dropping?

Who speaks what The Chancellor, Sajid Javid, included a little Punjabi in his speech to the Tory conference. How many people in Britain would have understood him? In the 2011 census the ONS counted 273,000 Punjabi speakers in Britain. The other most common languages, besides English and Welsh, were: Polish 546,000 Urdu 269,000 Bengali 221,000 Gujarati 213,000 Arabic 159,000 French 147,000 Portuguese 133,000 Spanish 120,000   Death by gender The British Heart Foundation claimed women were needlessly dying of heart disease because they were receiving less good treatment than men. How do the causes of death differ between the sexes? Deaths per million in 2017 Men / Women Ischaemic heart

Thursday

The Spectator

How many people have swum the Channel?

Journey’s end Holidaymakers are being flown home after travel company Thomas Cook failed. The idea might have horrified the company’s eponymous founder, whose first excursion was a temperance outing from Leicester to Loughborough on 5 July 1841, on a charter train from the Midland Railway Company. All 500 tickets were swiftly sold. A holiday from Leicester to Liverpool and North Wales followed in 1845, including several nights in temperance hotels and a night-time ascent of Snowdon. Thomas Cook went on to organise trips to the 1851 Great Exhibition for 150,000 from the Midlands. Financial health A Labour activist and parent of a patient accused the Prime Minister on a visit

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

Cricket’s guilty men: my list of who deserves to be sacked for the Ashes debacle

I suppose the question is who we sack first. For like many, if not most England fans, I am at a stage beyond rage, beyond reasonable doubt, beyond all good sense. I want blood. As a friend of mine who supports Everton posted on Facebook this morning, ‘Name two seven-letter sports teams beginning with E who will always let you down.’ The candidates for the chop are as follows: 1. Jason Roy as opening batsman. Dear god, I could do better. My old friend Simon, who used to open for the team I play for, could do better. He played 252 games for us and averages just over seven. He

Thursday

Roger Alton

Bring out the biltong for Labuschagne, an Ashes hero

Funny, the things cricketers put on their bats. England’s Jos Buttler has ‘Fuck it’ written at the top of his blade to remind him it’s only a game (or something like that). Australian Marnus Labuschagne, who for my money was one of the great heroes of the Ashes Test at Lord’s, has the image of an eagle drawn on the bottom of his bat. It’s to remind young Marnus of one of his favourite Bible passages, Isaiah 40:31: ‘For those who hope in the Lord, He shall renew their strength. They shall soar on wings like eagles; they shall run and not grow weary, they shall walk and not be

Thursday

Angela Patmore

Test match

Why do we need tie-breaks and photo finishes? If competitors have been nip-and-tuck all the way, why can’t they just share victory? England supporters who watched the ICC Cricket World Cup final might have been febrile with joy when the extra-time ‘super over’ ended in another tie, giving England the margin on boundaries, but New Zealand’s Black Caps lost by less than a whisker. Why shouldn’t they have halved the triumph? Why shouldn’t Roger Federer, who went toe-to-toe with Novak Djokovic in the longest-ever Wimbledon final, have lifted one side of that famous trophy? The answer is that human beings need resolution. Spectators need to know the thing has been

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Save us from the civil service and the BBC

I was asked on to the BBC Today programme — my old manor — last week to talk about the Women’s World Cup. The producers had noticed that I’d changed my mind about the event and now thought it all rather good fun, having hitherto been derisively misogynistic. ‘This is the thing,’ I said to them. ‘You only invite social conservatives on when they’ve come around to your way of thinking and stopped being social conservatives. Why don’t you ask me on to talk about banning abortion, deporting all foreigners and sectioning the trannies?’ I agreed to the football chat, a little reluctantly, but told the chap that the item

Thursday

Roger Alton

A very aggressive tackle

Forty years ago the football transfer market went crazy: the British record was broken four times in 1979, more than in any other year before or since. A lot of this was down to Malcolm Allison at Manchester City, who shelled out a record amount for a teenager (£250,000 for Steve MacKenzie, an apprentice at Palace) and £1.45 million to bring Steve Daley from Wolves. That was later, unkindly but not inaccurately, described as ‘the biggest waste of money in football history’. Allison continued to spend money like a drunk in a bar; something the club never recovered from until it became part of the sovereign wealth portfolio of one

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Croquet

People say cricket is the quintessential English game. Those people are wrong. Cricket may have a longer pedigree, but it’s too boring, too democratic and too honourable to qualify: croquet is the game that truly captures what it is to be English. As any pub quizzer will tell you, Wimbledon started its life in 1868 as the All England Croquet Club, only developing its vulgar sideline in lawn tennis late in the following decade. Its reputation has yet to recover.   Just like cricket, where the game as played on the village green differs from the international game, the echt English croquet is the one played, ideally slightly drunk, in

Thursday

James Delingpole

Get your kit off

After its new costume drama You Go, Girl! (Sundays) about how amazing, empowered and better-than-men women are, especially if they are lesbians, the BBC ran its first ever Nike ad. At least that’s what I thought initially: rap music, moody shots of athletes, very high production values. Then I saw they were all grim-faced women and the word ‘RISE’ in flames and I thought: ‘Big new drama series? About girls who’ve been sucked into this very strict Christian cult, a bit like the Handmaid’s Tale, maybe?’ Then I noticed they were all wearing football kit and kicking balls around, and went back to my original Nike idea. Finally came the

Thursday

Laura Freeman

Knight fever

Emperor Maximilian I liked to say he invented the joust of the exploding shields. When a knight charged and his lance struck the opposing shield — bam! — the shield shattered and the shrapnel went up like fireworks. It’s almost impossible to turn the pages of Freydal. Medieval Games. The Book of Tournaments of Emperor Maximilian I and not imagine Batman-style captions. Clank! Thwack! Kapow! The knights and princes of the painted miniatures are all-awl, all-action iron men. Their horses are hooded to stop them bolting and every harness is stitched with bells. All the horse would have heard was the jangling, not the thunder of hooves or the roar

Wednesday

Roger Alton

Master of manners – and the high seas

Something very odd happened on the Today programme the other morning. Amid the mountains of bombast that usually fill the Radio 4 airwaves at that time came the calm, modulated tones of a man speaking with great humour, wit and modesty of an extraordinary achievement. It was Sir Robin Knox–Johnston, on the eve of his 80th birthday, marking the anniversary of his greatest triumph. Almost exactly 50 years ago today he sailed his battered 32ft ketch Suhaili into Falmouth harbour — and history. He had become the first person to sail single-handed around the world without stopping. When Suhaili had slipped out of Falmouth in June the previous year it

Thursday

Roger Alton

The coolest man in cricket

It can’t be a coincidence that two of the coolest sportsmen on the planet are from the same place, Jamaica. Must be something in the air. Chris Gayle and Usain Bolt have both redefined excellence in their fields. And Gayle’s impending departure from cricket, like Bolt’s from athletics, will have the effect, sadly, of making sport more monochrome, though diehard traditionalists world over will doubtless be glad to see the back of him. Ten years ago, Gayle (aka Universe Boss) said he wouldn’t be ‘so sad if Test cricket died out’. In the intervening decade he has striven spectacularly to promote the action-packed delights of the limited-overs game, rarely more

William Cook

The world at his feet

How much is Jadon Sancho worth? Fifty million? A hundred million? As the speculation mounts, the numbers keep growing. Jadon is the star player for Borussia Dortmund, one of Germany’s leading football teams. He’s already won his first England cap — and he’s still only 18. If you know anything about football, you already know about Jadon. If you don’t know anything about football, you’ll know about him soon enough. He’s the kind of player who comes along only once in a decade — a Glenn Hoddle, a Paul Gascoigne, a Ryan Giggs, a Gareth Bale. He’s the most gifted British footballer of his generation. And from when he was

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Will women’s sports cease to exist?

Congratulations to Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood for sweeping all before them in the Connecticut girls’ high school track races last week. Yes, of course they are men. There were some anguished complaints from the various girls these two speedy lads defeated, but these were of course brushed aside in a country where women’s sporting events may one day soon consist entirely of men. Already a Democratic party representative, Ilhan Omar (Minnesota), is insisting that the US powerlifting tournaments allow transgender women to compete, so that people who look very much like Geoff Capes, and have the same chromosomes as Geoff Capes, and the same bone structure and musculature, can

Thursday

Louise Levene

Big in Japan

An early morning in late November in the peaceful glades that surround an ancient temple complex. A Shinto priest in sombre silks slips through a sliding door; a maple leaf catches the breeze. Suddenly, the silence is broken by the crunching thwack as two 400lb slabs of prime meat collide. It is the 15th and final day of one of Japan’s six annual sumo tournaments: the Kyushu Basho, held every autumn in the balmy southern city of Fukuoka. A group of visiting wrestlers have begun their pre-breakfast workout in one of the outbuildings of Torikai Hachiman-gu, preparing for the afternoon bouts at the arena three miles away. Sumo is as

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

Get your skates on

In landscape terms, the Fens don’t have much going for them. What you can say for them, though, is that they’re flat — a selling point for lovers of flat racing. This aspect was not lost on James I when, while out hunting in 1605, he came across the village of Newmarket, and 60 years later his grandson Charles II, who inherited the Stuart love of the sport of kings, would build a palace and stables in the Suffolk village. Today the remains of Palace House and the King’s Yard are home to the National Heritage Centre for Horseracing & Sporting Art, which houses a world-class collection of sporting art

Roger Alton Roger Alton

The end of the era show

It may be the end of the year but it’s also the end of some major sporting eras. Alastair Cook signed off amid sun-drenched glory and a tsunami of affection. And surprise, surprise, it has liberated Joe Root to make a team in his own image, playing with brio and bravery. Roger Federer may be capable of one last burst of incandescent brilliance but not much more than that. Meanwhile, the implacable giants of football and cricket, Germany and Australia, have been brought crashing down to earth. We should relish the schadenfreude now, because renewal will follow quickly, and a new-look young German football outfit looks to be already on

Thursday

Peter Oborne

Not always cricket

At the beginning of August this year, the England test team played what is supposed to have been the 1,000th test match since the 1877 Ashes test against Australia in Melbourne, a match which was won by Australia by 45 runs. But was it really a test match? The players in that 1877 game had no idea they were test cricketers. England’s finest player, W.G. Grace, wasn’t there. Nor was Australia’s great bowler, Fred Spofforth. England played as James Lillywhite’s XI and only later was the match awarded test status. Nevertheless, the show was on the road. Simon Wilde, cricket correspondent of the Sunday Times, has had the engaging idea