Tennis

The timing of Brendon McCullum’s appointment as England’s Test match coach couldn’t be better for him, or for the matey but very canny Rob Key, cricket’s managing director. Had they taken over their jobs when England were at or near the top of the world rankings, things would have been a lot tougher. Getting to the top might be hard, but staying there is a nightmare. Now, with England well and truly in the basement, McCullum’s only way is up. And he kicks off with a Test against his homeland, New Zealand, at Lord’s next month. You hope that sooner or later he finds room for the wonderfully talented if

Sport and politics have always been intertwined, but this was the year they became joined at the hip. Yorkshire racism; the growing protests about China’s sportwashing at the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022; anger about the Saudi takeover of Newcastle United; and the long-simmering anxiety about the Qatar World Cup. And with it, growing and very welcome, activism from sports-people: Lewis Hamilton’s rainbow helmet for gay rights in Saudi Arabia, Marcus Rashford’s indefatigable campaigning over child deprivation, and Michael Holding’s powerful interventions over everyday racism. But the gutless performance of the year should go to men’s professional tennis, which has resolutely failed to join the Women’s Tennis Association in boycotting

There’s a narrow stretch of Chelsea, south of the King’s Road from Oakley Street to Ormonde Gate, that reminds me of post-war London when I first came here with my dad. Names such as Margaretta Terrace, St Loo Avenue, Alpha Place and Robinson Street bring back sweet memories of youthful innocence and desire. London back then was big on rep but ranked last on comfort. Much later, towards the end of the 1950s, Queen’s Club held the second biggest tennis tournament in the land and had just one shower in the men’s locker room. (With a dirty white curtain.) It is often said that schoolboys derive no benefit from fine

Not so much the hair dryer: more a gentle home perm. Contemplating the increasingly less youthful visage of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer as he looked on powerlessly while his very expensive Manchester United side were dismembered by Liverpool, you couldn’t help wonder what Sir Alex Ferguson, glowering and irascible in the stands above, would have done with those players. He would certainly have got something more out of the infantile and malicious Paul Pogba, sent off for a mean tackle which betrayed his manager and his teammates. But as Solskjaer was clearly a Ferguson appointment, shouldn’t the old bully take a share of the responsibility? With a weak board and a

Around 20 or so years ago I had a point for match point on a perfect grass court at Fort Belvedere. We’d been playing for close to two hours. I remember hitting a topspin backhand down the line, going to the net and seeing my ball just miss the tramline. I was perfectly positioned to call the ball out. My opponent, thinking I would approach with a crosscourt, was covering his backhand side. He called my ball in. ‘Ball was out,’ said I. ‘I saw it in and it was in,’ said Galen Weston, my host at the Fort and a very good tennis player. It verged on the parodic,

Forgive the personal question, but how long does it take you to, you know, go to the gents, ladies, non-binary? Quite what Stefanos Tsitsipas was doing in there in any of his numerous toilet breaks during the epic first-round US Open encounter with Andy Murray at Flushing (geddit?) Meadows is anybody’s guess. It clearly riled Murray — never the hardest thing to do — who was playing as well as ever, and is the ironman, quite literally, of Grand Slam tennis. He has also rather wittily pointed out that Jeff Bezos can get into space and back again more quickly than Tsitsipas can go to the loo. There is something

Wimbledon is here at last, after its absence in 2020. What struck me watching the French Open on television a couple of weeks before was just how much rubbish I had to listen to if I kept the sound on. There are now too many matches broadcast, which means more and more commentators spouting off about the game in the middle of rallies. I don’t know why viewers don’t raise hell with the networks about these non-stop blabbermouths who interrupt our viewing. We’ve become a nation of sheep, accepting everything so-called experts throw at us. Televised sport needs commentators only before and after the event. Although the Wimbledon lot spout

The question is surely destined to become a pub quiz staple: ‘Who moved a bottle 18 inches across a table and was said by the media to have wiped millions from the share price of a major corporation?’ Cristiano Ronaldo’s casual dismissal of a product-placed bottle of Coca-Cola — and Paul Pogba’s subsequent pushing aside of a bottle of Heineken — during Euro 2020 press conferences earned them nearly as much attention as any sleight of foot they performed on the pitch. For years the corporations have been mightier than the players but this isn’t the case any longer. There has even been some talk of legal action against Ronaldo