How went our ‘Last Smoke’ dinner on Thursday, hosted by the Spec’s Andrew Neil at London’s swish Four Seasons Hotel? If not so grand, there were doubtless other such tobacco requiems all around the country. Nicely apt, somehow, that Nanny Blair’s smoking ban coincides with her own cursing, unlamented departure from the nursery. All ‘final
BBC radio’s Test Match Special will deservedly be celebrating particularly special champagne moments in a couple of weeks when their tardis settles on Edgbaston for the one-day international; for it was at Birmingham’s pleasant ground they began their ball-by-ball odyssey of jabber and jape 50 summers ago. In its turn, tennis next week nods to a
Here’s a singular cricket team, well balanced, hard to beat: Dick Spooner, Geoff Cook, Colin Milburn, Tom Graveney, David Townsend, Peter Willey, Alan Hodgson, George Sharp, Alex Coxon, Jim McConnon, Bob Willis. No-nonsense openers, some glistening strokeplayers, a mean and hostile pace attack, two Test match off-spinners, and Spooner and Sharp can share the gauntlets.
I was sorry to miss last week’s ghostbusting gig at the Hay-on-Wye festival when David Beckham’s surrogate-scribbler, actor-writer Tom Watt, joined two mates of mine, Paul Hayward (Sir Bobby Robson, Michael Owen) and Peter Burden (novelist-amanuensis of horseracing’s Francome and Pitman, and vet-thesps Hemmings and Phillips). Ghostwriting has a long literary history, but suddenly there’s
Is any new sporting arena fit for purpose without a statue to adorn it? Critics of the apparently workaday new Wembley Stadium reckon the most striking thing about it is the towering bronze at its entrance by sculptor Philip Jackson of the straightbacked, relaxed good fellow, lamented Bobby Moore. Statues of sporting figures are suddenly
Fasten your ear-muffs for a deafening weekend — din and dissonance, vrooms and fumes. Around Silverstone, lock up your dogs and daughters while the leaning, leather-clad boy racers sort out the British leg of the world motorcycling championship. Down on the Riviera, the straw-bales and (what we used to call) the starlets are in place for
With no international competition this summer, football’s curtain comes down with a clamorous abruptness in Athens on Wednesday, when Liverpool meet AC Milan in the final of the European Cup. By way of domestic overture, Chelsea play Manchester United this Saturday in the FA Cup final, and it would be fitting if a compelling show
It seems barmy that the first cricket Test match of the summer begins as early as next Thursday. The madcap trawl for profits obliterates all the old established rhythms. The Lord’s Test was traditionally high summer harbinger of the London ‘season’ at once followed by Wimbledon and Henley. You can bet, anyway, that a Lord’s
In those fresh, expectant springtimes of long ago, the last week of April was the very quintessence of the changeover — the week he would have bid adieu to the raucous wintery fever-pitch of Highbury and its stately marble halls, sling his football boots into his London landlady’s cupboard, and whistle chirpily down to Paddington
A vibrantly challenging final in Barbados today (Saturday) might at least — and at last — put a smile on the face of cricket’s dismally tedious World Cup. The England team will doubtless be watching at home, behind closed curtains. Let’s hope their new coach has more oomph and isn’t such a stubborn sourpuss as his
Chelsea vs Manchester United: the long-running grudge which has defined English football’s Premiership for most of the winter (and last) could yet be extended to a fevered and passionate play-off decider in Athens on 23 May in the European Cup final itself. Travel agents are rubbing their hands and, doubtless, Greek policemen are anxiously fondling
I daresay bonny Barbados and some blazing cricket in its final fortnight might retrieve disenchantment with the 2007 World Cup. But I doubt it. Bob Woolmer’s calamity still beggars belief but, that apparent outrage aside, the event as a whole has been one of drawn-out, sanitised tedium. The manner in which the colourfully spontaneous joie
Eight teams, and scarcely 10 points between them for months. While the Premiership title has long been an unchallenging two-horse race between Manchester United and Chelsea, the top of English league football’s second tier, the Championship, remains thrillingly, feverishly congested. The frantic, concertina’d eightsome are (alphabetically is safer, so regularly do the leaders change) Birmingham
The appalling crime in Jamaica still has the cricket world in shock, and it was harrowingly eerie this week to be coldly attempting to relish Wisden’s latest arrival, hot off the press. In it, of course, Bob Woolmer features prominently. The new almanack includes a poignant full-page close-up picture of a desperate Bob brandishing (in
Once more unto the breach! Harfleur, Dunkirk and all that guff is being desperately evoked by the public prints and broadcasters. Goodwill may be suffering from donor fatigue but for one more time the nation entreats the England football team to get a grip. Victory in Tel Aviv against Israel today (Saturday) is crucial to qualification
Cricket’s World Cup will be an interminable slog in every sense. It began on Tuesday, 13 March; the final is still six weeks away (28 April). With only a month to sort out 32 bristlingly competitive teams, football’s World Cup is comfortably more user-friendly, while rugby’s version already has plans in hand to compress itself
Six Nations rugby musters for its last convulsive heaves this weekend and next. Today (10 March) in Edinburgh, the appealing Irish XV should confirm their latest Triple Crown, while victory at Twickenham tomorrow will, to all intents, settle yet another championship for France. Both their matches next Saturday, respectively against Italy and Scotland, should each
By next Wednesday evening, uniquely, five British clubs could be in the last eight of the European Champions’ Cup. There is still, as they say, a lot of football to be played, but I suppose even the possibility remains testament to the strength at the top of the British club game. Mind you, only a
Football’s relishable League Cup final at Cardiff tomorrow has Arsenal and Chelsea, the big guns from London, intriguingly squaring up for what is, officially, the last time English clubs play a showpiece event in a ‘foreign’ country. Well, that’s the plan anyway. Personally, I wouldn’t bet on it. I fancy it is still anyone’s guess whether
There was generally bonny acclamation as the French rugby team ran out to play Ireland at Dublin’s Croke Park stadium last Sunday. I forecast a significantly tauter edge to proceedings next Saturday when the English XV takes to the Republic’s hallowed sports field and lines up in front of the Irish Army Band to belt