Roger Alton

I first became aware of Alastair Cook in the Ashes summer of 2005 when he was named the Young Cricketer of the Year by the cricket writers’ association following some epic performances in the county game, not least taking a double hundred off the touring Australians. The assembled brains on our table, including Mike Brearley,

Alice Cook’s impending third child could turn out to be the perfect delivery for England. Already the expectant father Alastair has asked for a few days off work, thus possibly sparing the England selectors a synapse-crunching headache. At some point before the end of days the problem of what to do with ‘Chef’ has to

It’s just too hot and too early to get worked up about football, so the two highlights of the late-summer calendar are the US PGA golf tournament, in St Louis this time, and the US Open tennis from Flushing Meadows. Both compelling, vivid spectacles and — unless you have a lot of money and free

So in the end it was a fallible Tiger that won all hearts at the Open, not the glowering, red-shirted monarch of the fairways who carried all before him long ago. But a softer, puzzled, vaguely frail Tiger is hard not to like: this is someone now who isn’t quite sure what shot to play,

Like most people with any taste, I like the odd vodka, I love Crime and Punishment, I enjoy Turgenev and Chekhov, and who doesn’t like to listen to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov? Their national anthem’s not bad either. In other words, Russia’s quite a place, give or take the odd poisoning or country takeover. And as

Let’s talk about VAR, why don’t we? We love the World Cup though the football is getting bonkers. The scoring of a goal or a penalty decision or just a foul is merely a starting point for negotiation, as players compete to be the quickest with the ‘check the TV’ hand signals after every tiny

Here’s a question: name some famous Belgians. Well there’s Kevin De Bruyne, Vincent Kompany, and Eden Hazard. And if that’s not enough, there’s Romelu Lukaku and Dries Mertens; not forgetting Toby Alderweireld and Thomas Vermaelen. Or Mousa Dembele, Thibaut Courtois, and Marouane Fellaini. If all goes well England will still be in with a chance

I must have missed the memo when it became compulsory for major football matches to operate as a marketing opportunity for the game’s marquee players, but that was what we got at Kiev after Liverpool were outmuscled and outplayed by a flinty-eyed Real Madrid. After Ronaldo announced that his time at Madrid was in the

Good for Ed Smith. The new national selector can’t just rock a fine pair of sunglasses, he can make bold decisions. Though quite how bold it was to pick Jos Buttler, arguably England’s most gifted cricketer, is a matter of opinion. It would have been remarkable if one of the world’s best players, and a

Difficult to know quite what to make of The Hundred, which has the feel of being knocked up on the back of a packet of Senior Service and anyway sounds like a film about a heroic battle rather than the name of a new cricket thrash coming to a Test ground near you sometime in

Fittingly, it took a dire performance from a dismal and dreary United against the worst team in the Premier League to push Guardiola’s magnificent project over the line. And fittingly, too, Mourinho greeted it with one his most awful displays: lashing out at his players and painfully recalling his own record of title wins as

I haven’t seen so many men crying since the end of A Tale of Two Cities at the Scala Cinema in Oxford in the late 1950s. As the credits rolled, stern-faced blokes whipped out their hankies and dabbed their eyes. But by the time the lights went up, the hankies were replaced and upper lips

Which would you least like to see coming towards you? An Uber driverless car, Ant McPartlin in his black Mini after a long lunch, or a Johnny Sexton up and under? Sexton is a rugby genius: two of his kicks won Ireland the VI Nations Grand Slam at the weekend (as predicted by this column,

The incomparable Roger Bannister, whose passing marks the end of our links with a vanished age of sporting innocence, could have been knighted in 1954, such were his achievements in that year. He was eventually knighted 21 years later, in 1975: he could have been knighted for services to medicine or athletics, or both. We

Despite the best efforts of this column (and the BBC), too many Brits regard the Winter Olympics with the same enthusiasm as they would a traction engine rally or a village fête. Well you are so wrong, people. Admittedly you can get fed up with the BBC TV breakfast presenters nattering away about how they