Roger Alton is a former editor of the Observer and the Independent. He writes the Spectator Sport column.
British sport used to be dead. You only have to look down the list of past winners of the Sports Personality of the Year award to see that. In 1994 Damon Hill won it for not quite winning the Formula 1 drivers’ champion-ship; three years later Greg Rusedski won it for not quite winning the
My friend Miles was bowling in a festival of wandering cricket clubs in Oxford the other day. First wicket down and in walked an immaculately turned out Japanese gentleman. As he took guard, he turned to the slips and said, ‘I’m the best batsman in Japan.’ Miles’s first ball he edged to the keeper, and
In sport, as in life, you just don’t know where you stand any more. Look at the Premier League: no club knows where they stand except for Crystal Palace, who are being stood on by all the others. Everyone else can beat everyone else. Manchester City, who must be one of the best teams, are
The comic book Asterix in Switzerland is full of joys, not least the many jokes about Swiss obsessions with tidiness and bureaucracy. Watching the Basel Open last week, the audience was a treat. Immaculate of course, with giant glasses, and cashmere V-necks looped over the shoulders, and doubtless trading assets between matches over hot chocolate
The more you see of Jack Wilshere, the more admirable he becomes. He seems to have taken wholeheartedly to fatherhood, a path he embarked on when he was barely out of short trousers. And then there’s the agreeably relaxed way he was toking on a Marlboro Light outside a London nightclub the other day. It
This weekend is the final round of the southern hemisphere’s Rugby Championship, the best tournament outside the World Cup and wildly better than the Six Nations. The most eye-catching fixture is South Africa v. The All Blacks in Jo’burg, but the more important fixture for British Isles rugby is the 11.40 p.m. kick-off in Rosario.
Golf has reached the eye-watering end of the season in the United States. By Sunday night, one man in a baseball cap will walk off the 18th green in Atlanta $10 million richer. This week is the final event in the FedEx Cup play-offs, a four-week season-within-a-season on the American Tour in which a total
Were you still up, as they used to say about Portillo in the 1997 election, for Hedwall? It was well past midnight on Sunday, the sort of hour when all good Spectator readers should be tucked up in bed — or when the really good ones are thinking about heading home — that Caroline Hedwall,
It’s been a long, hot, soccerless holiday. There has been football about — the women’s European Championship, for example, and various age-group tournaments, all of which England departed with undue haste — but not the proper stuff. There hasn’t been a tournament where players can ‘put themselves in the shop window’ or prove that they
Insomniacs, invalids and cricket obsessives (step forward yours truly) were probably the only people who stumbled on it, but BBC4 put out a cracking drama from Down Under the other day called Howzat! It was subtitled ‘Kerry Packer’s War’ and was a rumbustious retelling of how the Australian media millionaire put a bomb under the
There’s nothing we old folk like more than a chat about how poorly all our friends and acquaintances are. This is because, as anyone who understands the complex workings of the universe knows, there is only a certain amount of ill health to go round and the more it lands on someone else, the better
Many years ago, when I used to work for the Guardian, Germaine Greer, who was then a columnist for the paper, wrote a vicious little piece for the op-ed pages slagging off Suzanne Moore, who was also a columnist. Even in the shell-shocked state that goes with the territory of trying to handle egos like
Even if you don’t have a head for petrol, you can’t have failed to have noticed that the Formula 1 season thus far has been somewhat unsatisfactory. ‘Degradation’ and even ‘delamination’ (no, me neither but it does exist) have been the key words in Grand Prix chatter as tyres with a working life that can
Lords laid on a nifty do the other day for the British Sports Book Awards, which was a great reminder of the quality of so much sports writing here. The best books duly won — Gideon Haigh’s perfectly pitched On Warne (Simon and Schuster), and the Sunday Times journalist David Walsh’s biblical Seven Deadly Sins:
The tear-flecked coverage and forests of newsprint devoted to the departure of Sir Alex Ferguson have made the resignation of Pope Benedict and the appointment of his successor look as big a deal as trying to find an ink monitor. And rightly so: Suralex is not just one of the most significant figures in world
Sachin Tendulkar did not have the happiest of 40th birthdays last week. The man who has been worshipped as a god in India for most of his career lasted only six balls, playing for Mumbai in the Indian Premier League, before being clean bowled by a young West Indian off-spinner who was only a year
David Beckham’s elegant but pointless cameo role for Paris Saint-Germain in their Champions League defeat to Barcelona the other day got plenty of play in the British press, despite his ineffectiveness. We love Becks — who doesn’t? — but he’s no longer the player he was, let alone the one he was hyped up to
Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It listed an unusual character in the credits, a swearing consultant. And no wonder, for he must have been one of the busiest people on set. Lively on-screen swearing has been largely absent recently — until mid-afternoon on Easter Sunday, that is. Commentators Andrew Cotter and Dan Topolski were amiably rhubarbing away on the
Seems a little weird to be rabbiting about sport at a time when a malign confederacy of sanctimonious do-gooders, vengeful politicians, hypocritical celebrities and hatchet-faced lefties has brought about the biggest threat to press freedom since Uncle Adolf started on his European adventures. But at least we have this fine journal which has refused to
‘Look what these bastards have done to Wales,’ Phil Bennett famously said in the dressing-room before a Five Nations match with their friends across the Severn in the mid-1970s. ‘They’ve taken our coal, our water, our steel. They buy our homes and only live in them for a fortnight every year. What have they given