Roger Alton

You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, as Joni Mitchell used to whiffle way back when. And on cricket, as on so much else, the flaxen-haired loopster of Laurel Canyon was right. My friend Fiona took her three boys to the cricket at the Oval last Thursday and a fine time was had

Amid the weeping in SW19 last weekend, Andy Murray essayed what was a clunky if well-meaning compliment to his opponent’s longevity. ‘Not bad for a 30-year-old,’ he said. Shortly after, Roger Federer opined that he thought Murray might indeed win a Grand Slam one day. Probably deserved it, too. Unspoken seemed to be the thought,

If ever I feel my zest for racing flagging, a day at Windsor soon sorts things out. The Thameside track, even more fun if you go there by boat, is one of the friendliest I know. Families picnic on the grass between the parade ring and the winner’s enclosure, the jazz bands stroll between the

One of my main preoccupations during Sunday night’s football was the size of Roy Hodgson’s watch. An immense timepiece, it sat on the managerial wrist with the quiet assurance of Big Ben. So weighty was it that you wondered whether Hodgson would have the strength to raise his arm to signal a substitution (in the

One Test series down, one to go. It’s been fun to have the West Indies here this soggy summer. They are not yet fit to lace the rum punch of their predecessors but they’ve been better than some recent vintages of Caribbean cricketer. Now we wait for the main — if truncated — event of

Heavens, we do like a moan. Sure the traffic will be hell; the commercialism mind-numbing; the Zil lanes a pain; and the presence of the egregious will.i.am, a man so irritating he makes Stephen Fry seem likable, lugging the Olympic torch is preposterous. Usain Bolt will probably miss the final because he’s been stopped and

Like modules at the Leveson inquiry, gut-wrenchingly exciting weekends of sport are coming along thick and fast now. But forget last weekend’s theatrics if you can, take a deep breath and get set for what truly will be one of the best days of sport in the year. Just before we do though, a brief

Well, that went well. The selection of the England football manager has been carried out with enough pomp, secrecy and puffs of smoke to make the election of a pope look as simple as buying a packet of fags. The workings of the almighty may be mysterious, but it’s kids’ stuff compared to what goes

You don’t want to sound too swivel-eyed about this, but didn’t poor doomed Synchronised look cursed from the get-go in that enthralling Grand National? How often do you see the best jump jockey on the planet being chucked to the ground like a piece of straw? And that was on the way to the start.

Funny business, footballers and morality. One moment they’re all taking part in mawkish self-congratulatory breast-beating, first over Gary Speed, now over poor Fabrice Muamba. The next, it’s back to childishness and sharp practice. Here’s Balotelli and Kolarov bickering over a free kick; there are Liverpool’s Carroll diving and swearing at his bench and Reina shaping

Rory McIlroy used to be the world’s best golfer. He bagged the No. 1 ranking by winning the Honda Classic in Florida at the start of the month. It was a dream realised. Already a major championship winner, he held off a magnificent final-day charge by Tiger Woods to claim the top spot in the

Good old Pearcey, I say. England’s excitable stand-in manager refreshingly ruled himself out of the full-time job after his back-of-a-fag-packet team just lost out to Holland last week, because, he said, he wasn’t good enough. His actual words were, ‘I don’t think I have the experience for the job… the full-time manager of England at

My foul-mouthed friend Claudine had it about right after seeing Michael ‘full-­frontal’ Fassbender’s latest sex-and-angst gloomathon, Shame. ‘I didn’t know where to look,’ she said, ‘when Carey Mulligan started singing.’ And anybody who’s spent any time caring about Arsenal these past few years won’t have known where to look as the team was pulled apart

You’ve got to hand it to Princess Anne. She’s been loyally pitching up for Scotland’s rugby matches through thick and thin, largely thin since the battle of Bannockburn, and unfailingly appears to be enjoying herself. She’s a real rugby fan, and if she were 30 years younger, she’d have had her eye, you suspect, on

By chance I was in Abu Dhabi as England’s first Test against Pakistan was getting under way just up the road in the sepulchral wastes of the Dubai Cricket Stadium. What could be nicer, I thought, as I sat in my hotel room, than watch a bit of cricket, and it’s local too. But in

Nobody ever seemed to have a good word to say for Ivan Lendl, though I personally enjoyed his general cool implacability. But why so disliked? It wasn’t as though he stood in the way of British tennis glory: Lendl’s career coincided with headlines that read ‘British Wimbledon hopes extinguished as Jeremy Bates loses rain-delayed first-round

Sadly, no blistering new memoir this year from Max Mosley — A Study In Scarlet: the History of the Whip (published by the British Horseracing Authority) — but there have been plenty of wonderful sporting books this year. Too many to list obviously, so I have chosen just four and, in the Leveson spirit of

What a year for a world in turmoil: crisis, riots, revolution and economic catastrophe. And that’s just Manchester City. Meanwhile, there’s the cheering news that next year’s even more calamitous financial armageddon will coincide with London hosting a fortnight’s sporting event costing, oh, £23 million an hour give or take some change. Ah yes, 2011

The great footballer Pat Nevin, as fluent, funny and intelligent an ex-player as you are likely to find, tells a wonderful story about using the word ‘equidistant’ to a referee when they were lining up a free kick. The players looked at him as if he was an alien and the referee nearly booked him

Bracing times for those of us who are part of the winter fuel allowance generation — FAGs, as we like to call ourselves. At Haydock Park, the courageous Kauto Star thundered back into the national conscience with a spine-tingling win in the Betfair Chase. The 11-year-old is an equine superstar in the mould of Red