Roger Alton

Roger Alton

Roger Alton is a former editor of the Observer and the Independent. He writes the Spectator Sport column.

Spectator Sport | 1 March 2008

With Shilpa Shetty, Lachlan Murdoch, Aussie feist-meister Andrew Symonds and more Indian billionaires than you can shake a stump at, the eye-watering player-auction for the new Twenty20 Indian Premier League (IPL) in Mumbai last week was never going to be something tailored for the Long Room at Lord’s. But this should be good for cricket,

Spectator Sport | 16 February 2008

My friend Simon has a lovely bench in his garden made up of the blue-painted wooden seats he sat in with his dad when they went to Rugby League decades ago. He bought them when the old Swinton ground was knocked down. That’s what a lot of sport’s about: you mustn’t let the past disappear.

Spectator Sport

First Serb Like this journal’s esteemed High Life commentator, I too have been spending too much time watching the last fortnight’s Australian Tennis Open from Melbourne — but unlike my colleague I found it an absolute revelation, with potentially lethal levels of thrills, shocks, gut-wrenching excitement and great grace in victory and defeat. For most people

Diary – 7 April 2007

This afternoon we are saying farewell to the 11-year-old daughter of a close and much-loved colleague, Robin McKie, the revered and veteran science editor of the Observer. Olivia was killed in a road accident one Friday lunchtime. What the family has gone through is unimaginable, and everyone at the Observer has been affected by the