Football
Nothing can save Test cricket
Forgive me if I don’t join the general ‘Make mine a treble’ hoo-ha about the future of Test cricket after…
Don’t believe the doomsday talk about London
It is one of the joys of sport that friendships forged in changing rooms and on playing fields can be…
The Ashes just got spicy
You don’t have to look hard to find swaths of sports fans around the world who dislike England – England’s…
The sorry demise of Windies cricket
The tub-thumping atmosphere in the Long Room at Lord’s was so raucous late on Monday afternoon as India and England…
One of the boys: From Scenes Like These, by Gordon M. Williams, reviewed
An accident on the football pitch ends young Dunky Logan’s dreams of playing professionally – leaving him trapped with the lads in the ‘lair of their ordinary world’
The (nearly) lost art of the Test match
If you can bear to turn away from the Fifa Club World Cup, take a moment to ponder cricket and…
Sportswashing? Bring it on…
If that was sportswashing, let’s have more of it. The Champions League final, when Paris Saint-Germain vaporised Inter Milan, was…
How football found God
Without wanting to sound like a refugee from the 1950s, it was a shame that last week’s Cup Final was…
A football regulator would be an own goal
It’s that time of the year again in football when the Championship sweeps all before it: it’s full of joy…
The Premier League is rubbish
Of the 73,738 benighted souls who pitched up at Old Trafford on Sunday for the Manchester derby – presumably even…
Boxing belongs in the Olympics
If there is anything more pointless than signing a five-year contract to be Emma Raducanu’s coach, it is the effort…
The real reason for Scotland’s Six Nations defeat
The confused world of Duhan van der Merwe must seem more confused than usual after last weekend. The Scotland winger…
Colombia is a better place to watch football than Loftus Road
I’ve just returned from Colombia, where I’ve been visiting my daughter. She’s doing a modern languages degree and has to…
Football doesn’t need a regulator
Kemi Badenoch has come out against the Football Governance Bill, and not before time. In November 2021, Tracey Crouch, the…
Can anyone stop France in the Six Nations?
Winter’s almost done and spring’s on the way. We can tell because the Six Nations is about to muscle into…
The secret of Gary Lineker’s success
The Leicester-born striker was neither exceptionally skilful nor assiduous; but he worked out how to score goals, and later excel in broadcasting, through intelligence and calm resilience
The unnecessary complexity of the World Test Championship
Have you booked your tickets for the World Test Championship yet? Did you even know it’s on? What seemed like…
I’m not the only football-obsessed composer
I was in Sweden a few weeks ago, where my music was presented in Stockholm in the most recent International…
Could Thomas Tuchel be the one?
You would have to be living a very sheltered life not to have noticed that the Premier League this season…
The best (and worst) of this year’s sport
It was quite a year for some of the worst of sport – America’s golfers, already among the richest and…
The BBC vs Gregg Wallace
The last time I took my wife to watch Millwall play a home game, a gentleman a few rows in…
A father’s love: Childish Literature, by Alejandro Zambra, reviewed
The Chilean writer contributes obliquely to the fledgling genre of fatherhood literature, combining family vignettes with literary criticism and a ‘diary’ addressed to his infant son
Gary Lineker isn’t that bad
It’s a crying shame that we will no longer hear the insightful and original opinions of Gary Lineker. No more…
Who would be a goalkeeper?
There’s a whiff of hauteur in Robert McCrum’s history of the penalty kick – his great-grandfather’s brainchild of 1891, which proved such a momentous change to football
