Tennis

Summer of sport excels

It’s been bloody awful weather but no one can criticise the quality of summer sport. Over the weekend Carlos Alcaraz – the young pretender – claimed the title from serial major winner Novak Djokovic and Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogecar continued their fascinating Tour de France duel [...]

July 17, 2023 // 0 Comments

The Ladies Final

There were too many unforced errors and pressures on Ons Jabeur to make the final enthralling but it was nonetheless an exciting encounter. Jabeur was carrying the torch for Arab women and the first African to win a ladies title. There was no such constraint on Marketa Vondrousova, the unseeded [...]

July 16, 2023 // 0 Comments

What is – and is not – equality in elite sport

My effort today – which will no doubt make me few new friends or fans from the section of the community that might self-describe itself as the young, the diverse and/or the “woke” – is a simple statement of some of the factual and indeed inevitable practical issues faced by the general [...]

April 5, 2023 // 0 Comments

Thoughts on Wimbledon 2022

The editor gave me a wide brief to write on this year’s championship but to be “left field” – or perhaps “court” would be more appropriate. Before it began the Championship was denuded by the absence of Roger Federer and Daniel Medvedev. There was also much attention [...]

July 12, 2022 // 0 Comments

Saturday TV sport

Rather like the modern type of restaurant that serves tables all morning, afternoon, evening and night – during which time service declines – the televised sport I watched yesterday got worse as it went on. The best was indubitably Ireland’s first ever rugby union victory over the All [...]

July 10, 2022 // 0 Comments

Wimbledon

Daddy bought me a debenture for Wimbledon but we agreed this year that I would sell the tickets for the fortnight back to the All England Club and use the money for a holiday. I’m a fully paid-up member of the “Watch it on television” Rusters group and cannot believe the prices asked [...]

July 9, 2022 // 0 Comments

Poltics and sport

This morning my subject du jour is “Sport and politics don’t mix – discuss”. Like all juicy issues, this one has a number of thorny complications and I intend to begin with the most basic because – my hunch is – a consensus may not be as hard to establish upon it as some might [...]

May 25, 2022 // 0 Comments

On a fundamental sporting dilemma

As regular readers will be aware, on this organ we have a number of subjects that we address upon a recurring basis simply because from time to time – usually prompted by either stories featuring in the media and/or events in our lives – they come mind. Today’s example is arguably a glorious [...]

March 28, 2022 // 0 Comments

Hail Emma

A fact little commented on before or after this wonderful victory is the joy it has brought the nation. We always like a British champion winning on foreign soil: think Ken Buchanan, Justin Rose winning the US Open and, before him, Tony Jacklin and the British Lions. First the stats. Emma Raducanu [...]

September 12, 2021 // 0 Comments

The treading of a dangerous line

One of the downsides of being a senior citizen – besides straightforward “invisibility” as far as other generations are concerned – is that often one can see “the bleedin’ obvious” when others cannot and yet nobody will believe or take any notice of you when you point out this benefit [...]

August 31, 2021 // 0 Comments

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The Tanner Report: West Ham 3 Fulham 2

January 15, 2025 // 0 Comments

You can lose a game because the opposition is superior or through bad luck (a deflection, an injury or a poor refereeing decision) or through sloppiness. This match was lost [...]
El Cid/The book and the film

January 12, 2025 // 0 Comments

I was recently given a new biography of El Cid, the Spanish 11th Century knight, by Nora Berend, a Cambridge University historian. Her thesis is that Rodrigo de Viva – [...]
The Tanner Report: Fulham 4 Watford 1

January 10, 2025 // 0 Comments

Reporting on this victory is secondary to commenting on the decline of the FA Cup in my lifetime. The year of my birth (1954) witnessed what many consider the greatest game [...]
Foreign detective writing

January 9, 2025 // 0 Comments

We tend to assume that only English-speaking writers can write detective novels. In Britain the genre is dominated by women – Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Marjoriec [...]
Surprising actors in a 1980 TV series

January 8, 2025 // 0 Comments

On Monday I watched Bergerac, now shown at 3.00pm on the UK Drama channel. It featured – as Belle Young, an eccentric boatowner and smuggler – the 1970s actress [...]