Category: Uncategorized

I’ve been complaining here for months that ex-players are inadequate in the role of summarizers. I had one exception: Jimmy Armfield, the former Blackpool player who captained England and managed Leeds United to the 1975 European Cup Final (an achievement he himself plays down and attributes solely to his players). I listened to England’s friendly…

Match of the Day viewers who are bored with Shearer and co. can envy their fellow fans in the United States. During the 1970s, an edition of “Monday Night Football” featured California Governor Ronald Reagan. Reagan talked his ill-informed guest through the ins and outs of gridiron. His guest – a Liverpudlian musician called John…

Those round shortbread biscuits with a hole in the middle always frustrated me when I was a boy. I just couldn’t see the point. Where was the missing bit? Sitting in a huge pile of other missing bits, in some Scottish factory? I’m aware of the same kind of feeling now in the aftermath of…

It’s time to ask what we ought to want from this game. I want England to do well. But I want them to do well in a way that shows that we know what we are doing and that we know where we are going. At the moment, I don’t think we do and I…

Again narrated by Jackie Stewart, his voice alternating between apprehension, expertise and holy pity for the damned men in the cockpits: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6eygHi26jQ] ..which is in stark contrast to this film, made only days later, that makes light, shall we say, of the danger and the risk the Nurburgring posed to the drivers of the day….

One of the most remarkable aspects of the current penalty shoot-out set-up is the way it transforms what has been up to that point a team game into an individual event. What’s more, it’s an individual event with perhaps the highest stakes in any sport. When your turn comes to step forward, you leave the…

At the risk of turning this into a Youtube site – but I don’t need any excuse to post this. Just dare tell me this isn’t fabulous: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEJtBb-Pfxs]

You wouldn’t necessarily know that an accident was in the offing from the opening minutes of this film of Le Mans 1955, let alone its sheer magnitude. I’m not sure that autre pays, autre moeurs quite covers it in this instance. Not Moss’s fault. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMDMJYcikt4] Here’s our hero at home:

..keeping just within the site remit, or near enough! First up, an extended, beautiful version of Joe Kittinger’s staggering 1960 skydive. Top Gear still has some way to go.. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMsL6Jt9VwQ] Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier – officially on behalf of the US armed forces, but I’m happy to classify this as sport: The magical…

..returns in just over a week. A great series, although I find Sam Tyler’s constant references to Bobby Charlton as a Manchester United player contrived (LoM is set in 1973, a bad year for United and the one in which Charlton retired and Denis Law left). And I just don’t believe his hero-worship of various…