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If you wondered why Formula 1 motor racing sometimes has all the excitement and crowd-pleasing qualities of a German art-house movie without subtitles, then Patrick Crozier will explain it to you here and here. I recall him making these and related points in a talk at Brian Micklethwait’s place a few years ago. Very interesting it was. Even if you are not a sports fan or motoring enthusiast, the broader lessons of how a sport can regulate itself into narcolepsy are worth reflecting on. June 1st, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I guess it was inevitable. Football, like other aspects of life, has been hit by the credit crunch. In the case of Southampton, a team that once graced the top flight of the English league and has boasted some notable cup wins – famously winning the FA Cup in the 1970s – it has suffered terribly. It is now in danger of extinction. My own team, Ipswich Town FC, was in administration a few years ago although it has been since taken over by Marcus Evans, the man who owns the eponymous conference organising company. Ipswich also has appointed former Manchester Utd and Ireland international player Roy Keane as its manager (gulp, nervous laughter). Henry Winter, one of the main football scribes in the print press, believes Southampton’s local council should buy the team. He argues that the council and the lucky taxpayers of the south coast will be getting a bargain. Maybe. But it is not the business of councils to be spending money on what has been the money pit of professional sports, particularly when a place such as Southampton has many competing demands for public funds, such as policing, garbage collection, road maintenance and so on. As I said, when my club was in financial dire circumstances, no doubt some people would have been happy to see the Suffolk taxpayer foot the bill to put The Blues back on top. But wiser heads prevailed. The sad fact is that football clubs can die if the finances run out. We have seen teams like Leeds Utd hit by unsustaintable debts in far happier economic conditions. Even mighty Man Utd has heavy debts stemming from the leveraged buyout by the Glazers, while Chelsea is kept in the lifestyle to which it is accustomed due to Abramovich’s huge Russian oil wealth. The economics of sports clubs are a murky affair at the best of times. So my message to Southampton fans is that it is better for a hard-nosed private investor to sort out the club than a bunch of politicians. If Southampton really is a bargain, why are public funds needed – surely a canny entrepreneur will spot the opportunity? I hope someone does. I sometimes wonder why as, a football fan, I put myself through all this heartache. My wife shakes her head in wonderment. May 5th, 2009 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well, in a change from my usual ruminations on current affairs, I thought I would mention that I am planning to take a scuba diving course. I am off to my regular haunt of Malta/Gozo this late-summer to do a PADI course, as well as relax down there. Yes, you have guessed it, people blog about scuba diving as well as many other pastimes these days. As a keen amateur sailor, I have always wanted to have a go at exploring what lies under the waves and the blue seas surrounding Gozo, in particular, look just too damn inviting. If any readers have any tips or suggestions on how to avoid rip-offs or other problems, I’d be very pleased to hear them. The island of Gozo seems to be packed with diving school firms, such as these guys. The PADI courses, which are internationally recognised, are a good example of how a benchmark for a particular activity can arise without any central government agency decreeing it. April 29th, 2009 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Rome wasn’t built in a day. But I wasn’t on that particuar job.” – Brian Clough, the late English club football manager who did not suffer from the national trait of false modesty. April 13th, 2009 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Wisden, the cricket-lover’s bible (if there can be a new bible every year), yesterday announced its five Cricketers of the Year. It’s an odd arrangement, because you can only win this title once. So, you can be a totally dominant cricketer, but because you also did fairly well in 2003 and were picked then, you can’t be picked now, again. This year’s crop are accordingly the usual collection of pretty good cricketers who did very well, but who didn’t exactly grab many headlines: perennial nearly-man James Anderson, the best of a rather bad lot of England bowlers, someone called Benkenstein who did well for champion English county Durham, and a couple of the South Africans who recently beat England in England and then Australia in Australia. But one cricketer on the latest list really has done indisputably great things in the previous few months:
Pay attention:
Indeed.
 Said Wisden’s Scyld Berry, of Claire Taylor, the first woman ever to receive this particular form sporting recognition:
I wonder if a woman will ever play in one of the international men’s teams, so to speak. The immediate response would probably be: never, except maybe, one day, as a spin bowler, before then collapsing dead of exhaustion. Women, it is now assumed, just don’t have the necessary strength or stamina to challenge the men as top class cricketers. Well, power is certainly one way to do well as a cricketer, as men like Botham, and now Flintoff (who by the way took a match- and one-day series-clinching hat trick yesterday against the West Indians), have proved. But some quite small, even slight, men have excelled at cricket, especially as batsmen. Surely the real reason women do not now regularly challenge men at cricket is that until recently few women have played cricket at all, a state of affairs that is now changing quite fast. Because of the example of women like Claire Taylor, it will probably change quite a bit more in the near future. April 4th, 2009 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
“It is perfectly possible for inertia to be beneficial and an improvement, if the alternative is poorer. It is the same fallacy as the claim of the current Government concerning the current economic crisis, that ‘doing nothing is not an option’.” – Former England rugby player and man of firm views on the sport, Brian Moore. Now a television commentator and newspaper pundit, Mr Moore sees parallels between the rule changes in rugby – some of which have been a retrogade step, in his view – and the reaction of certain governments to the credit crisis. March 30th, 2009 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you want evidence of management ruthlessness, never mind Wall Street, the City or for that matter, politics, then check out the English Premier League. Scolari, the Gene Hackman lookalike who was once the manager of a World Cup winning side with Brazil, no less, has been sacked as manager of Chelsea by its Russian owner. Chelsea are only a few points adrift of Manchester United, the leaders. Tony Adams has been fired as manager of Portsmouth, which is near the bottom end of the table. A few weeks ago, Paul Ince, a former midfielder with Manchester United and West Ham, was sacked from his job. At Tottenham, they have been through about three managers in as many years. The same merry-go-round operates at such febrile clubs as Manchester City, Newcastle, Bolton or West Ham. In the latter case, you can bet the cries will go up that its current, relatively new manager, Zola, should be headed for Chelsea, where he is rightly adored as a legend. Against all this, it seems mildly incredible that Arsene Wenger has lasted so long at Arsenal, and of course that Sir Alex Ferguson has reigned for more than two decades at Manchester United. It is as if the credit crunch has barely begun to make itself felt at the world of English football. Some time ago I wrote about the wrangles between players and clubs over contracts. As far as the sackings of managers go, the world of football looks more cut-throat than ever. February 9th, 2009 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
February 2nd, 2009 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
In these days of modern motoring safety features, racing – either F1 or other genres – is not as dangerous as it used to be, when fatalities were common and some racers, such as the Austrian racer Niki Lauda, suffered terrible burns. I am glad the sport has got safer because the close racing of last year, when Lewis Hamilton famously won by a whisker in Brazil, can be just as exciting even when you know that the cars are so well made, the circuits so well designed, that death is not such a close presence on the track. The idea that we need the risk of death to spice up a sport is not a view I share. One sport that remains bloody dangerous, in my view, is downhill ski racing. Anyone who has skied on a difficult, icy slope in Europe or North America, say, will know what I mean. I have tried to imagine what it must be like to ski at 90mph or more down an icy race track such as the famous one at Kitzbuhel, Austria. It frightens me just to think about it. Here is a story showing what I mean. Anyway, considering my work commitments and the low value of sterling, I cannot really afford to hit the slopes this year. Next year, maybe….. January 25th, 2009 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
The hottest story in cricket just now, if you are an England cricket fan like me, is the apparently near simultaneous resignations of the England captain and the England coach, but I think the bigger story in the long-run is the third test between Australia and South Africa, which Australia won this morning (my time). Had South Africa won, they would have won the series 3-0. As it was, they won the series 2-1, and Australia had a consolation victory. Except that actually Australia achieved more than that. They achieved, by this otherwise merely consolation victory, the continuation of their reign as the top-rated test cricket team. This was what the match was about, given that the South Africans had already won the series, in other words it was about plenty. Without the test rankings system, this game would indeed have been decidedly empty. With these recently contrived rankings, Australia still stay top country. Now okay, you could argue that they aren’t really the top country any more, having just lost to India and now to South Africa. Well, maybe so, but sporting tournaments have a force of their own. If, according to the rules and calculations of whatever tournament it is, you win, then by golly you win and that still counts for something. I remember when Greece, a palpably second-rate team but coached, as I remember it now, by a German who knew his stuff, fluked and battled their way to winning the European soccer championship. They clearly were not the top team in Europe. But did that mean that their win in this particular tournament meant nothing? Did it hell. Australia are still top of the world test cricket rankings, and that’s a whole lot better than not being top, which is what would have happened had South Africa won this latest game. → Continue reading: A good day for the test cricket world rankings January 7th, 2009 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Getting my sleep patterns into sync with UK daylight is for me, now, a constant struggle, especially now, when there is very little in the way of daylight in my part of the globe, and especially when there are such good international cricket matches going on elsewhere in the world, together with, now, the means to follow them, ball by ball. The latest such disruption to my daily clock took the form of a terrific game between Australia and South Africa in Melbourne. I found day three especially hard to ignore. At the beginning of it, South Africa looked odds on to lose the 1-0 advantage they had gained with their amazing fourth innings run chase in the first test at Perth. With only three first innings wickets left, they were looking at a massive first innings deficit, but they ended with their noses actually in front, an advantage they pressed home the next morning by taking three quick second innings wickets before the Aussies had even got their noses back in front. I was still checking the score on that third day at tea time, which was at about 4 a.m. my time. JP Duminy got a big first test century in only his second test, having also done well at the end of the Perth run chase, and fast bowler Dale Steyn, who also took ten wickets in the match, gave Duminy massive support with the bat. In its way, this third day was a bit of cricket history, because it marked the moment of Australia’s definite, absolute, unarguable fall from grace as the definitely best international cricket team in the world. They recently lost to India in India, but that can happen to anyone. But then to go back home and immediately to lose to South Africa in Australia, well, that was something else again. → Continue reading: Australia without Warne December 31st, 2008 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
I agree with all those who are now saying that the England cricket tour of India should not be interrupted, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. My understanding of terrorism is that what makes it such a headache to defend against, given that in India people generally are not allowed to carry guns (correct?), is not knowing when or where they might strike. But if you have a number of set-piece, high profile events to defend, with definite times and places attached to them, you can. It will be cumbersome and tiresome, and expensive, with lots more frisking of people who look like they might be terrorists, and lots more frisking of people who do not look at all like terrorists, both to avoid upsetting people who look like terrorists and to make sure that any terrorist plan deliberately not to look like a terrorist is also guarded against. But if the authorities and people of India are willing to put up with all that, then so should our cricketers be. I am even opposed to the final two one-dayers being cancelled, although I daresay the Indian authorities would not have had the time to make their dispositions, given that the one-dayers would have been very soon. But the test matches should definitely go ahead, including and especially the second one, which they have already, regrettably, moved from Mumbai to Chennai. I guess the Mumbai police have enough on their hands already, or think they have. Playing those two one-dayers would have changed nothing in a cricketing way. 5-0 to India would almost certainly have become 7-0 to India, but playing those games, and the Mumbai test in Mumbai, would have made another and bigger point. I daresay that, because of their disappointing cricket, England’s cricketers are not now very highly regarded in India. This would be a chance to get back into India’s good books. Risky? Maybe, a little. But also, given the money now disposed of by India’s cricket fans and by Indians generally, to make this small stand against terrorism might also been, you know, rather lucrative. But headlines like Pietersen wants security assurances don’t strike the right note at all. This guy had a great chance to make a much more positive statement than that, but he muffed it. As James Forsyth put it yesterday:
And commenter CG added:
I know, I know. The reckless courage of the non-combatant. But I didn’t stop using London’s buses and underground trains in the immediate aftermath of 7/7, still less run away to the country. November 28th, 2008 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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