With England looking pallid and Australia showing only faint signs of recovery, this summer’s Ashes could be thrillingly closeThe traditional role of Poms in Australia is to accept graciously the humorous insults directed at the England cricket team, responding politely without resort to obvious cliches, particularly those involving convicts.For all kinds of reasons, it is a little different this time. For a start, British visitors are now greeted with a kind of affectionate pity mixed with honest curiosity: “What exactly is a backstop?” On enervating Australian afternoons, when the mind turns only slowly, it seems best to say that backstop is a fielding position, employed by captains of incompetent teams who can’t trust their wicketkeepers. Related: Significant win for Australia...
The Serb moves into another area of excellence in winning the Australian Open and sets his sights on the ‘ultimate challenge’ of beating Nadal on clay in ParisNovak Djokovic is the best tennis player in the world: now, and for the foreseeable future, perhaps until he chooses to retire, which looks to be a few years away yet, he hinted on Sunday night. What the 31-year-old Serb can achieve in the remaining days of a career that began more than a thousand matches and 72 titles ago is difficult to gauge but less so than it was before the final of the Australian Open.What he did to Rafael Nadal in the Rod Laver Arena turned what had been a keen...
Also featuring Australian Open memories, Sébastien Loeb at the Dakar Rally and the joy of drones in sport1) Cody Parkey was left feeling like the loneliest man in the world after watching his last-gasp potentially game-winning field goal bounce off the upright and crossbar in the Chicago Bears’ playoff defeat by the Philadelphia Eagles (keep an eye on the mascot in the background, too). Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised by Parkey’s supposed misfortune. He has a knack when it comes to finding the woodwork. Here he is clattering the goal-frame four times from four kicks in a match last November. And here are those doinks immortalised in Tecmo Super Bowl. Parkey still has some way to go before he matches...
The India batsman has three hundreds in four Tests this summer – Australia are beginning to appreciate his rare talentsRespect is often described as grudging, and it doesn’t get more grudging than from Australians for Cheteshwar Pujara. Yet as this Australia v India series plays out its final stanza, the admiration from the home players and supporters is real. Here’s a player who does what their own cannot: bats as long as he wants, puts distractions aside, and refuses to go away.Australians tend to celebrate impulsiveness. We like to think we have a national style summed up by Adam Gilchrist pulverising hundreds, or Shane Warne twirling out bunnies. But with no talents like theirs in the national team, people suddenly...
Ball-tampering in Cape Town led to sacking of captain Steve Smith and two other players and a softening of macho cultureTo some, scratching a cricket ball would be innocuous rather than infamous. But when the Australian batsman Cameron Bancroft did it during a Test match in Cape Town, the cricket world lit up. At the height of a viciously tempered series he used bright yellow sandpaper to rough up the leather in an attempt to aid his bowlers. Ball-tampering is a fact of cricket, but no international player had been caught so blatantly, using a foreign object smuggled on to the field. This time the offence was caught in lush high-definition by South African television. Related: Steve Smith's media re-emergence...