Before the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year awards on Sunday celebrate the best of 2017, here are our anti-heroes from the sporting world this yearThe retiring Taylor’s last year on the PDC circuit has not been without incident. There has of course been sporting success, including a 16th World Matchplay title, but also controversy, much of it centred on the Grand Slam of Darts, where he lost in the semi-finals to Michael van Gerwen. During that match the players were seen in heated discussion as they left the stage for a break. Later the victor was asked what had happened, and recounted a frankly not enormously interesting conversation. “He came to me: ‘You shouldn’t do this, you shouldn’t do...
For the first time the massive newspaper, website and TV conspiracy against whichever club you happen to support can finally be exposedThere’s a hugely culturally important scene in the movie So I Married An Axe Murderer, where Mike Myers (playing his own dad) explains How Stuff Works to his son’s friend. “Well,” he barks, “it’s a well-known fact, sonny Jim, that there’s a secret society of the five wealthiest people in the world known as The Pentaverate, who run everything in the world, including the newspapers, and who meet triannually at a secret country mansion in Colorado known as … The Meadows.” The friend humours him by asking who’s in this Pentaverate. “The Queen, the Vatican, the Gettys, the Rothschilds,”...
State broadcaster’s deal to show more than 100 hours of live cricket each summer from 2020 is well merited and long overdue, according to a former director of BBC SportIt is unalloyed good news that live cricket is coming back to BBC television. One of the great national sports is reunited with the one broadcaster that can make big events bigger – and get the whole of the country talking about what they watch. The story of the falling-out between the England and Wales Cricket Board and the BBC feels, happily, to be in the far distant past.It was two decades ago that live test cricket moved from the corporation to Channel 4 – which, by common consent, did an...
Test Match Special will not be the same without this lovable old rogue, who has decided to retire after 45 years in the BBC commentary boxThe expectation was they would carry Henry Blofeld out of the Test Match Special commentary box in a coffin. He has always loved the cricket and the microphone in equal measure. And he is one of life’s great troupers. Yet now we learn that, at 77, he has announced his retirement from TMS in September. It is a bit of a shock.His last game on air is scheduled to be England’s third Test against West Indies at Lord’s. When he bids farewell expect something more flowery than John Arlott’s final sentence on TMS in 1980,...
The BBC Saturday afternoon sports programme ran for nearly 50 years and showed England winning the World Cup, Red Rum’s Grand National triumphs and the 1981 Ashes but fell victim to shorter attention spans and the modern worldThe past is a foreign country, and boy do we all need some escapism right now. From T2 Trainspotting to Twin Peaks, the 20th century is the place to be. This time it feels like more than just the usual nostalgia – more of a safe house, with a subtle infusion of melancholy, from the outright misery of contemporary society.Sports fans of a certain age and disposition have never needed much excuse to do some mental time travel. The phrase “in my day”,...