Matt Smith and co had a solid opening despite a late wobble, while there’s an Ashes bromance in the air for Graeme Swann and Damien Fleming, but the adverts did jar a littleFade in. Interior, an extraordinarily messy room with a massage bed in the middle. Clothing and footwear are strewn across all visible surfaces and large bags are scattered haphazardly across the remaining floor space. Pads and bats are piled up, leaning against benches and walls. Exposed pipes meander around the ceiling, not in a trendy architect‑inspired Pompidou‑Centre way but just in a couldn’t-really-be-bothered-to-hide-them way. In the corner a television is attached tightly to the wall, so that instead of facing into the room it points straight ahead, allowing...
Joe Root is light years away from the visibility David Gower enjoyed and, away from terrestrial TV, some team-mates in Australia might as well be in a witness protection programmeAt the risk of making myself a hostage to fortune, it is very possible that Australia has already delivered its most withering put-down of England before an Ashes ball has even been bowled. I may come to regret this rash statement when this year’s exquisite causal link between someone’s girth, someone else’s wife, and some form of baked goods is made. But given how much of modern journalism seems to be about “calling” things in the comical belief that functioning as Earth’s wrongest bookmaker makes one relevant, let’s give it a whirl:...
BT Sport’s commentator Alison Mitchell and anchor Matt Smith chat to the Spin about the channel’s plan to be ‘right in amongst it’ in AustraliaLast week BT Sport announced its lineup for the Ashes, the first it will broadcast. Michael Vaughan and Ricky Ponting, who were involved in the station’s first toe-dip in the cricketing pool a year ago, are back, along with Graeme Swann, Geoffrey Boycott, Damien Fleming, Michael Slater and Adam Gilchrist. But while the network is still fairly new to this particular game the team behind the team are no ingenues; the coverage will be produced by Sunset + Vine, which has been working on cricket since taking charge of Channel 4’s first Test broadcasts in 1999...
Leicester’s Thai owners have been a success but there are others who have suffered with owners who do not have a club’s best interests at heartOn the eve of the home match against Crystal Palace last weekend, the players and staff of Leicester City interrupted their final training session to stand in a circle and observe a minute’s silence in memory of King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, whose 70-year reign had ended with his death a few days earlier. The following day, on the pitch at their stadium, they posed for a rather unusual pre-match team picture. Front and centre, held by their captain, Wes Morgan, was a large gold‑framed photograph of the monarch. The players were wearing black armbands....
BT Sport’s former Blackburn Rovers striker is continuing in a rich tradition of television miserablism pioneered by Alan Hansen and Jimmy HillI’ve always liked Will Self, one-time literary enfant terrible, TV talking head and all-round perspicacious hypersesquipedalianist. I know it’s probably not alright to like Will Self any more. He’s almost certainly not cool. It’s likely he’s said things on Twitter I can’t be bothered to Google that have angered people or displayed incorrect ways of thinking, sparking one of those wild sprawling waves of self-nourishing social media rage, the smartphone generation’s equivalent of going to a massive rave in a field.I still like Will Self, though. Not so much the recent Will Self, who has wise, weary opinions about...