The latest series from Julian Fellowes starts badly and barely improves but it is a reminder football has never stood stillYou can see how The English Game must have sounded in conception. It’s the birth of football. It’s toffs against proles, the rivalry of one of the great aristocrats of the early game, Lord Arthur Kinnaird, and the Glaswegian stonemason who was the first great professional, Fergus Suter. It’s about an idea going out into the world and being profoundly changed when it is taken up by the masses.But Netflix’s new series comes nowhere near what it might have been, and is little more than a mishmash of Downton Abbey stereotypes and trouble-at-mill cliches. The toffs are habitually awful, the...
As one half of Saint and Greavsie, the former striker spoke about the sport he loved with enjoyment and wit. We could do with some of that now“I am someone who believes that what we need without a doubt is more of Jimmy Greaves,” wrote the performance poet John Hegley in Greavsie, an ironic yet affectionate early-1990s paean to a then ubiquitous figure. “The more I get of Greaves, the more my life achieves.”The Premier League’s paywall model would soon be bringing down the curtain on one of the more curious and varied media careers of an ex-footballer. ITV’s failure to land broadcast rights to what the victor, Sky, would trail as a “whole new ball game” meant the axe...
TikTok, Helo, YouTube and the rest – like highlights after midnight – cannot make up for a widespread inability to watch the games unfoldRepeat a word often enough and it seems to lose all meaning. It’s called semantic satiation, and it’s a phenomenon you will already be aware of if you have spent much time talking to toddlers or sports marketing executives. “Legacy” went some time in the last decade, buzzworded to death after London 2012, and I suspect we’re about to lose “engage” and its variations, too. The England and Wales Cricket Board says it has “engaged” 1 million children in this World Cup, the International Cricket Council has set up fan zones to “engage” with families, partnered with...
Steven Soderbergh’s basketball drama probes the fraying covenant between white power brokers and their mostly black labor forceSteven Soderbergh’s High Flying Bird, written by the playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney and available for streaming on Netflix, is the finest movie ever made about the business of professional sports, not for the answers it purports to give about a billion-dollar industry charged by undercurrents of race and politics but the questions it asks. Related: High Flying Bird review – Soderbergh scales new heights on Netflix Continue reading...
The organisers tweaked the format and a lively evening of music and razzmatazz ensued, with a little space left for sportWho knew netball was so popular? Is sliding downhill really a sport? And how unloved must Chris Froome feel at being the best British Team Sky rider never to have won this public vote? These and other questions were asked, but not necessarily answered, as the Tour de France-winning cyclist Geraint Thomas accepted the famous silver four-turret lens camera trophy that is presented annually to the winner of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Having beaten Lewis Hamilton and Harry Kane into the minor placings at Birmingham’s Genting Arena, the visibly stunned Welshman accepted his award from Billie Jean...