Every match should be a challenge, teams rewarded for success, but not so that superclubs’ domination becomes permanentIt’s been another fine week for the people’s game. The Super League Three – two of whom will probably be eliminated from the Champions League at the group stage despite the enormous advantages they enjoy both financially and via the coefficient system – continue to agitate for a competition that would make them even more money.Fans chant disgracefully about tragedy and find their club not merely not condemning them, but blaming the manager of the other side for having made an entirely reasonable observation about the financial advantages enjoyed by state-run clubs. That manager, on the very weekend local referees had gone on...
This weaponised World Cup is not about Qatar becoming liked by western Europe, it is a vast geopolitical security operationWe need a new word for this thing. Psychologists have sometimes used the phrase “semantic satiation” to describe the process where saying the word “woodpecker” 20 times in a row, or sitting in a circle reciting the phrase “straight-leg easy-fit chinos” will eventually strip those sounds of any meaning, as though the entire concept of straight-leg easy-fit chinos has suddenly ceased to exist.Something like this has happened to the word “sportswashing”. This was always a hopeful coinage, adopted on the hoof to describe governments or other entities that use elite sport as a propaganda tool. Years of heavy use, first by...
The sport’s national governing body missed the chance to bring people together after the death of Queen Elizabeth IIDuring the middle ages, flagellants would remove their white robes adorned with a red cross, kneel on the ground, and then vigorously whip themselves in public displays of fervour. Some sports appear to have been taking notes. Since the Queen’s death, we have seen the FA stop grassroots football, the Premier League ask for applause at 70 minutes to celebrate the length of Elizabeth II’s reign, and British Cycling bizarrely tell people not to ride during the state funeral, before performing a rapid U-turn. These are some of the biggest beasts in British sport. And they have looked frit.Frit because such decisions...
Matches are a place of shared experience in an atomised world – they should have gone ahead following the Queen’s deathLike most people, I was deeply saddened by the news about Queen Elizabeth. Events over the past few days have demonstrated how important the royal family is to our sense of identity as a nation. Even the most committed republican can share the sense of loss of such a symbol of humility and grace at the centre of our nation, someone who, as the BBC has repeatedly and correctly said, represented stability in an age of ceaseless change.Three days after the death of King George VI on 6 February 1952, Grimsby Town beat Carlisle 4-1 in front of 16,000 fans....
Her choice of inspirational figure suggests a willingness to curry favour with one audience by showing two fingers to anotherAt Conservative party hustings in Leeds six weeks ago, Liz Truss declared she wanted to “channel the spirit of Don Revie”. Which suggests she wasn’t entirely familiar with his experience of leading his country. Still, as she takes office amid dismal poll ratings, with a sceptical parliamentary party and an election looming in 2024, the new prime minister may just regard three years in the job, followed by a lucrative and widely reviled sinecure in the Middle East, as a pretty decent outcome.Of course, political coverage in this country has long been influenced by the confected drama and basic unseriousness of...