The coverage of Sunday’s England v Pakistan T20, the first match on the BBC in two decades, will be very different to the days of Peter West and Tony LewisNostalgia is the comfort blanket of our times. The BBC knows this, which is why it spent lockdown pacifying or existential angst with golden replays of the Olympics, Wimbledon and West Indies tours. When it shows Sunday’s England v Pakistan T20, the corporation’s first live cricket TV broadcast in two decades, there will be a quiet sigh from older viewers, of something finally being put right with the world.Cricket and the Beeb used to be wedded to each other. For 60 years – it first showed the game on TV in...
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...
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...
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...
As a Manchester City supporter it’s impossible not to take some pleasure in the documentary but it pulls its punches, fails to probe and is nothing but a gloriously glossy club commercialWhy am I so reluctant to watch All or Nothing: Manchester City? The eight-part Amazon documentary series covers my team’s season mirabilis – 2017-18 when we won the league with record points, wins and goals, playing the beautiful game more beautifully than it’s ever been played in the Premier League. Fellow fans tell me it’s incredible and rivals say it’s a must-see. Even non-football fans are waxing lyrical. Perhaps that’s part of the problem. Related: Football transfer rumours: Keylor Navas to Manchester City? Related: How Lazio’s ultras must wish...