Manchester United’s manager finally finds himself in the right TV chair and after four days with RT at the start of Russia 2018, he will phone in his thoughts on the finalHaving seen José Mourinho slumped at a desk at Selhurst Park on Monday evening, looking as if he had been stuck on a coach for 72 hours at Dieppe, imagine my surprise when I got home and logged on to the RT YouTube channel. Yes, there he was, the Manchester United manager, clean shaven, in a fashionable fleece, and – could it really be – actually smiling. “Drop the cliché,” he joked as the voiceover announced The Special One was joining the channel as a World Cup pundit. The...
Lindsey Vonn’s outburst against Donald Trump means she takes her place in a complex game where politics and sport have once again become deeply entangledOn the face of it, Lindsey Vonn looks like Donald Trump’s type. Tall, blond, blue-eyed and a former star – naked but for a coat of paint – of Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue, the champion skier is the epitome of what would once have been called an all-American girl. And she will be one of the main draws of February’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, hoping to repeat her 2010 Olympic downhill win in Vancouver and thus take a measure of solace for her absence through injury in Sochi four years ago.Coming off a 2016-17 season...
Brazil have recovered from their 7-1 shame in 2014, while Germany maintain their winners’ aura and Russia have to show they can lay on a world-class partyIt should not come as any surprise for Brazil and Germany to be earmarked as favourites for the World Cup in Russia. After all, they are the two most decorated countries in the tournament’s history (not forgetting absent friends Italy, who, like Germany, have four gold stars embroidered over their crest, one behind Brazil’s five).But when you add some context, some nuance, it reveals something about sport’s capacity to drag the badly defeated back up from the floor that most bookmakers are not willing to separate two heavyweights who flabbergasted the planet with the...
Lineker has been one of Fifa’s most visceral critics and it is baffling to find him presiding over events in Moscow, even in an industry where the phrase ’complete moral volte-face’ tends to draw blank looksAs the days ticked down you kept thinking he might still have something up his sleeve. Maybe this is a brilliantly orchestrated inside job. Maybe halfway through the World Cup draw in Moscow, as the balls are divvied up and shark-like Fifa men with faces as blank as the polished granite interior of a Panamanian bank vault yawn behind their hands, Gary Lineker will wink at the camera, drop the mask of sickly corporate piety and get on with trashing the place.This is how it...
Goalkeeper’s last international was marred by Italy’s disastrous failure to qualify for the World Cup but as the embodiment of the sternest resistance and generosity of spirit, the 39-year-old has few peersGianluigi Buffon was born in Carrara, the Tuscan city where they quarried the marble for Michelangelo’s David 500 years ago. Maybe even now there is a fresh slab being carved out, ready for a statue of Italy’s greatest goalkeeper, who left the international scene in tears this week after his team’s goalless draw with Sweden cost them a place in next summer’s World Cup finals but whose deeds guarantee him a place in the game’s history.What even the most gifted sculptor could never capture would be the sheer dynamism...