The St Crispin Cup, anyone? Rivalries – and prizes – abound in the Six Nations, says Simon Barnes
The England men’s rugby union team may not have won the Five Nations (as it was then) back in 1988, but they did bring home the Calcutta Cup – and that was a big deal because back then they hardly ever won anything. There are all kinds of prizes on offer in Europe’s great rugby competition and you have to be really unlucky to go home empty-handed. Take Ireland, for example. They finished third overall in last year’s tournament, but won the Triple Crown, awarded if one of England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales defeat the other three countries in a single edition of the Six Nations. They lost, they failed, but they also triumphed. The Calcutta Cup is another of the many competitions-within-a-competition and is awarded to the winner of the England–Scotland match. England’s 9–6 victory over Scotland in 1988 wasn’t the greatest of games, but both teams took part in the post-match feasting, the Calcutta Cup fizzing with champagne and passed from hand to hand. After midnight the trophy became the ball in an impromptu game of rugby played on Princes Street. Made in 1878 by Indian craftsmen from 270 melted-down silver rupees, it was passed and it was kicked and it was dropped. The players were a little more sober when they got back to their hotels. John Jeffrey of Scotland remembered thinking, “Hmm, we could be in a spot of bother here.” He received a six-month ban, while England’s Dean Richards, a police officer, got a one-match ban. The competition’s rivalries are often packed with meaning and every round has a certain power. It sometimes seems that the only unifying factor is an ancient and lasting grudge against England. Of course, there are other rivalries and many have their own silverware. Ireland and Scotland mark their shared heritage with the Centenary Quaich. Scotland and France play for the Auld Alliance trophy, which is named after a treaty from 1295 when the two nations agreed to gang up on England. Wales and Scotland have the Doddie Weir Cup, France and Italy the Giuseppe Garibaldi Trophy, and Scotland and Italy the Cuttitta Cup, celebrating Massimo Cuttitta, former captain of Italy and later Scotland scrum coach. Finally, England and Ireland play for the Millennium Trophy, marking Dublin’s thousand-year history in 1988. England were the first winners (after that Calcutta Cup victory). That still leaves a good few matches sans trophy. Perhaps England and France could play for the St Crispin Cup, to mark the Battle of Agincourt? England could challenge Wales for the Under Milk Wood Tankard and Ireland and France for the Proust-Joyce Goblet. It’s about neighbours and about centuries: rows, wars, grudges, conquests, trade, friendship, oppression, cultural borrowings and strategic alliances; nations and people bound together by history and geography, by time and by space. Every match has a meaning way beyond sport. As the tournament begins once again, we should all raise a glass to celebrate. But let’s try not to drop it. Or kick it.
The Sports Personality of the Year is decided by our hearts, not our heads, says Simon Barnes
Add BBC Sports Personality of the Year to your watchlist Sporting brilliance is not enough. You can collect all the glittering prizes in the world and still not be a winner. You need something more to win the BBC Sports Personality of the Year. The voters – that’s us – don’t vote for someone just because he or she is good at sport. We vote for someone we adore, someone we want to be, someone who makes us cheer, someone who reminds us that it’s good to be alive. The shortlisted contestants won’t be competing for goals or points or cups, but for our hearts. The one who has the best story usually wins. Who will it be this year? Women’s football has supplied two of the past three winners, Beth Mead and Mary Earps (800m gold medallist Keely Hodgkinson followed in 2024). It could well be a Lioness again after England retained their European Championships title in Spain this summer. Chloe Kelly became the face of that team. She supplied a strut and a swagger that some found insufferable, especially her opponents. She scored the winner in the semi-final against Italy, hitting the rebound from her own penalty: “I don’t miss penalties twice.” In the final against Spain she fired in the cross from which Alessia Russo headed the equaliser. The match stayed level and went to penalties, with Kelly scoring the last and winning spot-kick in the shootout. Self-defining quote: “Thank you to everyone who wrote me off.” Now we turn to Rory McIlroy, who years ago was going to be the next Tiger Woods. He won four major tournaments between 2011 and 2014, when he was in his early 20s – and then stalled. After an 11-year drought, he finally won another major. His victory in the Masters at Augusta this year completed a career grand slam: he tapped in a birdie putt to win the play-off and collapsed in sobs. He’d done something he clearly thought he’d never do again. McIlroy also overcame the fairways – and the unsavoury crowds – at Bethpage Black, emerging with the Ryder Cup alongside his European teammates. Self-defining quote: “The next time I cry about golf it will only be with joy. It’s not worth crying about golf for any other reason.” Lando Norris needs to complete a certain task if he’s to take the prize because he hasn’t enough in credit to qualify as a plucky loser. As I write, he is still likely to win the Formula One Drivers’ Championship. He and his McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri were both disqualified for a technical infringement in Las Vegas, which left Piastri only two races to catch up – with Max Verstappen also in his mirrors. Norris has moved from an iffy start to showing bouts of serene control. Self-defining quote: “I am absolutely my own biggest critic.” Luke Littler still counts as an infant prodigy, despite the beard. At the start of the year he won the World Darts Championship at the age of 17, beating Michael van Gerwen in the final. His recent victory in the Grand Slam of Darts made him the youngest ever PDC world number one. He took up the game at 18 months old when his father, a taxi-driver, bought him a magnetic darts set from a pound shop. He hit his first 180 at six and his first nine-darter at 13. He puts together huge finishes in the tightest possible moments as if it were easy. Self-defining quote: “I’m just level-headed.” My own vote would go to Ellie Kildunne . A great team needs an individual to make a difference and she did this for England as they won the Women’s Rugby Union World Cup. Trailing Canada in the final, they could have been forgiven for self-doubt. But that was obliterated when Kildunne, playing full-back, got the ball a few yards past halfway and ran through the entire Canadian team, beating at least seven players to touch down. Self-defining quote: “Lukewarm is no good.” One more name: Hannah Hampton is a contender to watch after winning the BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year 2025 (this award was a precursor to Mary Earps’s SPOTY success in 2023). Hampton replaced Earps as England goalkeeper at the Euros and saved two penalties in the shoot-out in the final. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/07/GettyImages-2227268208-1365913.jpg" width="3287" height="2191" alt="Hannah Hampton of England saves the second penalty from Mariona Caldentey of Spain in the penalty shoot out during the UEFA Women's EURO 2025 Final match between England and Spain at St. Jakob-Park on July 27, 2025 in Basel, Switzerland." title="Hannah Hampton of England saves the second penalty from Mariona Caldentey of Spain in the penalty shoot out during the UEFA Women's EURO 2025 Final match between England and Spain at St. Jakob-Park on July 27, 2025 in Basel, Switzerland." /> Self-defining quote: “It’s hard. Being in the public eye, you learn the hard way.” In sport you win because you’re the best; there’s no room on the scoreboard for “I tried.” But SPOTY is soft, it’s subjective, it’s emotional. You win your medals and cups for being brilliant; but you win SPOTY for being loved.
Ashes rivalry is always passionate — now it’s time for England’s best to shine in Australia
I love Australia. And I have nothing against the Australian people. Why, then, does the rare spectacle of the Baggy Greens looking broken, battered and bewildered bring me so much delight? Why does their each and every victory over England bring such pain? As England prepare for an Ashes series Down Under, the memory of Adelaide comes back to me with unstoppable force: the dreadful agonies of Adelaide, the overwhelming joys of Adelaide... That fair city was the site of two matches, four years apart, that captured the delirious extremes of partisanship in sport. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2021/08/GettyImages-540119655-8a4d7e0.jpg" width="3069" height="2256" alt="(AUSTRALIA OUT) The Ashes 2006-2007. Australia's Shane Warne takes the wicket of England's Paul Collingwood at the Gabba on the fourth day of the First Test at the Gabba in Brisbane, 26 November 2006. THE AGE Picture by PAUL HARRIS (Photo by Fairfax Media via Getty Images/Fairfax Media via Getty Images via Getty Images)" title="The Ashes 2006-2007. Australia's Shane Warne takes the wicket of England's Paul" /> In 2006, after a long losing streak, England held the Ashes and were expected to retain them. They began with a hapless defeat in Brisbane – remember Steve Harmison’s first ball of the series that went straight to second slip? – but they batted up a storm in the first innings of the second Test at Adelaide and Shane Warne was reduced to defensively pitching the ball outside leg stump to Kevin Pietersen. Captain Andrew Flintoff declared at 551–6. Yet England still lost. They collapsed on the last day when Warne imposed his will. He also imposed it on the umpire, who started the slide with a dodgy decision against Andrew Strauss. England were all out for 129. Australia knocked off the 168 runs to win in just 33 overs and England went on to lose the series 5–0. Four years later in Brisbane, England managed a draw in the first Test of the 2010 Ashes, thanks to a second-innings score of 517–1 declared. “Nice to see your boys making a bit of a fight of it,” was the sarcastic remark from a press-room attendant. England went to Adelaide undefeated and it soon became the sweetest city in the world. It’s an attractive place. I saw black swans on the Torrens River on the way to the ground on the first day. Good job I was in good time, as within ten minutes Australia were three wickets down with just two runs on the board – a smart run-out from Jonathan Trott got rid of Simon Katich, Ricky Ponting was caught by Graeme Swann off Jimmy Anderson’s next ball and Michael Clarke went with the first ball of his second over. When England went in to bat, it got even better. Pietersen scored a brutal 227, as fine an innings as I’ve ever seen. Australia couldn’t match him and Swann completed an innings victory with a five-fer. If Australia could have held on just an hour longer the weather would have saved them. I wrote my match report watching the rain bouncing knee-high off the pavement outside my hotel. Extremes of emotion are part of the Ashes experience. It’s not just about wanting England to win, it’s also wanting Australia to lose. Badly, if possible. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2021/08/Ricky-Ponting-d29c373.jpg" width="3900" height="2741" alt="Australian captain Ricky Ponting (C) and England captain Andrew Strauss (R) lead their teams out on the first day of the first Ashes Test match in Brisbane on November 25, 2010. IMAGE STRICTLY RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE � STRICTLY NO COMMERCIAL USE AFP PHOTO/William WEST (Photo credit should read WILLIAM WEST/AFP via Getty Images)" title="Ricky Ponting" /> The Ashes lasts for nearly two months and that gives them a peculiarly indelible quality. I’m still wincing at the Bazball excesses of the last series, in England, in 2023: Ben Stokes’s ridiculous declaration at 393–8 on the opening day with Joe Root well set on 118 not out, and then the epidemic of witless hooking in the second Test. Australia won both. England levelled the series with a great comeback, but they shouldn’t have needed to. This time round, England should be the stronger side, if Stokes is on fire with both ball and bat and all the fast bowlers are fit. All the same, Australia start as clear favourites. That’s because it’s in Australia, and the will of the entire nation is against England. England have this dreadful tendency to wilt in Australia. Call it the Adelaide Fade. So what about Joe Root? If for the first time in his career he manages to bat in Australia in the manner he can, England have a serious chance. He has never scored a century in Australia, a fact remarked on at least 100 times every day in the course of the preliminaries. But he’s in a better place to do so than he was in 2021, given he’s no longer carrying the weight of being captain. Last summer Root moved into second place (behind Sachin Tendulkar) in the list of Test match run-scorers. He’s already an all-time great. But this would be such a nice moment to score that elusive first Ashes century in Australia. In Adelaide, perhaps.
Individual brilliance counts for less in the Ryder Cup than passionate partnership, says Simon Barnes
Add the Ryder Cup to your watchlist For me the mystery of the Ryder Cup was summed up on the first afternoon of the 2004 edition in Michigan. Tiger Woods, the greatest golfer in the world, was playing a foursome – alternate shots, same ball – with Phil Mickelson, the world number two. Mickelson slammed his ball into the bushes. From the disgusted look on Tiger’s face he was thinking, “Who is this idiot?” The pair lost twice that day. It’s fair to say that Woods, for all his 15 major tournament victories, never really got the idea of “team”. Fast-forward a couple of days: the winning putt for Europe was holed by Colin Montgomerie. If he’d played every major the way he played in the Ryder Cup, he’d have had as many trophies as Woods. But he’s never won any. Woods played in eight Ryder Cups, and the USA triumphed just once. Montgomerie was never beaten in Ryder Cup singles and Europe won five times in the eight editions he played. Between them, these two great golfers represent the eternal mystery of team sport. Golfers don’t usually have to worry about other people. Perhaps that’s why they choose the sport. Woods at the Ryder Cup reminded me of the actor who asked the director what he should do in the pauses. What pauses? “You know – when other people are speaking.” It’s time to consider the phenomenon of team playing again as the Ryder Cup moves to Bethpage Black Course at Farmingdale, New York State. The American build-up has been dominated by one question: should the captain, Keegan Bradley, pick himself as a player? President Trump posted on social media that he should go for it, but in the end, Bradley said no. “It hurts for sure,” he said. The captain of Europe, Luke Donald, had no such dilemma. He selected the same team that won in Rome two years ago, apart from preferring Rasmus HØjgaard to his twin brother Nicolai. The Ryder Cup is contested on alternate occasions in the USA and Donald needs experienced players who can cope with a hostile crowd. US sport is inward-looking, with gridiron football, baseball, basketball. When international sport does come to the USA, there’s a tendency to overdo the partisanship. I can still hear the whoops from the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Cheering on your own team is one thing, exhibiting seething hostility to the opposition is quite another. And golf is particularly vulnerable to bad vibes. The spectators are very close to the players and can speak to them directly. The action lasts all day and there’s plenty of opportunity for refuelling. As a result there can be – well, a certain overzealousness among the galleries as the beer gets vocal. All this intensity sometimes leads to moments of serious excess. Past tournaments are remembered as the Battle of Brookline and the War on the Shore, occasions when patriotism got out of hand. Sport matters because it doesn’t matter. In that contradiction lies the whole point and meaning of sport, but such things can be forgotten as the scoreboard turns American red. Or when it doesn’t. President Trump has promised to show up on the first day, and he’s unlikely to be a calming influence. “I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade,” he has said. Hating Europe has been legitimised. It could be an uncomfortable three days. There are, then, a good number of complications as 12 Europeans and 12 Americans set about knocking small white balls into slightly larger holes. It’d be nice to think that we’ll still be talking about team players on Sunday night. The documentary Una Famiglia: Team Europe’s Ryder Cup Story is on Wednesday at 11.30pm on BBC2
Failures ditched, new signings made and managers changed… Simon Barnes predicts another season of high drama
The Premier League kicks off on Friday 15 August with Liverpool v Bournemouth, 8pm on Sky Premier League/Main Event. Add it to your watchlist I asked a friend, “How’s the football season looking, Danny?” His reply: “We’re in pretty good shape – especially as the tribute act is still a car crash.” Question: which team does Danny support? No, it’s not Manchester City. It’s Celtic. The most obvious pleasure in football is the success of your chosen team. But never underestimate the game’s second most powerful force: schadenfreude, or delight in another’s misfortune. And for Celtic supporters there has been a surfeit of such pleasures in their rival’s performance over recent years. Danny’s assessment of Rangers as Celtic’s tribute act can’t be entirely laughed off. Rangers have won the title once in the past 14 years – since the dark days of administration and demotion to the Scottish third division – and Celtic have won all the rest. In May a new consortium bought into the club and promised the usual great things; but supporters on both sides of the city of Glasgow are a little cynical. But it was the city of Manchester that gave most English football supporters the greatest pleasure last season. It’s never encouraging to hear anyone say that your club may have the worst team in its 147-year history – especially when it’s said by your own manager. That was Manchester United’s Ruben Amorim. In the final 12 years of Sir Alex Ferguson’s reign, United had seven Premier League titles and one manager; in the next 12, they’ve won no titles and got through ten managers. Last season they recorded the lowest points total they’ve ever had in the Premier League and ended 15th. The pre-season at United has been pretty mad, with five players, including former favourites Marcus Rashford and Alejandro Garnacho, placed on the naughty step: the former exiled to Barcelona and the latter forbidden to train with the good boys. There have been signings, of course, including Matheus Cunha and Bryan Mbeumo. Last season Amorim had a ready excuse for failure: it wasn’t his team. In this new season, he is rather more exposed. Manchester City are used to setting the standard in the Premier League, with six titles in the past eight years – so it was gratifying for many when last season turned into a comparative disaster with no trophies, a third-place finish and a real fear of missing out on a Champions League place. The response of manager Pep Guardiola has been fascinating. All his life he has played in and managed teams that work on position and possession. But that’s now outdated. “Modern football is not positional. You have to ride the rhythm,” he said. That means more long balls, especially from the goalkeeper Ederson, and more direct dribbling. It’s a change of emphasis rather than a tactical revolution, but there’s a radical philosophical shift behind it. New signings adept at that attacking dribble include midfielders Rayan Cherki and Tijjani Reijnders. Guardiola has also appointed as his assistant Pep Lijnders, who worked with Jürgen Klopp at Liverpool. We can expect more emphasis on counter-pressing –winning the ball back the instant you lose it – and fast, direct attacks. At this point of the season, every pitch is lush and green, every new signing is a football genius, every former failing has been banished to the landfill of history and every new manager is a messiah. What could possibly go wrong? How to follow the Premier League: Sky Sports will show 215 live matches this season, up from 128 games in 2024/25. TNT Sports retain the Saturday-lunchtime slot, with 52 live games including two midweek rounds. The BBC keeps the rights to TV highlights. 5 Live will have commentary on 209 matches and TalkSport around 111, including the opening two games of the season.
If anyone can lead the British and Irish Lions to victory in Australia, it’s Maro Itoje, says Simon Barnes
Add Australia v British and Irish Lions: First Test to your watchlist It’s a concept that might seem unusual in today’s era of brutal professional rugby, but back in the 19th century, the idea of bringing together a bunch of players from opposing teams and forming a cohesive group, then pitting them against some of the best and most established teams in the world – on their home turf – seemed rather romantic. That is exactly how a Lions tour was envisaged, and how it still works (more or less) today. Curiously, the first British Lions (the “Irish” was added, somewhat tardily, to the name in 2001) were created by three former cricketers – Alfred Shaw, Arthur Shrewsbury and James Lillywhite – and while they failed to initially get the sanction of the Rugby Football Union (RFU), an 1888 tour pressed ahead nonetheless, heading off to Australia and New Zealand for a staggering 249 days. Off the back of its relative success (they won 27 out of 35 games), the RFU came round and the first official test tour visited South Africa three years later. Teams made up from English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish players have been touring the southern hemisphere ever since. And that romantic ethos – of enemies sinking their differences in pursuit of a near impossible goal, a glorification of camaraderie and futile heroism – prevails despite the advent of the more pragmatic professional game in 1995. Traditions survive and every now and then the Lions actually win. Indeed, the Lions have won one series in 12 trips to New Zealand, though there was a heroic tie – one win, one loss, one draw – in 2017, when a promising youngster called Maro Itoje caught the eye. The Lions have won four times in 14 tours of South Africa, though the last series was only lost by a penalty two minutes from time in the decider and Itoje was again outstanding. In 2025, the Lions have a better than usual chance despite the fact they lost their warm-up fixture to Argentina in Dublin. Their opponents are Australia. And while no one underestimates the pleasure Aussies take in beating any team with a few Poms in it, Australia are simply not the hottest rugby team on the planet right now. In fact they’re eighth. Of the four home nations, only Wales is ranked lower (14th). While the Lions’ Argentinian defeat can be written off as one of those bumps in the road that scratch teams are prone to, Australia’s warm-up against Fiji exposed much deeper problems, despite their last-gasp win. The Lions began their time in Australia by racking up consecutive 50-point scores, but hit another bump in the road against the New South Wales Waratahs. They won, but, well, bumpily. But logic – only occasionally a relevant factor in sport – suggests the Lions should win the international matches. And this time Itoje is the captain. Even if he does no more than give the opposing captain Harry Wilson a hard Paddington Bear stare at the toss he will have done a fine job. That’s not just because he stands 6ft 6in and weighs a good 17 stone. It’s the impassive power of his face. It’s a face that compels referees to give his side the marginal calls; it would be disrespectful not to. Itoje is English of Nigerian heritage. “I believe human beings are multi-faceted. We are not a monolith,” he has said. “I am a rugby player, I am an athlete, but this is what I do, not who I am. I have other interests.” Some athletes find their fulfilment in the narrowness of their focus; Itoje is the opposite. The Lions’ captain must be a unifier: someone who can get a bunch of enemies playing together as comrades. Eddie Jones, England’s former head coach – and an Australian – once said that Itoje was “too inward-looking” for such a role. It’s likely that this will be just one more thing that Eddie got wrong.
The pressure of success may weigh on a wounded England, but debutantes Wales can play without fear, says Simon Barnes
Add Women's Euro 2025 to your watchlist What would you rather be: a swaggering champion trying to prove your greatness all over again, or a plucky contender with nothing to lose? Underdog or overdog? It looks like a no-brainer. Everybody wants to be a champion, that’s what you’re there for. But the underdog has a freedom from expectation and a joy just in stepping onto the pitch. The cares of a champion are known only to a privileged few, but they can weigh the world. England will perhaps feel a tiny hint of envy as they keep the closest of close eyes on Wales in the next few days. The two are drawn in the same group at the Women’s Euros: the defending champions against the first-timers. England carry the burden of expectation; have Wales already exceeded theirs? If the idea of going into a tournament is to have fun, being Welsh has a lot going for it. The rise of the England women’s football team has been one of the great national adventures, creating joy after Covid. England won the Euros in 2022 – Ella Toone’s perfect chip and Chloe Kelly’s shirt-whirling celebration in extra time took them to a sensational 2–1 triumph against Germany. The following year England reached the final of the World Cup. They lost 1–0 to Spain, but goalkeeper Mary Earps saved a penalty, won BBC Sports Personality of the Year and was awarded an MBE. The Lionesses had become part of national life. But it’s not always easy to be a champion and teams are horribly complicated things. You always plan to go into a major tournament looking serene, but England are having a hard job convincing us they’re not a team in crisis. And Mary Earps is part of that crisis. She announced her retirement from international football just days before England beat Portugal in the Women’s Nations League at the end of May. She was no longer England’s first choice keeper, having lost her place to Hannah Hampton. England head coach Sarina Wiegman has overseen the age of England’s success – and seemingly doesn’t have a sentimental bone in her body. Opinions vary as to whether Earps was nobly sacrificing herself or walking off in pique. Centre-back Millie Bright has also stepped away, saying her physical and mental health required a break, and had immediate knee surgery. Midfielder Fran Kirby has also retired with injury problems. As a textbook example of how not to go into a major tournament, this could hardly be bettered. Group D will be difficult for England, with matches against France and the Netherlands before they meet Wales in what could be a must-win game. Back in 2003, the Football Association of Wales pulled their team out of the qualifiers for the 2005 Women’s Euros as part of a cost-cutting exercise. But they have come back from this 21st-century rock bottom, and last year triumphantly qualified for the Euros by beating Ireland. Euro 2025 will be their first major tournament. Sport is full of fairy stories like this – it’s one of the reasons we watch. But such tales are usually followed by less comfortable experiences. Wales have just been beaten 4–1 by Italy and the team, under Rhian Wilkinson, are aware that qualification could be followed by three very chastening matches in the actual competition. There are two good omens, though. The first is that Jess Fishlock, their all-time record goalscorer with 162 caps and 47 goals, is back after injury, perhaps avoiding the exhaustion that follows so many players into these summer tournaments. The second is that their last group match is against England, and England may well be desperate to win it. It’s a situation that could inspire a Welsh team. Especially if England go into the match thinking “Well, it’s only Wales...” England are learning that the only thing harder than achieving success is doing it all over again. As for Wales, they’ve already won.
Is German master tactician Thomas Tuchel the man to guide the Three Lions to World Cup glory?
England v Albania is on Friday at 7pm (k/o 7.45pm) on ITV1 and Radio 5 Live. Add it to your watchlist. When Thomas Tuchel replaced Frank Lampard as the manager of Chelsea in January 2021, the club’s players were lost and bewildered. Four months later, Chelsea won the Champions League. If you think that was difficult, you should see the job Tuchel has got now that he’s managing England. All he needs to do if he doesn’t want to be considered a pathetic failure is win the next World Cup. Hope springs eternal in the English breast, but it soon becomes urgent demand. Ever since 1966, wild hope has preceded desperate disappointment and a furious search for someone to blame. Tuchel becomes the third non-English manager of England, after Sven-Goran Eriksson and Fabio Capello, both of whom endured some bruising times during their tenures. International football may seem a gentle option after the day-in-day-out life at a major club, but there’s nothing like the intensity – and the scrutiny – of a major international tournament. And that rule counts double for England. But there are some plus points. For a start, no international manager has rows with the hierarchy over transfers. Tuchel has the old-fashioned belief that a football manager, rather than a club’s executives, should be in charge of team matters, and has fallen out with the powers that be at just about every club he has been at. When he starts off, he’s regarded as brilliant, innovative and a perfectionist; a season or two later, he’s said to be difficult and demanding. In international management it’s more important to have the players on your side. But Tuchel has been known to alienate players as well as directors and higher-ups. His intensity and his tactical demands can be fearsome – and international players don’t have to take that. They can retire from international football and continue a happy, profitable club career. Or there’s always the option of a diplomatic injury. Playing for England is an honour, but it’s also a burden, often a mighty one. Every major error is noticed by the entire country and regarded as an act of treachery. The erring player will be pilloried in the papers and hung, drawn and quartered on social media. That’s why international players often play the safe pass rather than the telling pass. Tuchel must follow Gareth Southgate, who steered England through an unprecedented era of confidence, going deep into every tournament: runners-up in the 2020 and 2024 Euros, semi-finalists and quarter-finalists in the 2018 and 2022 World Cups respectively. Southgate’s method was calmness, good sense and good vibes. His lack of intensity and his trust in the players made England consistent, but a rung short of excellent. Can England take the next step under Tuchel? Will the German’s intelligence, passion for details and soul-deep love of tactics push England towards triumph in the 2026 World Cup hosted by the USA, Mexico and Canada – assuming, of course, that those three nations are still talking. He starts with as soft a qualification group as could be hoped for, with home fixtures against Albania and Latvia. Andorra and Serbia complete the group. And he has some seriously brilliant attacking players at his disposal. He worked with Harry Kane at Bayern Munich and it would be perverse not to persist with a player who scored 44 goals for him in 45 games. But who else? He’s got Phil Foden, Cole Palmer and Jude Bellingham: a sort of one-team-three-guvnors situation. Do you play them all in their preferred positions and watch them cancel each other out? Or change things around and alienate the ones who lose out? But if it all works, we could yet end up with a stadium full of England football supporters singing the praises of a German. Something to look forward to, eh?
England are the Six Nations outsiders who have learnt to win ugly, says Simon Barnes
Rugby Union: Six Nations fixtures this weekend Ireland v France Saturday 1.25pm (k/o 2.15pm) ITV1, 2.10pm 5 Sports Extra Scotland v Wales Saturday 4.00pm (k/o 4.45pm) BBC1/S4C, 4.30pm 5 Sports Extra England v Italy Sunday 2.15pm (k/o 3.00pm) ITV1, BBC Sounds and BBC Sport website and app England could win it, you know. That’s not a sentence I expected to be writing about any major tournament this year, let alone the Six Nations rugby union championship. But if a couple of remaining results fall kindly and England manage a pair of bonus point wins against floundering opposition – wooden spoon candidates Italy and Wales – they might just sneak past the winning post ahead of the rest. England won their past two games by the canny tactic of being completely outplayed. France and Scotland did all the running with the ball that rugby’s supposed to be about, but England still won each match by a single point. Scotland beat England 3–1 in tries, but lost 16–15 on points. England’s next game is at home against Italy and it will be interesting to see how they approach it. Their basic tactic against Scotland was to make sure Scotland had the ball as often as possible. Nearly all the time, in fact. They kicked away 69 per cent of possession, as if the ball was somehow cursed. Rugby union is unique among ball games in that it’s often a genuine advantage to give the ball away to the opponents – no thanks, you have it, you make the mistake. All teams do it to a greater or lesser extent. Against Scotland, England opted for greater. Much greater. “Is it the type of rugby we want to play? No,” said their head coach Steve Borthwick afterwards. He was being grilled about this supposedly dull and unenterprising tactic, but surely the bottom line is that England took the victory. Last time I looked, sport was supposed to be about trying to win. Perhaps we need to redefine “outplayed”. Against Scotland, England made 194 tackles. There were long passages of play in which Scotland had plenty of the ball, but no way through the England defence. Ben Earl, Tom Curry and the captain Maro Itoje were all superb. But England still find themselves caught up in a non-debate. Shouldn’t they be trying to entertain the punters rather than merely winning matches? Perhaps it would have been more “entertaining” if they’d not tackled so many Scotsmen. No, the England rugby team are not the Harlem Globetrotters, neither were they meant to be. But they’ve found a way to win, twice, against opponents with far greater levels of genius. France’s performance against England in February was bizarre. The time their captain, Antoine Dupont, dropped the ball when clean through might be the defining moment of this year’s Six Nations. You can say as often as you like that Scotland and France both deserved to win – but they didn’t. There isn’t a column in the Six Nations table for “Just Deserts”. France will travel to Dublin for a showdown with Ireland. This fixture always looked like being the championship decider, but most observers had expected that when these teams faced off, they would be unbeaten. France cheered themselves up after defeat by England with a merciless performance against Italy in Rome, scoring 73 points. Their fury and dismay at losing at Twickenham might help them further against Ireland, and the Irish certainly looked a touch wobbly in their unexpectedly narrow, nine-point victory over Wales. But Ireland are at home, and they have James Lowe in their side, the master of elusiveness. His performance on the wing against England was the best attacking play of the championship so far. As England move somewhat sheepishly into the role of title dark horses, the more likely winners will be hard at it in Dublin. The French were rattled when they had to play with a wet ball at Twickenham – well, God forbid that it should rain in Ireland.
This year’s Super Bowl has the makings of a classic, says Simon Barnes
Add the Super Bowl LIX: Kansas City Chiefs v Philadelphia Eagles to your watchlist Britain, it’s often said, is divided from the United States by the Irony Curtain. I’ve walked straight into it on more than one occasion. US immigration officer: What kind of business are you in, Mr Barnes? Me: I’m a sportswriter. I hear you have a little football game in town this week. US immigration officer: You mean the Super Bowl? That’s a big football game. And you know something? He’s right. The Super Bowl is always America’s most-watched television broadcast of the year; last year’s was viewed by 123 million people in the US and a further 60 million overseas. There were more than 6,000 media accreditations, with most of the holders asking the same question of every player: “How are you handling the hype?” It’s the only sporting occasion I’ve covered in which the most hyped aspect of the occasion is the hype itself. It’s all so crazy that it’s sometimes hard for sport to break through. There have been many Super Bowls in which the players have seemed almost embarrassed by the nonsense that surrounds the event and viewers ended up with an encounter that had them craving the equally hyped advertising breaks. But one of the abiding truths of sport is that being very good day in, day out is never quite enough. The greatest of sport occurs on the greatest occasions: Olympic finals, World Cup finals, Lord’s Test matches, Wimbledon finals and so on. These are moments when the best play the best for the biggest prizes of all. The Super Bowl is a great occasion, even if it’s a wholly domestic affair, as non-Americans are allowed to observe, so long as we remember it’s a big occasion. And this year’s edition in New Orleans – Super Bowl 59, or Super Bowl LIX if you prefer – has the makings of a classic. Yeah, yeah, don’t they all, I hear you say with a cynicism that ill becomes you. But the indications are that it’s going to be very close, with the Kansas City Chiefs narrowly favoured over the Philadelphia Eagles. The Chiefs are going for a three-peat. This is an Americanism that we British have yet to embrace, so let’s stay British and say they’re on course for a hat-trick. Either way, they’ve won the last two Super Bowls and would be the first to make it three in a row. At the beginning of the season, the Chiefs were considered ever so slightly past their best. That might be true, but they’re still better than almost everyone else. They won their Conference Championship game against the Buffalo Bills by a breathlessly tight three-point margin and the game management of their star player, Patrick Mahomes, was decisive. The quarterback brought the priceless gift of control for long periods of the match. Mahomes is renowned as a clutch player. That’s another sporting Americanism we haven’t taken on here, and it represents a crucial concept. Clutch players find their best when it’s most needed: winning matches with a 93rd-minute free kick, delivering a second-serve ace on match point, and scoring 75 runs in a winning last-wicket partnership of 76. The Eagles, meanwhile, cruised through their own Championship game against Washington Commanders. It was an exhibition for their running back Saquon Barkley, who finished with 118 yards and three touchdowns. One of them was a wonderful 60-yarder – even if you watch it ten times you still don’t think he’s going to make it. All this is great and fine and beautiful, and no doubt either Mahomes or Barkley will get the award for Most Valuable Player. But as ever, the team that wins will be the one that stops the great player on the great occasion. Don’t let Mahomes roam free, keep him in the pocket. Stop Barkley running before he has accelerated to maximum speed. This pair won’t even be on the field when their team is playing the most crucial part of the game: stopping them. It’s the anonymous line of defensive hulks, glowering behind the grills of their helmets with eye-black grease strips on their cheekbones, who will decide which of the glamour boys gets the write-up the day after the game.
Talk of changing the Six Nations is still in the air, but will the resurgence in the Blues’ form silence it, asks Simon Barnes
It was lovely to be back in Rome. I was there to cover a rugby match, but it felt like a true holiday, even more for the Scottish supporters in kilts and Jimmy wigs. The Scotland team must have shared the prevailing mood. After all, they were reigning Five Nations champions. It was 2000. Italy had just joined the great annual rugby tournament of Europe, turning the Five Nations Championship into Six. Rome was its gorgeous self, though no one there expected anything more than a pleasant day out. At the World Cup the previous year, Italy lost all three matches while conceding nearly 200 points. On Saturday, we made our way to the Stadio Flaminio, a delightfully retro venue that held a modest 24,000 – and it became the stage for one of the great occasions. Italy won 34–20 as Diego Domínguez kicked 29 points, including a hat-trick of drop-goals. Every time a big team tells you they’re not underestimating the opposition, you know they’re lying. However, it seems that every single year of the subsequent quarter-century, people have been trying to oust Italy from the tournament – a return to the Five Nations. Or pitched going the other way to expand the tournament to make it even better. Or rather, even more lucrative. Italy haven’t always been their own best friends. Starting in 2015, they went on a 36-match losing run in the competition that only ended when they beat Wales in Cardiff in 2022. Last year they made great strides, beating Wales and Scotland and drawing with France. England beat them by a mere three points in an unexpected thriller. That match was played at the Stadio Olimpico in front of 57,000 fans. After a long, slow burn, Italians have started to support their own team. But whispers of change continue. One idea is to bring in South Africa and make it the Seven Nations, or substitute them at Italy’s expense. There has been serious discussion of this possibility at the highest level, or so it’s been claimed, but so far nothing has materialised. It’s a move that would threaten other southern hemisphere teams, including the mighty New Zealand and Australia, who wouldn’t be pleased. It would also disturb the integrity of the European competition with its dangerous cross-currents of ancient sporting and national rivalries. Perhaps the tournament should expand further, bringing in Georgia and Portugal. After all, the current structure makes it hard for teams to clamber up to the next level. But an Eight Nations tournament would mean 28 matches in total, seven for each team instead of five as it is now. There would be serious opposition from domestic clubs. The Six Nations tournament remains free to air. In 2023, it was watched by 121 million people. Advertisers love every one of them because rugby followers traditionally come from wealthy backgrounds. There has been talk about aiming to boost the audience by holding all the matches on Saturdays in a staggered sequence. But what the Six Nations and all good sporting tournaments need is jeopardy. For that you need parity of competition. Every match must be a serious test: no one-sided embarrassments. You make that possible by sharing, by helping your opponents to become better. In this way, you generate better sport; in turn more people will want to watch it, so you’re actually helping yourself. The stronger Italy become, the better it is for the Six Nations. Perhaps over the next 25 years they’ll contend for the top honours, regardless of who does or doesn’t join in.
Gabby Logan: 'A football match on Christmas Day might be going too far'
Gabby Logan will present Liverpool v Leicester on Boxing Day for Amazon Prime Video.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Christmas is desperately hard work. It's the most intense period of the year, one that will expose frailties, confirm strengths, undermine pretenders and show the world the difference between the merely hopeful and the real thing. Frivolity is for other people. For football people, Christmas is deeply, unforgivingly serious. All the Premier League clubs play four games in a fortnight, including Boxing Day for most. By the time the decorations are down and the thank you letters written, the league table could have taken on a whole new complexion. Christmas has been like that since childhood for Gabby Logan, who will be presenting the Premier League games on Boxing Day and the day after for Amazon Prime Video, and also hosts their Champions League coverage. Her father was Terry Yorath, a terrific footballer, mostly for Leeds United and Wales. "Christmas was always somewhat truncated," she says. "Often we'd have Christmas in a hotel. I was a child, I didn’t know any different. Mum was very good; she always made it an adventure. And most of my working life it’s been the same. On Boxing Day I’ll be at Anfield for Liverpool against Leicester City. I’ll have done most of my prep by Christmas Eve, but I’ll still be thinking about it. I might have one glass of wine on Christmas Day." Not that she’s asking for pity, and is quick to point out that emergency workers and people in essential services are doing something that actually matters. “People sit down to enjoy sport after the madness of Christmas Day. And sport over Christmas is lovely. Families go together – I love going to live sport. “That’s partly because Christmas is the pivotal point of the season, the time when promising teams fall away – and as a Newcastle fan I know all about that! That glut of matches really gives the league a different shape. But it all comes with a certain lightness. The match is serious, but afterwards, there’s a relaxed atmo-sphere, you can have a nice conversation. You’re all in a club doing something that people are going to enjoy – so you don’t begrudge it at all. I’ll get home late and be off again early the next day for Arsenal versus Ipswich. I like that back-to-back thing.” This unexpected jollity behind the seriousness is a reminder that football is only pretending to be important, and the reason we have professional sport is because it is fun. How does Logan see the run of festive fixtures for the current league leaders, Liverpool? "They look as if they’re going to run away with the title, never mind winning it. But I wonder how they are they going to cope with that pressure. They also have contract issues with their key players Mo Salah, Virgil van Dijk and Trent Alexander-Arnold – how will that affect them?" Boxing Day sees one of the other title contenders, Manchester City, in action against Everton, and the next day Logan will be back at work presenting Arsenal v Ipswich, which means a chance to watch Arsenal's Bukayo Saka. "He's great, and a lovely young man as well," says Logan. "You can feel the love for him in the crowd." Football is part of Christmas for everyone who has a taste for the game. Sometimes managers who are used to a winter break – standard in most other European countries – complain about the Christmas rush, but they’re fighting an entrenched tradition. There was once a full programme of football on 25 December, but the last big Christmas Day match in England was Blackpool v Blackburn Rovers in 1965. Brentford scheduled a game against Wimbledon on Christmas morning 1983: “We hope to revive the old tradition of the husband going to football while the wives cook the turkey,” said one Brentford official back then. The match was brought forward to Christmas Eve after fan protests. “A Christmas Day match might be going too far,” Logan says. So she will have a proper family gathering, though her son Reuben, who plays rugby union for Northampton Saints, has training the next day. “I’m living the life I grew up with,” she says. Spoken like a true professional… The Christmas double issue of Radio Times is out now – order your copy here. Gabby Logan will present Liverpool v Leicester on Boxing Day and Arsenal v Ipswich on 27th December, both on Amazon Prime Video at no extra cost – try Amazon Prime Video for free for 30 days. Check out more of our Sport coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
As Manchester City attempt to win their fifth Premier League title on the trot, Simon Barnes says millions of people around the world will be watching – and listening to the unique soundtrack of stadiums packed with British football fans in full flow
Why bother? Everybody knows Manchester City are going to win the Premier League. They’ve won in six of the past seven years, so who’s going to waste time watching it? Answer: most of the world. The Premier League is still the most popular league on the planet. No one else is even close. The average global audience for a live Premier League match is 643 million. The nearest rival is La Liga in Spain with 76 million. In third place is Ligue 1 in France with 10.5 million. Germany’s Bundesliga got six million after Covid. Serie A in Italy and Major League Soccer in the US get two million apiece. Popularity brings money, and Premier League clubs have access to plenty of the stuff. So is that what it’s really all about? Answer: not really. Take Manchester United. They’ve spent 11 seasons since Sir Alex Ferguson retired as manager proving that money and success aren’t inevitable partners. Last season they finished eighth. They paid £82 million for the Brazilian winger Antony in 2022, but in two seasons he’s scored five Premier League goals. Chelsea, too, have proved that spending and success aren’t blood brothers. Todd Boehly bought the club in 2022 and has assembled a squad by spending a billion pounds. In the past two seasons they finished 12th and sixth. All this money producing less than impressive results gives a refreshing flavour to the Premier League. These two clubs have given us an intriguing subplot about pride and falls and humility, and a proper perspective on the clubs that succeed. The winning clubs have money, but they have something else as well. Manchester City set the standard. Their manager, Pep Guardiola, is on a mad mission to create perfection. Belgian midfielder Kevin De Bruyne – who’s perhaps beginning to fade as a major force – has been the player who has done most to put these ideals into action. Guardiola knows as well as anybody that footballing perfection is an impossible dream. But that gives him all the more reason to chase it, and this pursuit has been weirdly compelling. He has a passion for passionless excellence, and that contradiction has created something for everybody else to both admire and seek to destroy. City’s brilliance hasn’t killed off the competition. On the contrary, the chasing clubs improve season by season, removing any possibility of complacency at the top. Whatever City win, they increasingly have to struggle for. Last season Arsenal finished just two points behind them. They did so by playing youthful, joyous football that made even aged spectators long to play again. One glimpse of Bukayo Saka romping down the wing is enough to convince anybody that football at its heart is all about fun. Unless you’re the opposing full-back, of course. Liverpool under Jürgen Klopp were City’s most regular pursuers, opposing City’s coolness with their heat. It was a series of wonderful battles, but perhaps Klopp shouldn’t have run last season as a personal farewell tour because it led to a marked drop in intensity and they finished a distant third. Now Liverpool are being remodelled under Arne Slot, and football has an intriguing new narrative. The Premier League remains highly competitive. The hierarchy isn’t set in stone, as Leicester City proved in 2016. Their ghost continues to haunt the league, giving hope to middle-rankers. They showed that the Premier League can indeed be won by an outsider. It probably won’t happen again this season, but it might. Leicester are back in the Premier League after a brief visit to the Championship. Bubbling under the elite there are the nearly clubs. Aston Villa were promoted in 2019, had three double-figure finishes and then finished seventh and, last year, fourth. And then there is the perpetual hope that Tottenham Hotspur, fifth last season, will somehow stop being Spursy and add steel to their intermittent brilliance. It’s a rich mix and it goes a good way to explaining why the Premier League remains so far ahead of all the other leagues in the world. The habit, the soap opera, the resonant names; all these help to build an experience that annually enthrals the world from August to May. But there’s an additional factor less often discussed: the soundtrack. True, all clubs, big and small, have supporters and they all make plenty of noise. Unfettered emotion is part of the global experience of football, but British fans are better at expressing it. It’s not that they’re more passionate or more committed or more noisy. It’s just that the tradition here adds to the viewer experience in a way the other leagues can’t rival. They often have cheerleaders with microphones and/or amplified drumbeats. Even if they don’t, there’s a different quality to the sound from the stands. When British fans cheer, they reflect, reinforce and enhance the emotional experience of football. They sing, they shout and they express glory, joy, humour, fury, disappointment and hatred. It’s exactly what the best composers of film scores do. John Williams, Ennio Morricone, Hans Zimmer: they produce scores that emphasise the action and bring out the emotion. What would films be without Williams when Superman takes flight, Morricone when Clint rides into town, or Zimmer as Captain Jack Sparrow steps onto the quay? Premier League crowds express the shifting emotions of a match as no other league does. Their wild din – and sometimes their intense silence – is what makes the Premier League work and draws audiences across the world. But it comes with an awful warning to all the top Premier League clubs: price the din-makers out of the game and you lose the soundtrack. Lose the soundtrack and you lose the world.
In a Games all about equality it’s fitting that the honour of ending the show in Paris goes to the women
Marathons: Men’s Sat 7am, Women’s Sun 7am, BBC1, 8am Eurosport 1 The men’s marathon is traditionally the final event of the Olympic Games, but this year in Paris they have delivered a switcheroo. The honour of closing the Games instead goes to the women’s marathon, which is a fitting expression of the progressive nature of these Games. It’s hard to believe, but women’s stamina was doubted and they had to fight for the right to run the 26 miles and 385 yards of the marathon. It has only been an Olympic event for women since it was introduced at the Los Angeles Games in 1984. The gold was won back then, in two hours, 24 minutes and 52 seconds, by Joan Benoit Samuelson of the USA, who made an early break from the pack and ran alone for the next 20-odd miles to the finish. The choice of the route in Paris is significant. Athletes will run this 40th-anniversary women’s Olympic marathon from the Hôtel de Ville in the heart of the city to Versailles and back, in a race that has serious history. It commemorates the Women’s March on Versailles of 5 October 1789, when thousands of women descended on the royal palace to bring the king back to the Tuileries. That day, Louis XVI finally agreed to ratify the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens. It’s also a route posing serious physical challenges – by city marathon standards this one is distinctly lumpy, ascending 436 metres and descending slightly more; the steepest gradient a demanding 13.5 per cent. To qualify, women needed a personal best of two hours, 26 minutes and 50 seconds (men a PB of two hours, eight minutes and ten seconds). The fastest woman in the race is Tigst Assefa of Ethiopia, who ran two hours, 11 minutes and 53 seconds in Berlin last September. It was a stunning performance, but in the records the time has an asterisk, because she was running in a mixed-gender event. The fastest time for a women-only marathon was set in London earlier this year, when Olympic defending champion Peres Jepchirchir of Kenya completed the course in two hours, 16 minutes and 16 seconds. The best female runners are seriously swift. The men’s marathon takes place on the penultimate day, and it looks as if the African dominance of the race will continue. Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya and Ethiopia’s Kenenisa Bekele are the big names. They first raced each other in 2003 and they’ve been taking turns to beat each other over various distances ever since. Kipchoge, now 39, won the past two Olympic marathons and has the second-fastest time ever run on an eligible course. But his preparation has been troubled by the death in February of the brilliant fellow Kenyan Kelvin Kiptum at the age of 24 in a car accident. Bekele, now 42, has an opportunity – but betting against Kipchoge is a bad idea. And how will their legs and lungs cope with the climbs? Will it come to a sprint to the finish when the racers come to the Esplanade des Invalides? The women’s race on Sunday will be a spectacular conclusion to the Games, and as noteworthy, I hope, as one of my earliest sporting memories – the 1960 marathon at the Olympic Games in Rome. Not that I actually saw it. What I mostly watched was a black-and-white television image of the Stadio Olimpico with absolutely nothing going on inside it. Back then there wasn’t the technology to follow every stride of the race through the streets. What we got instead was speculation, garbled reports and the delicious suspense of waiting. And then, at last, galloping into the stadium alone, came a gloriously unexpected figure. He was Ethiopian, he wore no shoes and he had beaten the rest almost literally by miles. Abebe Bikila’s victory was a revelation not only of the beauty of sport, but of its universality. In the course of a single solo lap, sport was revealed as something to do with the whole world and the joy and wonder of it filled our sitting room in south London. This was sport as it was meant to be.
France gave us the modern Games and now the City of Love is preparing the most romantic stage of all. It’s time to lose your heart to the Olympics…
The French see themselves as practical, clear-sighted and, above all, logical people. So different from that lot on the other side of la Manche with their obsession with their royal family and imperial past. But the Olympic Games are before us – and they wouldn’t exist without the ineluctable romanticism of the French. The beach volleyball will be held beneath the Eiffel Tower, built from 1887–9 as a symbol of French romantic feelings about modernism. The parade of athletes that opens the Games will take place not in a stadium, but along six kilometres of the River Seine, concluding opposite the Trocadéro, an expression of the notion that the Olympics are for everyone. Vive la liberté! There will be sporting events held all over the city that was rebuilt by Georges-Eugène Haussmann in the 19th century, with its wide boulevards, squares, fountains and parks combining radical thinking with romantic aspirations. The modern Olympic Games was the dream of another romantic Frenchman, Baron Pierre de Coubertin. The French are entitled to claim that Paris is the natural home of the Olympics, and for the next 17 days it would be ill-mannered not to agree. De Coubertin had one of the great moustaches of history. He also had deeply romantic notions about ancient Greece, along with equally romantic notions about British education. He especially admired the way that sport was part of the curriculum at British public schools and venerated the headmaster of Rugby School, Thomas Arnold, who was never as keen on sport as De Coubertin believed. It has been suggested that De Coubertin got most of his ideas about sport and the British from Thomas Hughes’s novel Tom Brown’s School Days, which is set at Rugby. The baron was an idealist who put his ideals into practice. He took the ancient Greek festival of sporting excellence called the Olympic Games and combined it with the British vision of the noble sportsman. The first Olympic Games of the modern era took place in Athens in 1896, to make clear the continuity with the past. But in 1900 the Games went to Paris. The 20th century was here and the Olympics as we know them today were up and running. Paris hosted the Games again in 1924, as memorably depicted in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire. “L’important dans la vie ce n’est point le triomphe, mais le combat,” De Coubertin famously said: “The important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle.” I’m not convinced that Harold Abrahams, gold medal winner in real life and the film’s hero, played by Ben Cross, saw it quite like that. I spoke to Victor le Masne, composer of the official Olympic theme for this year’s Paris Games. He told me he was trying to express “the many emotions you have when you watch sport, the amazing journeys of the athletes, win or lose. What is happening in your head, to express all those emotions in one piece, is not an easy task.” International sport is largely a French idea. Jules Rimet was involved in the founding of an organisation called the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, these days more widely known as Fifa. He was the governing body’s third president, serving for a record 33 years, and he thought it would be nice to have a world championship. The first football World Cup was held in 1930; the art deco trophy was named in his honour. Many international sports organisations have or had a French name, having been founded by the French. Swimming is run by what was originally the Fédération Internationale de Natation, or Fina, now groovily rebranded as World Aquatics. Horsey events are run by the Fédération Équestre Internationale, and fencing by the Fédération Internationale d’Escrime. For De Coubertin, all this was still not quite heroic enough, so he invented a discipline designed to make sport even more glorious. This new event was supposed to combine all the attributes of the perfect soldier: he must ride a horse, shoot, fence, swim and run. Perhaps De Coubertin should have kept his nerve and made writing an ode to your mistress the ultimate decider of gold. The new sport was the modern pentathlon and they keep messing about with it. They even tried to get rid of it for the 2028 Games in Los Angeles. But when it came to it, no one had the heart to say goodbye. We are all romantic about sport, or we wouldn’t watch it. Perhaps we got that from the French – or perhaps it’s a universal emotion that the French spelt out for us. Paris will be the second city after London to hold the Games three times. A century has gone by since the Chariots of Fire Games, which had 3,089 athletes taking part in 17 sports. It was the first Games to have an Olympic village and the first to be covered by live radio. This summer’s Games will see more than 10,500 athletes taking part in 329 events across 32 sports, including the new one of breaking (as in breakdancing), which has doubtless been introduced by people who are romantic about the future. There will be broadcasters covering the action from some 160 nations and territories. But the organisers of the Paris Games certainly haven’t created a brave new world of specially created buildings. This Games is all about sustainability: athletics at the old Stade de France, tennis at the Stade Roland-Garros, football at Parc des Princes, along with temporary facilities, for example for skateboarding, at the Place de la Concorde. There are only two new builds. And the Opening Ceremony will take place all over the city, available for everyone to watch, many of them on the quays for free. “It is a crazy idea,” says le Masne. “It is a beautiful idea. Paris will be the landscape.” And the music will be his: “If it is a success, the perception of people everywhere in the world will be good. The French have reinvented the structure of the classical Opening Ceremony and placed it in the beautiful city. It will be hard to be bored!” The athletes will travel by boat from the Pont d’Austerlitz to the Pont d’Iéna in what the organisers promise will be “the most spectacular and accessible Opening Ceremony in Olympic history”. But really, never mind all that. It’s the sport that counts. What we will remember about what they’re already calling “the people’s Olympics” will be the stuff the athletes do. De Coubertin was no doubt right when he said that the most important thing in the Olympics is not winning but competing, though I suspect that when we look back on the 2024 Games, we will mostly remember the winners. We might also disagree with his idea that sport creates character, preferring to relish the action for the way it reveals character. But I’m sure we will all agree on one thing: that the truth lies in the action. Allez! Coverage of the Olympic Games' Opening Ceremony begins on Friday at 5.45pm on BBC1 and 4.30pm on Eurosport.
Predicting who will be victorious at sporting events isn’t guesswork — just do the science
Add Wimbledon 2024 to your watchlist. Sir Isaac Newton understood momentum as something you could calculate precisely: p = mv and all that. But in sport, momentum is the mysterious essence that allows individuals and teams to win tournaments. As we move into a weekend that brings us the finals of the men’s and women’s singles at Wimbledon and the final of the European Championship, the question everyone is asking is, who has momentum? It’s not necessary to play seven blinders in a row to win either Wimbledon or the Euros. It’s more usual for the winner to start slowly, overcome a few setbacks, look like a goner and somehow get there in the end. The emerging champion tends to get better with every passing round, saving the best for the final. It’s an especially difficult process for footballers. Tournament football is nothing like a domestic season and even the luckiest players only get a chance to win once every two years. It’s easier for tennis players, but even for them a two-week, seven-round grand-slam tournament only happens four times a year. How can we get a better understanding of sport’s mysterious concept of non-Newtonian momentum? How can we get a handle on the triple-event of the coming weekend? Let’s try some case studies. Denmark hadn’t qualified for the Euros of 1992 when Yugoslavia were disqualified on the grounds that Yugoslavia no longer existed, meaning Denmark, runners-up in their qualifying group, found themselves taking part. The players were unprepared, turned up and, as expected, were pretty terrible. They drew 0-0 with England and then lost to the hosts, Sweden. So their ultra-defensive coach, Richard Moller Nielsen, brought in striker Henrik Larsen and that freed up fellow forward Brian Laudrup. They were still a defensive team but now they could counter-attack. And they did so, beating France to go through to the semi-finals. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2024/07/GettyImages-145880450-61c3553.jpg" width="3426" height="2351" alt="GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN - JUNE 22: Peter Schmeichel of Denmark saves the penalty kick in the shoot-out to send Denmark into the final during the UEFA European Championships 1992 Semi-Final between Netherlands and Denmark held at the Ullevi Stadium on June 22, 1992 in Gothenburg, Sweden. (Photo by Simon Bruty/Allsport/Getty Images)" title="UEFA Euro '92 Semi-Final - Netherlands v Denmark. Schmeichel" /> Peter Schmeichel, their goalkeeper, had just completed his first season with Manchester United – and he made the difference. His saves allowed them to draw 2-2 with the Netherlands and then beat them on penalties, with Schmeichel making an important save. In the final in Gothenburg they beat Germany, thanks in part to two remarkable stops from Schmeichel. In 2000 the Williams sisters were ready to takeover Wimbledon. Venus, the elder, was 20 and she got through the first four rounds by playing with intimidating power: and that brought her up against Martina Hingis. It was a three-set classic of guile against power. Power won – and that was the turning point. Venus beat her little sister Serena in the semis and then crashed her way past Lindsay Davenport in the final. Sometimes a tournament seems to demonstrate not the eternal uncertainties of sport but the relentless operation of destiny. That’s how it seemed at Wimbledon in 2013, when Rafael Nadal went out in the first round and Roger Federer lost in the second. Meanwhile, Andy Murray looked like he was going to lose his quarter-final against Fernando Verdasco. But he staged a comeback, and was able to alchemise the near-defeat into a new confidence. He dropped the first set in his semi but went on to beat Jerzy Janowicz in four. I was there at Centre Court for the final against Novak Djokovic and in the second set I wrote in my notebook, “Bloody hell, he’s going to win in straight sets”. And he did. So, three examples of how to win a tournament, each one showcasing the elusive quality of momentum, that combination of inner belief, good fortune, inexplicable runs of luck and the ability to seize an opportunity. Can we reduce all that to a simple equation? How about skill times will divided by luck? Where v is victory – V = (S x W) ÷ L.
To make the knockout stage, Scotland might have to beat hosts Germany in their opening game – but Simon Barnes and Pat Nevin say they have the firepower to be a surprise package
Scotland’s best hope of going beyond the group stage could lie at the feet of a man who was actually born in England — but his name is Scott, so that presumably takes care of the eligibility problems. Besides, his father was born in Helensburgh on the Firth of Clyde. Scott McTominay is committed to Scotland all right. He played a blinder of a qualification group. Scotland are supposed to go agonisingly close and then fail at the 11th hour, but this time they forgot the script and won their first five matches. They qualified with two to spare. McTominay, who has made more than 250 appearances for Manchester United, was at the heart of Scotland’s charge, scoring seven goals from midfield, most of them arriving late in the box for a decisive finish. The only players to score more than he did in qualifying were Romelu Lukaku for Belgium, Cristiano Ronaldo for Portugal, France’s Kylian Mbappé and Harry Kane. McTominay scored twice against Spain, the second a beautiful guided volley into the bottom corner. This is the fourth time Scotland have qualified for the European Championship finals and for once they go in with a swagger. Mind you, they will need to. Their first match is against the host nation, Germany, in Munich. After that, they play Switzerland and then Hungary. Qualification for the knock-out stage is possible, but it will require a few heroics. It will be a first for Scotland if they do manage it: the three previous times they qualified, in 1992, 1996 and 2020, they never got out of their groups. Euro 2020 wasn’t a happy experience: they lost to the Czech Republic and Croatia. The one bright(ish) moment came at Wembley where they frustrated England with a tigerish 0–0 draw. This is the kind of crumb that Scotland tend to live on in major tournaments. It’s always just about to be the moment they make a real statement in the international game. But Steve Clarke, Scotland’s manager since May 2019, has built a defence every other country must respect – “They are a team who defend brilliantly,” Germany’s manager Julian Nagelsmann has said – and McTominay’s inspiration is capable of changing the course of any match. Scotland’s tradition is disappointment garnished with beautiful but futile heroism. But maybe this time… The expert view: Pat Nevin The Scotland international turned 5 Live pundit says there’s nothing to fear Is Scotland’s group the group of death? I don’t subscribe to that idea. Sure, the first game is against Germany, but then we play the Swiss and the Hungarians and neither of them are better than us. We should respect them, but not fear them. How do Scotland approach Germany? There’s a phrase we use in Scotland that means “get into them”. That doesn’t mean throwing caution and tactics to the wind, but if you’re too negative, you’re going to be disappointed. When I played for Scotland in Euro 1992 we also faced the Germans, who were then world champions. We wanted to get stuck into them, and I would say the same is true of the present squad. Who are Scotland’s key players? Scott McTominay, Andy Robertson and John McGinn. He’s someone I have admired since his days at Hibs. Who are the dark horses? Scotland! I was in Qatar for the World Cup in 2022 and who thought Morocco would go as far as they did? We’ve played a whole bunch of teams – like Spain – where we’ve been rank outsiders and given them a bloody nose. Steve Clarke has done a fantastic job. Who do you think will win the whole thing? England and France should make the finals, and I’d never write off Croatia or Spain. JAMES MANNION
Gareth Southgate can call on the three best players in Europe, says Simon Barnes. All his men need now is to believe – and be lucky
We love a Big Date. European historians bring up 1789 or 1914 or perhaps 1945. Those who follow cricket and the Ashes prefer 2005. In football it’s the Lionesses, in 2022. But for England’s senior men’s team, the only possible contender is 1966, the last time they won a major international trophy. The relentless disappointment that followed has cast a vast shadow over England’s preparations for tournaments ever since. The question “Can England win it?” has become one of those loaded questions like, “Do you believe in Father Christmas?" But the European Championship begins on Friday and England start as clear favourites with the bookmakers. And why not? England have the three best players in Europe: every one of them would stroll into any squad at the Euros and be instantly accepted as the main man. The first is Harry Kane. Throughout his career he has made goal-scoring a matter of routine: he’s pleased when he scores, but never surprised. What’s more, he’s better than he was at the last tournament, in December 2022, when England reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup in Qatar. That’s because he left Spurs for Bayern Munich, a team with higher expectations. He was top scorer in the Bundesliga, with 36 goals: calm and accurate in the madness of the penalty area. He’s the best player in Germany. Jude Bellingham is a West Midlands boy who has played most of his football abroad, which has given him an air of self-certainty (see our profile on page 14). Certainly he’s gone far beyond the parochial concerns of English football. He knows he can do it anywhere, and do it well. He moved from Borussia Dortmund to Real Madrid last summer and has surpassed all expectations, driving Europe’s top club with power, style and plenty of goals. He’s a midfielder but in all competitions he’s scored 23 goals, mostly crucial ones, with 15 assists. He’s just been voted la Liga player of the season. He’s the best player in Spain. And then there’s Phil Foden. You might have expected Manchester City to struggle when they lost Kevin De Bruyne to injury, but the manager, Pep Guardiola, merely moved Foden into the middle and got him to dictate the play. He’s now a routine scorer of important goals: 27 goals for City in all competitions, plus 12 assists. He combines an eagerness for responsibility with knowing football is about teams, not individuals: he’s a classic Guardiola player. He’s the Football Writers’ Association men’s footballer of the year and the Premier League player of the season. He’s the best player in England. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2024/06/GettyImages-2107475971-12c7505.jpg" width="3757" height="2633" alt="LONDON, ENGLAND - MARCH 23: Phil Foden of England runs with the ball during the international friendly match between England and Brazil at Wembley Stadium on March 23, 2024 in London, England. (Photo by Eddie Keogh - The FA/The FA via Getty Images)" title="England v Brazil - International Friendly" /> So England manager Gareth Southgate has the best player in Germany, the best player in Spain and the best player in England: and that’s a pretty decent start. And then there are the two players who powered Arsenal’s splendid season. Midfielder Declan Rice is capable of taking control of any match, and forward Bukayo Saka makes football look like fun again. Don’t forget, too, the emerging talent of Manchester United’s Kobbie Mainoo and Chelsea’s Cole Palmer. In Ollie Watkins, Southgate has a talented deputy for Kane; Watkins scored 19 league goals from open play for Aston Villa. In all the attacking positions Southgate is in the delicious position of wondering which fine talent he will have to disappoint. England have the best squad in the tournament, even if defence isn’t the strongest part of it. If the Euros were a league, England would be near-certainties to win. But tournament football is a different matter. In England’s group are Serbia, Denmark and Slovenia: not a draw to inspire horror, or for that matter, complacency. But every match carries a degree of peril, especially if you reach the sudden death of the round of 16. After all, having survived the group stage at Euro 2016, England then lost 2–1 to Iceland… who you might have noticed they also lost to last Friday at Wembley. Every team can be undone in a moment by an opponent playing out of their skin, or by a loss of nerve, a dodgy refereeing decision or a marginal offside picked up by VAR. And then there’s the penalty shoot-out, which is not so much a test of footballing ability as a made-for-TV drama, little better than a coin toss. The better side need to win while they’re still playing. England’s greatest weakness isn’t their players or manager, but history. England supporters have been brought up in the certainty that England get so far and then lose their nerve or run out of luck: after all, it’s happened often enough since 1966 when Geoff Hurst scored his hat-trick and Nobby Stiles performed his toothless gavotte of triumph. England reached the final of Euro 2020 (played, because of Covid, in summer 2021), but then lost to Italy after extra time and penalties. Despite Luke Shaw’s second-minute goal, they played too cautiously and conceded an equaliser. Perhaps they never believed they could win. Southgate has been a marvellous manager, mixing loyalty, intelligence and decency. If he prefers caution to the reckless gamble, that has often enough been his strength. But should England move into the knock-out rounds, they will need something more. They will need luck (especially if it goes to penalties), and they will need inspiration, the most valuable quality of all. And perhaps the best players in Europe at supplying it are Kane, Bellingham and Foden. So, yes: England can make 2024 into a Big Date. In another 58 years’ time, people could be sighing with nostalgia about the boys of 24: the team that had it all and did it – at last. But there’s a fair bit to go through before we get there. The Euros start on Friday with Germany v Scotland at 6.30pm on ITV1 (kick-off 8pm), 7pm Radio 5 Live. England’s first game is against Serbia on Sunday 16 June, live on BBC1, kick-off 8pm.
Bowlers Jofra Archer and Adil Rashid are key to England’s chances, Nasser Hussain tells Simon Barnes — but any team could win it
Nasser Hussain is on his way to Dallas, Texas, to cover the opening match of the men’s T20 World Cup. It’s the United States v Canada, which is perhaps not a fixture you’d expect, but there’s more tradition to it than you might think. “It’s the oldest international fixture in cricket,” Hussain is quick to remind me. The countries first played in 1844 and Canada won by 23 runs. Matches will also be played in New York and Florida, but the bulk of the tournament is in the West Indies. There are 20 nations taking part, including Oman, Nepal, Papua New Guinea and Scotland, England’s first opponent. “The shorter the format, the more it’s up in the air,” Hussain says. “Someone has a good day and the match is won.” In other words, anyone can beat anyone. Scotland have beaten England in a 50-over match before (in 2018) and have a genuine chance of doing it again in a Twenty20. With this in mind, I have a theory that I want to run past Hussain. It goes like this: T20 is a bowler’s game in disguise. After a pause, I get qualified agreement. “Batters will win you matches. Bowlers will win you tournaments.” Of course, everything is geared for the batter in T20: flat pitches, short boundaries, fielding restrictions, very tight wides, ever more efficient bats, the list goes on. “Michael Holding said they shouldn’t bother with bowlers and just put up a bowling machine. But there’s only one effective way of bringing down a scoring rate, and that’s to take wickets. That’s why Pakistan consistently do well.” So, let’s look at England’s most important bowlers. “Adil Rashid’s four overs in every match are like gold dust,” Hussain says. Rashid is now 36 and as good as ever; better, perhaps. “He has the variations, the accuracy and the consistency. And he’s equally good bowling to right-handers as left-handers.” And then there’s fast bowler Jofra Archer. “He jogs in and makes it look easy as he bowls at 90-plus miles an hour,” says Hussain. It was Archer’s pace that gave England the edge in the final of the 50-over World Cup of 2019, in the Super Over that allowed England to squeak home. Since then, Archer has endured a nightmare time with injuries, but he’s now back in the squad. “Jofra is key. And he’s box-office,” says Hussain. “He bowls so close to the stumps that his bouncer is really hard to avoid. Fingers crossed he’ll stay fit. Who knows how many more injuries he can take.” Jos Buttler led England to victory in the last T20 World Cup, in Melbourne in 2022, but he was also captain during their disappointing campaign in the 50-over World Cup last autumn, when they didn’t make the knockout stage. It’s always tempting to put this kind of flop down to a failure in leadership, but Hussain is kinder. “He was leading a side that was coming to an end. There were bad decisions made on and off the pitch, like choosing to field in 40-degree heat and high humidity because the stats said batting second gave an advantage. But certainly he and [chief coach Matthew] Mott are under a little pressure. “I think the winner will be one of the usual suspects, India, Australia or England, but the West Indies have a decent chance. They’ve won it twice and have home advantage.” After the tournament, England will be back playing Test cricket, which means we’ll have to talk about Bazball again. In the past half-century the England Test team have gone through two long periods of truly desperate results. One of these ended when Ben Stokes took over the captaincy two years ago. The earlier run ended under Hussain’s captaincy. “I had a great fear of failure as a player,” says Hussain. “The idea of going out to enjoy myself simply didn’t occur – until my last innings, when I had no future. And I enjoyed it.” It was against New Zealand. Hussain reached his century and then hit the winning runs, both with flowing cover drives that were not exactly his trademark. “When you have no fear, you generally play better – but at the key moments you have to be ruthless. There’s a time not to Bazball.” When England played Australia at Lord’s last summer, they lost a match they should have won because they were suckered into playing hook shots. There’s one question I’ve always wanted to ask Hussain. I was in South Africa for the 50-over World Cup of 2003, and in the crucial match against Australia he made the startling decision to give the 49th over not to Andy Caddick, but to a lad called James Anderson. Did he see the brilliance of Anderson even then? “I went on gut feeling, as always, and I had faith in a young cricketer. People weren’t picking his slower ball, and I thought if he bowls it to Andy Bichel, Bichel will hit it in the air. He did, too. Unfortunately he hit the scoreboard!” England lost. “In the evening I looked for Jimmy to say sorry. He was playing pool, and I said, ‘My fault. I put too much pressure on you.’ He just shrugged and potted the black.” Twenty years later, Anderson’s farewell match is set for July. But first, there’s the T20 World Cup. So get set for a cricketing carnival that raises the curtains on a summer of sport.
Jenson Button on his underdog F1 victory: "For a start, we had no engine"
His success is the topic of a new documentary series on Disney Plus.
Underdogs do better in some sports than in others. Perhaps there's scope for doctoral-level data analysis yielding a figure for every sport in the calendar. We could call it the Woof Index – the bigger the number, the better the chance for the underdog. It would be something like 10 for football, seven for tennis, six for T20 cricket, four for rugby union, three for Test cricket – and 0.5 for Formula 1. Naturally, the Woof Index drops appreciably over a full season, so the chance of an underdog victory in the F1 Drivers' Championship is vanishingly small. But it did happen. In 2009, a fairy tale took over the world's most single-mindedly commercial sport – and the story is now richly retold in a Disney Plus documentary series, Brawn: the Impossible Formula 1 Story, fronted by petrolhead film star Keanu Reeves. It began with a team in chaos. "For a start, we had no engine," says Jenson Button, who was the designated number one driver in the Brawn GP team. Even I, no motorsport expert, can see that this was a critical shortage. Honda had pulled out of F1 racing before the season began, and it looked as if the team they'd left behind would fall apart. Then, they were taken over by motor racing maestro Ross Brawn, who had masterminded the dominance of F1 by Michael Schumacher and the Ferrari team in the early 2000s. Brawn had been working for the Honda team, but now he controlled it. Button had to take a pay cut. "I had one other option [to move to another team], but I decided to stay. I wasn't going to get results elsewhere. The whole team chose to take a pay cut so we could go racing – I wasn't the only one, and I was still getting more than anyone else, so don't feel sorry for me. We did it so we could win races. That's why we were in Formula 1." The car itself looked better once it had a Mercedes engine in it. All the other teams had been testing for a while when Brawn finally got a car onto the track, but Button was cautiously optimistic. "It felt smooth. It felt reliable. Ross told me, 'You're eight-tenths of a second quicker than anyone else.' And I thought, 'OK!'" Yes, Cinderella, you shall go to the ball – and get there damn quick. "That was the moment," Button says, savouring it all over again. "I knew then that we had a car that was seriously good, but we still weren't ready. Back in those days, we had mid-race refuelling, and our fuel guy had gone off to be a plumber and hadn't been replaced. "In the first race, we lost seven or eight seconds at every pit-stop. So we asked him to come out of retirement every weekend for the rest of the season - and he agreed." Button won that first race, and went on to win six of the first seven. "It's amazing how quickly the goalposts move," he says. "The first win was amazing. The second was great. So by the next race I was telling myself, I have to win. You start to put real pressure on yourself." That pressure was to become almost too much. The first part of that season was a heady time. Button had always been admired for his smoothness as a driver. But behind that widespread admiration was the hint that maybe he couldn’t really do it under extreme pressure, that he would always be just a hair’s breadth away from excellence. Yet he had become the driver that all others were trying to catch, in the car that everyone envied. "Many things gave us the edge," Button says. "There had been a change in the regulations, and when that happens there’s always room to find something." What the design team found was something called a double diffuser. Formula 1 is as much about aerodynamics as engine power. The innovations that Brawn introduced allowed the airflow underneath the car to pull it down onto the track. It stuck better, so it got better grip and that brought better control at high speed. In short, you could go round corners quicker. Read more: Las Vegas Grand Prix 2023 on TV: How to watch race, channel and live stream When does Formula 1 2024 season start? Pre-season testing and calendar "The best bit was that nobody looked at the rest of the car," says Button. "We weren't the only ones to have developed a double diffuser; two other teams had a similar thing. Everyone was talking about whether or not it was legal. Well, it was, but the point was that the whole car was fantastic, from the nose cone to the rear wing. Everything worked in unison. "And the team was so united. We didn't think we had a job, and then we were given a chance to go racing. It was such a journey. When I see anyone from that year, we're always smiling before we speak – it was a special year in all our lives." But it nearly wasn't. The seventh race was the last race Button won in the 17-race season. The other teams had caught up technically and it had gone from being a breeze to a struggle. Button's competence brought him a string of minor placings, which won him useful points, but were a long way from decisive. The penultimate race was in Brazil and Button had qualified way back in 14th place on the grid. "It wasn't that we didn't have the pace; we made a bad decision about tyres," he says. "I was really struggling under pressure – the thought that this might be my only chance to win the championship. There was silence in the car as we drove away from the track. "Then my dad said, 'Come and have a beer.' And he reminded me what I had achieved and where I had come from, as a lad from Frome in Somerset. We talked for an hour, I let it all out and suddenly I could breathe again. I slept really well. And the next morning, I knew I was ready." Not half. Button started near the back and began overtaking. "Races like that are great. A long series of important overtaking manoeuvres. You get your fists out. I was driving through the field, ticking them off." He finished fifth and won the World Championship with a race to spare. "It was the best way to win it. It was the story of our season in a single race. We had to fight just to be on the grid." No team owner, no engine, a pay cut and no one to even put the fuel in the car… but Button was champion of the world. He had a great car, a beautiful driving style, and at the end he showed his racing mettle. He left the team the following season and joined McLaren alongside the young Lewis Hamilton. Believe it or not, he says 2009 wasn’t his best season – that was 2011, when he finished second to Sebastian Vettel. "If I'd been the driver I was in 2011 back in 2009 – it wouldn't have been nearly so exciting," he says with a smile. As it was, 2009 was a year of beauty – and the last time the underdog barked in Formula 1. View Green Video on the source website All four episodes of Brawn: the Impossible Formula 1 Story are on Disney Plus from Wednesday 15th November. Check out more of our Documentaries coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to see what's on tonight. Try Radio Times magazine today and get 10 issues for only £10 – subscribe now and celebrate the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who with a special issue of Radio Times. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Worzel Gummidge's Mackenzie Crook talks improvising his character and the message the BBC special hopes to deliver
Mackenzie Crook talks to Simon Barnes about turning his back on a Ferrari and buying an Essex woodland instead.
There comes a time in many of our lives when for once we have a little more money than we expected, a little more than we actually need. It’s like a gift from God: money to spend in pursuit of pure joy. The decisions we make at such a time define who we are. It was 2008 and with three Pirates of the Caribbean movies under his belt, Mackenzie Crook had set his heart on a vintage Ferrari. Why not? He was now definitely in the Ferrari class – and here was just the car. “And then I had a revelation,” he says. “I realised that a Ferrari was the last thing I wanted to buy. Instead I bought eight acres of ancient woodland and it’s the best purchase I ever made.” Crook is back on BBC One this Christmas with a third outing as Worzel Gummidge. To say that he “plays” Worzel would understate the link between character and actor; he inhabits the scarecrow’s world as writer, director and orchestrator of the country character’s revival. As his BBC Four comedy Detectorists displayed, Crook is a passion-project man, and Worzel is a passion of the first rank. He sees the scarecrow of Scatterbrook Farm as a rough-and-ready guardian of the countryside: a champion of nature with a robin’s nest in his pocket. “Nature was all I used to think about as a child,” he says. “I was obsessed.” When Sir David Attenborough is asked how he got his love of nature, he generally replies: “How did you ever lose yours?” It’s something we’re all born with: but it helps if you have someone to encourage you. “It was my father’s fault,” Crook says. “I grew up in Kent in a suburban cul-de-sac. But it was a short hop into the countryside and my father and I would take bike rides all the time. He would tell me the names of the birds and the flowers and the trees, everything we saw.” But it wasn’t nostalgia that made Crook buy his patch of woodland, it was an enduring love. “It was a way of giving my family the nature they deserve,” he says. The wood lies in Essex, and it’s dominated by hornbeam coppice. For the uninitiated, coppicing is a way of managing trees so that they produce multiple trunks, although as he notes, “Here, the trees haven’t been touched for 100 years.”I recognise the delight in the voice; I own a few acres of Norfolk marshland that I manage for wildlife, so here was like calling to like. Naturally, I wanted details. For starters, what birds do you get in the wood? “All three British species of woodpecker,” he says, with justified pride, for that trio includes the elusive lesser-spotted woodpecker. There’s also a badger sett. “The wood is marked on maps 400 years old,” he says. So is the place carpeted with wood anemones in spring? These lovely white flowers are powerful indicators of ancientness. “That’s right!” he says. “Then there are lesser celandines, and in May it’s full of bluebells.” He has taken his children, son Jude and daughter Scout, camping there, though they go less often now they’re both teenagers. Crook goes up when he can, both to unwind and to do some maintenance; he is slowly replacing the boundary fence with dry hedging, made from fallen branches and other handy organic matter. “I’m wondering about taking out a few trees to open up the canopy and let some light in,” he says. It might seem counter-intuitive, but sometimes tree-felling is good conservation, greatly increasing the biodiversity of a wood, most spectacularly for butterflies. “I like the idea of doing it myself with an axe – but that’s in the future.” An intimate association with a place like this affects you even when you’re away from it. Perhaps it’s not the wood itself, but that sense of commitment, one that began in childhood, that drives his reworking of the scarecrow’s story. In his first Worzel film, the scarecrow and the children realise that the seasons are “all locked up”. Together they bring about a merry miracle that sets the seasons free again. “It seemed obvious to me that there should be an environmental message,” Crook says. “But I soon realised that kids don’t need that message to be spelt out – they’re already completely into it. It’s my generation that needs a kick up the a***. But I had my dad to teach me the names. I’d love to see kids educated in British nature, so they can understand the diversity of our incredible wildlife.” Perhaps Worzel will help them. “He’s a smashing chap, I love him. He’s kind, childlike, trustworthy, a bit petulant… I’ve never been a great one for improvising, but when I’m doing Worzel I can improvise as I’ve never done before. There was a time when we were filming near a school and I was surrounded by five and six-year-olds. In the moment, I was Worzel and I made them all laugh. Nature is a thread that runs through all of Worzel. He looks after it, he loves it, he sees every sunrise, he sees every sunset, he notices everything. That’s his job.” It’s fair to say Worzel would never have set his heart on a Ferrari, probably because the nearest thing he has to a heart is that robin’s nest. For him it’d be the woodland every time. Wouldn’t the world be a little better if we all felt like that? This interview originally appeared in the Radio Times magazine. For the biggest interviews and the best TV listings subscribe to Radio Times now and never miss a copy. Worzel Gummidge: Saucy Nancy airs tonight on BBC One. If you’re looking for more to watch, check out our TV Guide.
Bradley Wiggins reveals "utterly strange" experience after winning the Tour de France
Ah, victory. It’s absolutely everything in the world – and then again, it isn’t. Is victory harder in the Tour de France than in any other sporting event? Is it sweeter? Sir Bradley Wiggins was the first British winner of the men’s Tour in 2012 (Nicole Cooke having won the women’s Tour in 2006), and a week later he won an Olympic gold medal in London: not a bad year. As cycling’s greatest race enters its second week, Wiggins – who appears every day on The Breakaway, Eurosport’s post-race review show – tells me it’s a shame that there are no serious British contenders in this year’s Tour: no Chris Froome, no Geraint Thomas. A British rider has won six of the past seven Tours, but it won’t happen this year. “It’s been challenging for everybody and we’re lucky to have the race,” says Wiggins. “It’s been very difficult for the riders to prepare: how do you peak when you don’t know when it’s happening?” At least we have a Tour, even if it’s in September rather than July. Wiggins will be there: “You always forget what it’s like. I can’t imagine doing anything like riding the Tour now. It lasts three weeks – it seems like a long time to me now, and I’m just doing the TV. “But I remember that it can seem mundane and repetitive: so much of it is a mental game. You have to get up day after day and get on with the race.” The Tour is an ordeal: each rider must face a daily question of how much more he can take, and if it’s all really worth it. Those of us who merely watch are entitled to wonder if the riders get up one morning after the halfway stage and think: do I really want to do this today? “No,” Wiggins says, “I never did feel that. And, by the way, I think you’ve just defined the difference between winners and losers.” OK, then: what’s it like being a winner? Not just a winner, but the winner? And suddenly we are back in 2012, on the 19th stage, a 53km time trial from Bonneval to Chartres. The riders set off knowing there was only this stage left to secure victory as the final stage into Paris is traditionally one where the race leader isn’t challenged. They started in reverse order, so Wiggins, with a narrow lead, set off last. It was the ride of a lifetime, swift and decisive, turning a half-decent lead into an unassailable one. “I remember the last five kilometres. I remember getting to the point when I knew I’d won the Tour. I was filled with flashbacks and memories, and I had no control over them. I was cycling hard, negotiating bends, avoiding the public, controlling the bike – and at the same time I was remembering cycling in Regent’s Park with my grandparents.” It was, he says, something like an out-of-body experience: utterly strange, totally unforgettable. “Lots of other memories kept coming – it was the strangest feeling I have ever had in my life. That must have been the meaning of life for me then. I’d spent decades dreaming about doing it. I’d never imagined winning, but I’d dreamt it. Winning – that must be what I’d lived for. I could admit that to myself now that it was actually happening.” These peak experiences mark for life those who go through them: and in sport they can come frighteningly early. Many people never get over it, and spend a lifetime preferring the golden past to the gritty present. “Yes, well, it’s all downhill from that,” Wiggins says, and it’s hard to read how serious he is. “You look back and you realise how important it all was. And it seems almost pathetic – pathetic that it meant so much to me at the time…” Watch the Tour de France live on Eurosport, Eurosport app, and GCN Race Pass. If you're looking for more to watch, check out our TV Guide. This interview originally appeared in Radio Times magazine. For the biggest interviews and the best TV listings subscribe to Radio Times now and never miss a copy.
James Cracknell returns to compete in the Boat Race – 15 years after he gave up rowing
The Olympic gold winner will be the oldest ever participant at the age of 46
I don’t know. You start off with the idea of asking James Cracknell what it’s like to row four and a bit miles at racing pace along the River Thames when you’ve reached the advanced age of 46 and you end up talking about the glories of the National Health Service and the best way to save it. Cracknell won gold medals for rowing at the Olympic Games of 2000 and 2004, so he was – and indeed still is – one hell of an oarsman. It’s not really surprising that he fancies a new athletic challenge: people like that always do. What’s far more startling is that he wanted to be a student again. How to watch and live stream the Boat Race 2019 He’s at Cambridge University studying for a masters degree in human evolution; the chance to row in the Boat Race and become the oldest ever participant is a mad bonus. “I’m here to study,” he says. “The course comes first. If there’d been any problem about keeping the course going, I’d have dropped the rowing.” All the same, there’s a kind of inevitability about it. You work hard, but you turn up at the boat house and find yourself “taking the option to put yourself in the mix”. Like the cavalry charger responding to the whiff of cordite, the fascination of sinking your ego and your ambitions into a crew and moving a boat at speed across the water becomes irresistible. But not at the expense of his studies. He wants to lay down a serious academic qualification so that he can help the NHS in the best possible way. “My mother worked in the NHS. The NHS is something we should all be proud of,” says Cracknell. “But as a society we put so much pressure on it, and to make it a more effective organisation we must take the pressure off.” That means making sound decisions about healthy living. Cracknell’s passion for the extreme tests of sport is only a part of what drives him. “It’s not about policies for the middle classes; it’s about everyone’s ability to make effective choices. We can change our attitude to diet as we changed our attitude to smoking.” Cracknell’s inability to resist the challenge of taking part in the Boat Race is something you expect from someone half his age – and yet he brings to it a well-honed technique, along with his “feel for the boat”, an inescapable but essential part of the sport. Sport on TV 2019 calendar It’s not as impossible as it sounds. Cracknell hasn’t exactly been taking it easy since he won that last gold medal in Athens 15 years back, in the company of the weeping Matthew Pinsent. He has a 2 hour 43 minute London marathon on his CV, and his knowledge of the complex mix of ingredients that makes a boat work has never left him. “It’s different from what I’ve done before. The crew has people from Poland, Australia, the United States and Britain: we all began with slightly different techniques and the challenge was to work together. In some ways it’s easier for me than it is for the guys of 19 and 20. They are missing out on the social side of being at university, having to get up very early to train. I have kids; early mornings are no shock to me.” One other advantage Cracknell has is that the brutal training required to bring your body and mind to a peak holds no surprises. “Everyone struggles in the winter,” he says. Harder, perhaps, was the mental side of the challenge. “I had to learn the way that people row now – 15 years after I stopped doing it. The sport has evolved, so I had to change with it.” It’s easy to see how, bit by bit, the old enthralling magic of being in a developing crew has him by the throat once again. He is relishing the deep experience of belonging that comes from being part of a team – and a boat crew is more than most teams: its eight members, plus the cox, must seek to become one in a sense that you never find in any ball game. “No one can stand out. No one person can win the race on their own, though any one person can lose it. So it’s about absolute trust in each other: a real trust that they will do their job. And for me, I know that what I will always remember will be waking up on race day, thinking of the crew, knowing that their dreams are in your hands – and your dream is in theirs.” It’s often been said that youth is wasted on the young. Cracknell has taken on two great youthful pursuits in maturity: to race, give all and win if you can, and also to set about making the world a better place. If there’s a touch of craziness in it, it’s exactly the craziness we all need. The Women’s Boat Race is due to start at 2.13pm; the Men’s Boat Race begins at 3.10pm. Both take place Sunday 7th April and air on BBC1
"The title race is on": Liverpool v Manchester City preview
Man City's bogey team from last season are causing them greater problems this year
They were so nearly perfect. But they had a flaw, and it still haunts them. Manchester City came as close as any team ever has to a perfect season, but their flaw made it clear that they were still vulnerable human beings like the rest of us. The name of that flaw was Liverpool. Now Manchester City must make the short trip to Anfield for a match that will go some way towards defining both their seasons. What Premier League matches are live on TV this weekend? How to watch the Premier League live on TV: Sky and BT subscription costs, games and more RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox Liverpool finished fourth last season but, unbeaten in six league games at the start of the season, they are already seen as City’s main rival for the Premier League title. It would be an understatement to say that Manchester City won the title last season. They triumphed, setting a number of records while they were at it. Most points: 100. Most goals scored: 106. Most consecutive wins: 18. Most away wins: 16. Best positive goal difference: 79. Biggest gap to second place: 19. And there are probably a few more records I’ve left out. But in the course of making all that history, Manchester City lost to Liverpool – three times. In one view, this failure, by humanising the heroes, makes their deeds more remarkable. But professional athletes don’t tend to see it that way; they will see only the stark failure. City seemed to transform football into a kind of ballet: one based around speed and grace, with players who seemed incapable of surrendering possession, even for an instant. There would be long periods when this looked like pointless self-indulgence: and then their opponents would make a tiny miscalculation and, in a moment of bewildering speed, City would strike. Again. Their style lacked the swashbuckling joy of the best Manchester United sides under Sir Alex Ferguson, looking more like a form of chess than the swing-on-the-chandeliers stuff you got from Fergie’s boys on the counterattack. But it had a kind of austere beauty, and not beauty for its own sake, because the football was – sometimes cruelly – functional. It was perhaps the best football ever seen from an English club. View oEmbed on the source website Except that they lost three times to Liverpool. Once in the league, in January, when Liverpool beat them 4–3 at An eld, and then twice over two legs in the Champions League quarter-finals, Liverpool winning 5–1 on aggregate. There was nothing remotely lucky about it. City were outplayed, knocked off their spindle by the energy and commitment of Liverpool’s gegenpress: a tactic by which you harass your opponents out of their possession- based game. Why don’t all teams play like that, then? Because it’s difficult and hugely demanding. But City can be harassed into error, as was shown by their recent home defeat to Lyon in the Champions League. Sunday’s match will be seen as a contest between two managers: Pep Guardiola of City and Jürgen Klopp of Liverpool – both passionate and clever men. But the game will be about which of the many highly skilful players on show will find in this fraught encounter the very best of his talents. It’s October: the right time of year to get serious about football again, and for football in turn to get serious. The season turns right here. Liverpool v Manchester City is live on Sky Sports Main Event on Sunday 7th October at 4.30pm. If you don't have Sky you can still watch the match with a NOW TV Sports Pass.
A tale of two skippers: will Root or Kohli triumph?
This summer's Test series between England and India is really a battle between the two captains, Joe Root and Virat Kohli, says Simon Barnes
It’s a ritual. Before every major Test series, someone – usually a fast bowler – will announce that the team will be “targeting” the opposition captain. It’s one of those meaningless sporting statements: after all, you’re not planning to go easy on the rest of the team, are you? But the captain is a crucial player. If the skipper has a bad series, you know you’re halfway to victory. Being the most important figure in every cricket team also makes the captain the most vulnerable. Their failure is often the team’s failure – and they know it. A good personal performance leads to strong, confident decisionmaking, but a second-rate showing eats into the confidence of the captain – and by extension, the entire team. England v India 2018 cricket TV and radio coverage: how to follow the summer Test series live Sport on TV 2018 calendar RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox View oEmbed on the source website As the Test series between England and India unwinds across this impossible summer – the more impossible because, absurdly, the Premier League has started right in the middle of it – it becomes clear that this is a personal competition between the two captains – Joe Root and Virat Kohli. Who is the better cricketer? Who is the better leader? Who leads the better team? Personal performance is closely intertwined with leadership abilities. A captain who can’t buy a run – captains are traditionally batsmen – will often make flawed decisions. That’s why the sight of the opposing captain hopping and ducking at a fast bowler, or groping desperately at a spinner, brings great joy to the opposition. Root began the series with a terrific innings – but he was run out for 80 by Kohli with a stunning piece of fielding. The fact that it was Kohli made it worse for Root – and the fact that it was Root being run out gave special joy to Kohli. It seemed that the entire match hung on that captain-on-captain encounter, especially as Kohli went on to bat so beautifully himself. And Root must have felt one-down to Kohli before the series even began. Both have a batting average of a little over 50 – but Kohli is boss when it comes to converting scores of 50-plus into centuries. Kohli has 22 centuries and 17 half-centuries; with Root it’s 13 and 41. That flaw in Root’s record clearly haunts him. At Edgbaston in the opening Test, Kohli had a period of complete dominance when he batted, making Root look bereft of ideas: and these are times a rival captain cherishes. But cricketing rivalries ebb and flow and, on the last morning of the game, Root had the sort of session in the field that captains dream about. It seemed that every time he changed the bowling, the new bowler took at least one wicket in his first over. You could almost see Root thinking: life – and cricket – should always be like this… For what it’s worth, Kohli is a better batsman than Root: one is very good and the other is very good indeed. But there can be a problem with top cricketers. Their teams get dependent on them and, like spoiled children, become less capable of helping themselves. Kohli is the best batsman in either team: but did that have a diminishing effect on the rest of the Indian lineup? Perhaps Kohl’s excellence is not only India’s greatest asset, but also their secret weakness. And so the personal battle between the two men continues. It will be the theme that dominates the rest of this extraordinary summer. The first of five Test starts on Wednesday 1st August at Edgbaston. The final match begins on 7th September
Michael Vaughan has a plan for the future of Test cricket
Crisis? What crisis? The former England captain is bullish about the future of Test cricket at home and abroad
If you’ve got a problem – any kind of problem – talk to Michael Vaughan. He’ll have the answer. It may not be the right answer, but he’ll certainly have one: and that in itself is wonderfully cheering. It’s easy – look, we can do this... Premier League 2018/19 fixtures and live TV coverage revealed Sport on TV 2018 calendar RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox England’s most successful captain of recent times is playing cricket again, though not in a Test this time. He’s captaining a Test Match Special commentators’ team on Friday 17th August against a celebrity team called the Tailenders, in Derby. A similar fixture last year got an audience of half a million on the BBC red button. So, let’s ask Vaughan how to fix cricket’s problems. After all, he’s like Charlie in The Italian Job. You remember the last scene, with the coach balanced on the edge of the cliff, all the gang on the landward side, all the gold over the drop? That’s when Michael Caine, as Charlie, speaks the film’s immortal last words: “Hang on a minute, lads. I’ve got a great idea...” So, cricket is in crisis. “No it isn’t,” says Vaughan. “Millions of people love cricket. Millions of boys and girls are playing the game, millions of people are watching the game. We need people inside the game to be more positive: don’t go around saying cricket’s knackered when it’s not.” Vaughan is good at doing the impossi ble. That’s because he has no concept of the impossible. It’s a mindset that brought victory in 2005 when England beat Australia to win an Ashes series for the first time in 16 years. In the final Test at the Oval, with defeat a real prospect, Vaughan had an idea that made all the difference. At lunch on the final day with England on 127 for 5 and just 120 ahead Vaughan told Kevin Pietersen, who was 37 not out: “Go out and take them on.” Fifteen fours and seven sixes later, Pietersen was out for 158, and the draw was secured that won the Ashes for England. Addressing the eternal problems of cricket is nothing compared with that. Too many people give up cricket at 14, with exams and other pressures. The answer? “All clubs should play nothing but Twenty20 on a Sunday. Doesn’t take the whole day, you can have a barbecue, a bit of music: make it a festival.” A decent game of cricket depends on a decent pitch to play on, and juniors traditionally get the worst pitches – and so it’s harder to enjoy the game and harder to improve. Vaughan has an idea: hybrid pitches, with natural and artificial elements. All clubs should have them – and, of course, he’s already got a scheme to finance this. Cricket has become the shrinking game. Five-day Test cricket – nation against nation – was once seen as the leading format. Then it was matches of 65, 60 and 50 overs. These days, if you want money and glory, you play Twenty20 for an Indian franchise. Audiences for Test cricket are diminishing. There’s much sad hand-wringing going on: the most challenging form of the game – for both players and spectators – is being lost. Bu Vaughanie has a great idea. "The new Test league is the right way to go. But I'd have promotion and relegation. Test matches should last for four days only. Every year, there should be four blocks of six weeks when no country plays anything other than Test cricket. That way you get a story. That way there's a meaning." The unstemmable flow of Vaughan’s ideas is so gloriously life-affirming that I was beginning to wonder about bringing my non-turning off-breaks out of retirement. He’s that kind of man: look, we can do this! Every sport, every organisation, every individual needs a Michael Vaughan. There are no problems in life, only solutions. We can sort this out, it’s not difficult. I’ve got a great idea... TMS v Tailenders is live at 4pm on Friday 17th August via BBC iPlayer and the BBC red button
Why Team GB could win big in athletics at the European Championships
Paula Radcliffe and Radio Times Sports columnist Simon Barnes say Great Britain has real medal hopes on the track
Athletics is the heart of sport. Whatever sport you most like to watch and to play, it all goes back to track and field – and that’s why athletics always seems to matter more when it’s the central part of a multi-sports event. We’re always keenest on running and jumping and throwing when these events are surrounded by a garland of other sports – and that’s why the newfangled European Championships might just turn out to be a winner as they unfold over 100 hours of television coverage, in the course of ten days of action. The athletics will be in Berlin, while a bunch of other Olympic heartland sports, including swimming, gymnastics, rowing, cycling and triathlon, will take place in Scotland, with Glasgow as the main host city – and if that’s slightly awkward, bringing these sports together will give a touch of specialness to each one. Why the European Championships could be this year’s surprise sporting success European Championships 2018 live on TV: how to watch the all-new sports tournament RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox View oEmbed on the source website Athletics is always the centrepiece, because it’s is the basic sport. The only equipment you need is your own body – its origins are primeval: I bet I could run to that tree ahead of you; I bet I could leap that stream and you couldn’t; I bet I could throw that rock further than you. When other sports take place around athletics, you understand the central role that athletics has in the way we watch and play all of them. Some purists might prefer to see track and field as a stand-alone event, as has been the case in the past with the European Athletics Championships – but not Paula Radcliffe. “It actually helps bring a wider focus to all of the sports,” the great British distance runner, who is now a key member of the BBC’s team, tells RT. “Cycling, rowing and golf don’t detract from the athletics at the Olympic Games. They make it more of a celebration of sport in general and that’s what we can look forward to here.” It’s much harder to win the big medals in athletics than in most other sports, a fact Radcliffe knows all too well. Despite a long and hugely successful career that saw her crowned world champion at the marathon and European champion at 10,000 metres, she never landed Olympic gold. In athletics the competition is greater: it’s never about two or three top nations and the rest playing catch-up. There are no cheap medals. There have been times when British performers collected medals in wholesale quantities in cycling and rowing, but that can never be the case with athletics. “The key thing people have to understand is that athletics has 214 member federations around the world,” says Radcliffe. “That gives you an idea of the number of countries competing and the depth of talent in each track and field event. It means it’s that much harder to win a gold medal at a global event. But on the European stage, you’ll still see British athletes produce a very good return of medals.” Another important thing with track and field is that athletics has been confronting the doping issue for years. Unlike other sports, athletics has always seen doping as a sporting and a moral issue, rather than a public relations or a political problem. Radcliffe has always been on the front line: “Athletics faced up to the problem head on, acknowledged there was an issue with doping and is seen to be fighting back against it. Cycling is still on that pathway to regaining credibility. Athletics is as well – but we’re further down that path.” Who will win gold? Radcliffe is tipping Britain’s new sprint star Dina Asher-Smith (main photo) for one gold medal “at least” , and hopes Scot Laura Muir will triumph in the 1500 metres. It looks like being a great festival of sport: and as always, athletics will be at its heart. European Championships 2018 live on TV: how to watch the all-new sports tournament
Why the European Championships could be this year’s surprise sporting success
A new event unites Europe’s best – and you can watch it all for free
The satellite companies keep buying up top sporting events. If you don’t subscribe to the right channels, you are deprived of live Test match cricket, Premier League action, Champions League football, all kinds of stuff. The idea is that you miss them all so much you just have to take out a subscription. But there’s a fascinating counter-revolution taking place alongside. The shortage of familiar sport on free-to-air channels has created a hunger for athletic excellence, for the unending dramas of sport and for the simple joys of partisanship – and this hunger can be sated by free-to-air channels that bring us sporting brilliance in less familiar forms. Sport on TV 2018 calendar RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox View oEmbed on the source website We may not be able to watch Cristiano Ronaldo outside of the World Cup, but we can turn to other disciplines and find the same kind of quality, all the more compelling for the way it comes in a radically different package. And that is the thinking behind the European Championships, which will be launched for the first time across the continent, and all of it free-to-air. The events take place in two cities and across seven different sports, in the great European belief that sports, like nations, are better together. Britain will be a part of it: most of the events will be in and around Glasgow, the city that did such a terrific job of the Commonwealth Games in 2014. The athletics will take place in Berlin, while Glasgow will hold swimming and diving, cycling – all four Olympic disciplines: road, track, mountain bike and BMX – gymnastics, rowing and triathlon. So far, so understandable: all of these are heartland Olympic sports holding serious competitions that every competitor will be desperate to win. But bizarrely, there’s also a team golf event at Gleneagles. It’s likely to lack the intensity of the other events… but no doubt it will please punters who were unable to watch the Open because it was on a subscription channel. We look on any newfangled sporting event with suspicion, and we are right to do so, knowing that at least 90 per cent of the thinking will be about making money rather than producing great sport. A good litmus test is the question: has it got cheerleaders? The more gimmicks they bring in to beguile an audience, the less faith we have in the actual sport. The European Championships seem to be based on a sound structure: championships most of the sports would be holding anyway, in a format that already matters to those taking part. The only gimmick is to bring them together in space and time, so you can go from the 100 metres standing up to the 100 metres lying down, from piked somersaults landed feet-first to piked somersaults completed head-first, with racing on legs and arms and wheels and boats, and all that matters is who finishes first. It’s not the Olympic Games, neither is it supposed to be – but it has something of the same purity of purpose, that deeply refreshing feeling that the athlete’s obligation is not to entertain but to seek excellence: a quest that can touch us all and become enthralling. The BBC is going big on these championships, continuing a wonderful summer of sport. At the World Cup we celebrated the power of the collective, especially in the team spirit of the gloriously unexpected England team. Now with this quite different garland of sports at the European Championships, we have an opportunity to celebrate the individual, which is all part of sport’s rich pattern. And you know, this might just be the year’s unexpected sporting success. The European Championships is on TV from Friday 9.00am on BBC2/BBC red button, 1.45pm BBC1 Sign up for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter
It's been a golden summer for sport – but 2012 was the greatest of all
Simon Barnes looks back at the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics – and considers why we're still looking for another Jessica Ennis
There’s nothing like a great summer of sport for bringing a nation together: a glorious few weeks when partisanship, drama and sporting excellence all combine, and huge numbers of us are out there rejoicing beneath the great gold medal of the sun. This has been such a summer. England had a great ride in the World Cup, refreshing and noble, the disappointment as Gareth Southgate’s young charges lost in the semis – watched by 26 million – only adding to its poetry. On the same day, Roger Federer went out of Wimbledon, proving an iron rule of sport: that you can’t win ’em all, though a genius can get close. It seems like generations since we went through similar agonies and delights – but six years ago, the London Olympic and Paralympic Games brought one of the greatest summers of all. Sport on TV 2018 calendar: how to watch the Premier League, Tour de France and more Everything you need to know about the Premier League fixtures and live TV coverage The best women’s sport on TV in 2018 View oEmbed on the source website So it’s always a delight, when the Anniversary Games come round again, to recall that sporting euphoria. It’s just an athletics meet on the IAAF Diamond League circuit – nothing like the mad omnisport grandiosity of the Olympics – but over two days we will be able to set the athletes who currently lead the world against memories of those golden days of 2012. The event takes place at the Olympic Stadium in Stratford, which is now the London Stadium in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The current crop of all-time greats, aspiring hopefuls, ageing champions, has-beens, never wozzers, nearly-but-not-quiters, maybe-this-timers and all the other members of the cast of breathtaking talent will be out there doing their stuff in the context of all our memories of greatness. The athletes will have their eyes turned towards the future and the unanswerable question of what happens next. But we who watch have the luxury of comparing one generation with the next. And, using clues from the past, we can pick out the greats of the future. Or try to. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/11/GettyImages-874050798-d4940c9.jpg" width="5472" height="3648" alt="Four-time Olympic champion Sir Mo Farah does the mobot after receiving his knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace on November 14, 2017 in London, United Kingdom. (Photo by Jonathan Brady - WPA Pool/Getty Images)" title="Investitures at Buckingham Palace" /> I was there in the stadium for Super Saturday, when British athletes won three gold medals in half an hour, but I remember it as the culmination of two days on the track and field. I watched every second of the two quiet morning sessions and two infinitely noisier evening sessions – concluding with the din of that triple victory. My assignment was simple: don’t take your eyes off Jessica Ennis, our gold medal hope in the heptathlon. I saw how she coped with the expectation, withdrawing into a bubble of concentration and offering the world an expression as serene as the Mona Lisa. How to watch the Premier League live on TV: Sky and BT subscription costs, games and more I watched every one of the seven disciplines of the heptathlon. I remember her asking the crowd for help during the long jump; I remember her struggle in the shot put – but then her weaker events always revealed the competitive streak in this supremely gifted athlete. I remember the moment she nailed a terrific long jump on the second day and briefly burst from her bubble to celebrate with the crowd. In the final event, the 800 metres, she took the lead, was passed – and then battled back to the front to win the way champions win. Before we had fully digested this, Greg Rutherford won the long jump and Mo Farah won the 10,000 metres and the night was filled with glory. Greedily we look for the next Greg, the next Mo, the next Jess: but we look in vain because such people do not come along as of right. But at the Anniversary Games we celebrate the winners and look for the contenders for next year’s World Championships, and the 2020 Olympics, and do so while remembering glory six years old – and getting more glorious with every passing year. The Anniversary Games are broadcast on Saturday from 1:15pm on BBC1 and Sunday from 1pm on BBC2
What is the greatest Wimbledon final of all time?
"Choosing your favourite Wimbledon final is deeply personal, like choosing your favourite Beatles song" says Simon Barnes – but which match stands out above the rest for him?
It’s easy to work out which is my favourite Wimbledon final – all of them. They’re all great: the sense of occasion, the power of history, the Centre Court hush on match point, when you can hear the server bouncing the ball even if you’re sitting right at the top of the stands… But this week we’re playing by Desert Island Discs rules, so I’m only allowed to choose one. Well, one of each of the men’s and women’s singles finals. And after a good deal of cogitation, I’ve made my decision. It’s a deeply personal matter, of course, like choosing your favourite Beatles song. On what grounds do you choose? Partisanship? In that case, you must go for Andy Murray’s first win in 2013, or perhaps Virginia Wade’s historic win in 1977. Drama? That will be Goran Ivanisevic’s victory over Pat Rafter in 2001, or the agonising, eternally oscillating struggle between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in 2008 – though, on that occasion, I felt that the tension became genuinely unbearable. A human dramatist would never have let things get so out of hand. How much do Wimbledon tennis players get paid? Wimbledon 2018: How does Hawk-eye work? On the women’s side, there is the parade of brilliance from the Williams sisters, the victory of the 17-year old Maria Sharapova over Serena in 2004, and the athletic glory of Martina Navratilova. But in the end, my choice is the 1995 final between Spain’s Arantxa Sánchez Vicario and Steffi Graf of Germany. The eleventh game of the final set, with Sánchez Vicario serving at 5–5, went on for 20 minutes. They played 32 points, with 13 deuces and 18 game points, of which six were break points. When Graf finally broke the Spaniard’s serve, the crowd stood and applauded throughout the changeover. View oEmbed on the source website It was a classic example of the minute difference between the very, very good players and the all-time greats. Sánchez Vicario had attacked Graf’s backhand relentlessly, a policy that took her within touching distance of victory: and yet Graf won that extraordinary 11th game of the deciding set with a backhand blaster that could have taken your head off, and went on to win the match. It seemed there was nothing to choose between the two players… and yet Graf won 22 grand slam singles titles to Sánchez Vicario’s four. My choice for the best men’s final is the all-American showpiece of 1999 that many remember as dull and one-sided, when Pete Sampras beat Andre Agassi in straight sets. It wasn’t boring, but perhaps you needed to have a ridiculous number of sporting hours on the clock to see it for what it was: the greatest display of fast-court tennis in the sport’s history. Agassi was at his absolute peak that year and he delivered three sets of perfection. Sampras did the only thing he could do – or perhaps the thing only he could do – and went beyond perfection. There are times in sport when you stand up and cheer: there are other times when you just want to sit in silence, wondering how such brilliance can be, and marvelling that you had the privilege of witnessing it. No tennis player in history – not Rod Laver, not even Roger Federer – could have lived with Sampras that day. His serving reached such lofty levels of skill that Agassi knew the tiniest error on his own serve would cost the game, the set, the match, the championship. Partisanship is great, drama is great, but the greatest of all is excellence. In those two finals, both players contributed: the loser forcing greater excellence from the winner. These duels show how sometimes the difference between two brilliant players is tiny. Almost the only place it can be seen is on the scoreboard – where you find the uncompromising truth. Wimbledon's women’s final airs Saturday at 1.15pm, on BBC1. The Men's final shows Sunday at 1pm, on BBC1.