Taking sport too seriously

This was easier I suppose. For the most part (apart from in goal), it's not the one-cap wonders, it's those who really have been nothing special but kept on accruing appearances. Look up how many caps each of these got/have got and it's genuinely baffling. Nothing particularly against some of them, just some of them got more caps than Geoff Hurst, Glenn Hoddle etc.  James Milner appears on the bench, of course. Scott Carson Wayne Bridge Phil Neville Joleon Lescott Glen Johnson Ashley Young Carlton Palmer Shaun Wright- Phillips Kieron Dyer Stewart Downing Emile Heskey Subs: James Milner

OK, pretty basic, quite a fun idea and I'll undoubtedly produce another list which is the exact opposite. Let's say it's since about 1990 - no Hoddle, none of those 70s guys like Stan Bowles. In recent times, a lot of people have won a lot of England caps, and some have not won enough. Paul Robinson - if he could have just played one more game, England would have made Euro2008 Ashley Cole-should have gone to the World Cup, because when it comes to playing top class teams, you need pure defenders. Rio Ferdinand-only appeared in two Major tournaments, for a combination of reasons. Des Walker - seemed to stop being world-class too quickly Lee Dixon- best of an average lot at right-back, I suppose, but I never really understood why he wasn't an England regular John Barnes - could have been one of the world's best Paul Gascoigne - obviously Paul Scholes -  obviously Steve McManaman - the idea that he underperformed for England is pure nonsense. They should ...

I quite like this as an idea because they haven't been going as a test nation for very long so there's not a massive base, they've had some absolute stars of the game but they've never quite had a full coherent test team so the question was, if you picked from everyone, would there be enough top class players to fill it in every role or would there have to be one or two plodders? The fact Dilhara Fernando is a very realistic option says it all really ... no problem with the quality of the batting line-up though ... the questions are - does Sangakkara bat and keep (considering how much better his average is when he only bats)? Is Angelo Matthews capable of being the 3rd seamer? Should Ranatunga be brought in to captain? If not, then who? The more accumulative Atapattu vs the explosive Dilshan? Sanath Jayasuriya Tillekeratne Dilshan Aravinda da Silva Kumar Sangakkara  (wkt) Mahela Jayawardene Thilan Samaraweera Angelo Matthews (captain) Chaminda Vaas Rangana He...

OK, so in the sport blog I'm just going to rattle out some lists for a while. Can't think of anything better or more coherent to do. Here's the first one. Best Spurs XI since I've been a Spurs fan (1985) Hugo Lloris Chris Hughton Ledley King Gary Mabbutt Kyle Walker Chris  Waddle Glen Hoddle Paul Gascoigne Gareth Bale Robbie Keane Gary Lineker Subs: Thorsvedt Berbatov Modric Klinsmann Dawson Lennon

I'm just going to have a bit of fun with the blogs for now- at least I hope so. I'll try to avoid the need to think too deeply or give myself the task of coming up with anything definitive. This is not "The Definitive List of the Most Overrated Sportspeople of a Set Era in a Set Place with Set Definitions Thereof", it's just some sportspeople who've, at some point, for a crucial moment or for a whole career, by one person with a chequebook who ought to have known better or by the whole sporting world, been vastly overrated. I think I've spent too much of my life trying to persuade people that Stephen Gerrard is overrated, so I'll give him a break ... except I've just mentioned him, oh well. This can't really be anything but subjective - no doubt some other fool's list would have David Beckham, Ian Bell, Andy Murray, Ryan Giggs, Bradley Wiggins, Muhammad Ali, Amir Khan, Joe Calzaghe, Andrew Flintoff, Jonny Wilkinson, all sportspeople I lo...

This is the very last post in this whole strand. I could have polished it off in one evening but it's ended up taking six months and many thousands of words. I started with the simple notion of my favourite moments watching sport in the last 30 years, and have ended up with something far more expansive and confusing. On the other themes, there were times when I admit I struggled for varied and interesting topics. But this is the easiest one. This is the one that could go on and on. This is just me rifling through the sport I've loved watched on TV ... and I've watched (and loved) a lot of sport on TV. I've had time to think about the way I watch different sports, what is the most thrilling and involving, what serves as mere relaxation, what I've little interest in, what consistently delivers and what relies on outstanding performance or unusual incident to thrill. My favourite sports to watch, consistently, are, I suppose, cricket, boxing, football and athleti...

Golf, really? Perhaps it's been too long. I was a little reticent to accept golf's place as a worldwide global sport - I'd still rather it was an enjoyable, esoteric pastime, as it deserves to be. But the rich Americans got hold of it, so we're meant to not find it ridiculous that pudgy charisma-free chumps in sponsored caps and garish polo shirts can earn $5 million for what actually amounts to about 8 minutes of athletic activity over a 4 day period. Though I love golf, don't get me wrong. All my life, it's had the capacity to utterly grip me, whether it's the Open, the Masters or, of course, the Ryder Cup, one of the most beautifully honed sporting contests in the world. But if I was going to talk about a moment in golf that is a Defining Moment in Sport over the last 30 years, it'd be utterly faulty for it not to be about Tiger Woods, and, damn, I've tried hard not to see Tiger Woods as one of the world's great sportspeople. He's cert...

I've kept putting this post off, as I've been waiting for the conclusion of a certain trial, but I can't really wait any longer, and in any case, whether one judge finds Oscar Pistorius guilty of premeditated murder isn't really key to what I'm going to write. It would have only been a pertinent fact when writing about being in the Olympic Stadium on a beautiful early September evening for the last night of athletics in the 2012 Paralympics. The weather in 2012 was shocking, if you recall. It was shocking for approximately 48 weeks of the year. But  the 4 weeks for which it was glorious were the weeks of the Olympics and then the Paralympics. I went to the three Olympic events - football, swimming and boxing, at pretty high but worthwhile prices, and had also, at Juliette's prompting, booked three or four Paralympic tickets, at fantastically low prices. If they kept it low to make sure the Londoners turned up, it worked in abundance. Packed arenas, the atmosph...

I reach the last of my '10 Best Moments of my Sporting Life', a strand which I hoped could run alongside my lists of proper, world-class sport in an interesting and insightful way. It naturally became pretty difficult to find variety. I'm not a decathlete nor am I CB Fry - there were only a few sports I was remotely competent in. I'm also not insanely, unknowingly egomaniacal. I appreciate how writing about your own minor triumphs as if they ought to mean anything to anyone else is a bit weird. So, I determined to end this strand on a downer, rather a boring downer of breaking my leg playing football, which is I suppose the defining sporting moment I've experienced, both to try to give some perspective on how shitty sport can be sometimes and also because I thought I'd run out of incidents I could conceivably write about with a bit of flair. But, hell no, I forgot something! How could I forget the time I performed a sport at a genuine high-class professional...

As I draw near to the end of this journey into my own sporting life, I make a choice as to whether to tell you what "sporting achievement" is to me now, or what it was to me then. I could have chosen to write about playing cricket, surrounded by team mates on a sunny day, with variety and meaning and context. But instead I'm going to say a little bit about the other, less romantic, less interesting side of sporting satisfaction. Alone, monotonous, numerical. Actually, there's not a big difference. As a left arm spinner, at my best, I was alone, monotonous, numerical. My best spells relied on finding my undisturbed groove early, on protecting my figures, on not letting anyone or anything distract me. I would try and bowl maidens, over and over again, and the rest would follow. I remember bowling a 26 over spell once, 5 wickets at 2 an over, just ticking it over. That was bliss for me. I just wanted to bowl and bowl. I can't do that anymore. I don't have t...

I suppose I've messed up a bit here, both in that a) I'm writing about something in the same sport but a year earlier than the last post and b) I said I was aiming for variety and, look, it's more cricket from Lord's, I've already done one of those in Live Sport and mentioned it plenty elsewhere. But  it would be daft of me not include this, which was, though not epoch-shaking, the most straightforwardly exciting and wholly satisfactory sporting event I've had the pleasure to attend. The first test vs New Zealand at Lord's in 2004. I was, in fact, lucky enough to attend two days, the 2nd and 5th, the 2nd, bought in advance, costing £35 and the 5th, on the morning, just £10. Good value for money. I'll talk about both days, but mainly the 5th. It was a really very good test match. This was in the "up" period of English cricket. From late on in the summer of 2003 to the great summer of 2005, they won nearly all their test matches - Andrew Fl...

There's just been so much. I've just watched such an awful lot of sport, it's been rather hard to narrow this strand down. What ten moments of sport that I've watched have I enjoyed the most? Really and truly. Well, enjoyed is the wrong word for this one. I enjoyed it only so much. And it was also a strange, fractured, watching experience for me. But 2005 was a summer when cricket was truly joyous and life-affirming, for me and, for the last time in England, for countless millions of others. Cos after that, of course, Sky came and stole our cricket for good. Fuckers. I gave in a couple of years later, and more than Premier League football or Boxing or Sunday Supplement (croissants and all), it was the absence of live test cricket on terrestrial TV that forced me to the dark side. The Ashes on 2005 were on Channel 4, and they did a phenomenal job of it. Mark Nicholas, Richie Benaud, Michaels Slater and Atherton, Tony Greig, Geoff Boycott, Simon Hughes, their voices...

"One shot", a line that runs through Michael Cimino's 'The Deer Hunter', that underlies Eminem's 'Lose Yourself'. One shot. Take it clean or it's gone. I never had a shot, not like that. At least I don't think so. If I did, it came and went without my noticing, which is probably for the best. So the concept of "One shot" can mean something different. It simply reminds us of a time where we nailed it, where we hit or struck one shot with such pure timing, such out-of-context perfection that, years or decades later, that one split second still lives on through the haze that surrounds it. And we imagine Alan Partridge soundtracking it by saying "Shit, what a goal/shot/smash!" I'm not quite talking about the "aristeia". In The Iliad, our common heroes have brief periods when they are at their very best, when they rise above themselves and destroy all before them. In modern parlance, there's "the zo...

You know the one. The guy who took the tour, traditionally the exclusive preserve of Europeans, by storm, whose career was shocking interrupted by a life-threatening event only for him to make a triumphant comeback, who stands for everything good about his sport ... oh, no, not that guy, of course not that guy. The one great American cyclist, Greg LeMond. There are others who have won more Tours, not even counting the now-expunged Armstrong - Hinault, Indurain, Anquetil, and the one usually considered the greatest, Eddy Merckx, but I hope history will put LeMond, winner of three Tours, right up there with them. First of all, as a trailblazer - he was the first (and still only one of two) non-European to win the Tour. Secondly, he could well have won more but was required, early on, to ride for Hinault, which he certainly did more loyally than Hinault did for him (or than Froome did for Wiggins). Thirdly, he had to miss two Tours after being shot in a hunting accident which almost k...

When it comes to the defining moments in global sport, I had to think long and hard about whether or not to include anything from "the American sports". World Series, my arse, we say. America is not the World, as Morrissey once sang. But are they the insular ones? Well, yes, yes, they are, but we Brits would be wrong to think that the four team sports they traditionally build their culture around have no currency elsewhere. Basketball is truly one of the biggest sports all over the world, especially in the rest of Europe, likewise ice hockey is particularly big in Eastern Europe, baseball in South and Central America and Japan, and it's only American Football that, in terms of international teams and high class leagues, remains North American. They did try pretty hard with NFL Europe (remember the London Monarchs?) but it was always second-rate and ended up folding. Yet, it's the Super Bowl I'm choosing, because the Super Bowl is something a bit special, easil...

I only recently remembered this one, which fits perfectly into my plot and provides a good bit of variety. New York Mets vs St Louis Cardinals at the old Shea Stadium, or, as they bizarrely do it in the USA, St Louis Cardinals vs New York Mets. I'll try to avoid too many uses of the phrase "as they bizarrely do it it the USA", but I suppose that's what I'm writing about. America wins film, it currently wins music, but, hell, it does not win sport. Does it win global cities? Tough one. I watched my first baseball game on my first ever full day in New York City - a good, long, cliched day. New York lived up to expectation (apart from the first thing I saw, as I've said before, in a cab through Brooklyn, being cricket). I arrived on the Sunday night to my friends' apartment on Bowery and we went straight out to have lovely corn and Mexican beers at a street cafe, and Morgan Spurlock was there, and, ignoring jetlag, went to bed late and woke up early on th...

I wrote in a previous post on the shame of tacitly supporting Manchester United about how, because England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Northern Ireland have not actually WON anything for 48 years (apart from the "fabled" Tournoi in 1997) if one wants actual glory in football spectatorship, it is natural to engage with the heights of club football, be it Premier League, FA Cup, Champions League even if that doesn't involve your own club. That's how it works for me, but of course it's not how it works for most people. England is all. When Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea or Man Utd reach the Champions League final (you know, actually give themselves a chance of winning) you don't see their flags draped all over the nation. Their fans are passionate, a fair few football fans back them a bit, a lot of fans of other clubs rather want them to lose, and the majority don't really give a shit. England is all. It's primarily the actual Championships which bring ...