Taking sport too seriously

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...