Taking sport too seriously

There was, as usual, a lot of good writing in this year's Wisden Almanack. I used to pore over it for the match reports and statistics, but now it's the articles at the beginning which grab my attention. There was a particularly lovely piece by Matthew Engel on the 60-year history of Test Match Special. Amongst that and several other good ones, the article called Cricket and Politics, though fine enough, was a bit of a damp squib - little more scope and insight than mentioning that there used to be more working class players, and that most cricketers are probably likely to be right-wing. No shit. So I've decided to have a go myself, ingeniously entitling it Politics and Cricket. Cricket is a special game of rare wonders, rare meaning and context. Sometimes it can be hard to pin that down, but I'll try. John Major's vision of cricket as the sun goes down on an English village green is all well and good - I've been there and I've loved that, I'm not ...

I got thinking about managers a little bit lately, so I've made a list of the Best of the Premier League era. It was pretty interesting, actually, going through the long list of all the managers there've been, at times a real rogue's gallery of forgotten failures, from Jacques Santini to Steve Wigley to Velimir Zejic, but there were also a fair few more who did, at some point, for a significant stretch of time, do a pretty job, than you might remember. There are those who rather lost their reputation who actually did a great job for a while, the likes of George Burley, Joe Kinnear, Steve Coppell - winners of the LMA Manager of the Year award include all of the above (Coppell twice), Dave Jones, Frank Clark, David Moyes three times (I should say that's the overall award - the divisional award is much more dominated by the big guns). My list is pretty arbitrary - I didn't want to be guided by win percentage, for obvious reasons. Number of games is in itself a gr...