Taking sport too seriously

This is the third time I’ve had a go at this list. I seem to be doing it every 3 years.  Since I last compiled it, a lot has happened which affects the order - whereas, even in 2017, it felt like the great Manchester City players were still on their way somewhere they hadn’t yet reached, and were consequently hard to judge, they’ve now had a full era (perhaps complete, perhaps not)  as a dominant Premier League side. It’s also possible to look at the players of the freak Leicester season and see how good the individuals really are. Liverpool have put together a couple of seasons the likes of which we’ve hardly seen before. The Ferguson years are completely and utterly in the past, and look all the more remarkable for it. Saying all that, most of my main ‘opinions’ are still the same. In a sporting sense, talking about greatness only makes sense if you know what you personally mean by greatness and you can, to some extent, explain that. I have a specific thing in mind here, a...

 What I've done is pick "All Time Best XIs" for the main eight test cricket nations (men's teams). I thought about doing it for Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Ireland and Afghanistan too, but, though they've all had a few fine players, there was not the same fun to that, especially with the last two. Then, we can put them all into an imaginary round-robin test tournament, all played in some purpose-built neutral venue with a pitch with a bit of help for everything, and imagine what happens. Needless to say, for selections, test averages are very important when I haven't seen players in real life, and I will usually veer to someone who I have seen if in doubt. These will be First XIs - I've added five squad members in case of injuries, but generally the idea would be you can't change the teams for different conditions - these have to be teams for all conditions and oppositions. Starting with  ENGLAND Jack Hobbs Herbert Sutcliffe Len Hutton (c) Walter Hammond Kev...

I’m going to write about Ryan Giggs. What an original thing for me to do. For a large part of my 20s, I fostered an idea of writing a spirit-of-the-times book about Ryan Giggs, wherein I unpacked his undersung sporting and cultural significance. It seems very silly now. It started as nothing, it came to nothing. But I bored plenty of friends with my wounded fanboyish lectures on the topic. Sometimes, it serves a person to imagine they live in a world of even more widespread wrongheadedness than is actually the case. Consequently, in my sensible head, Ryan Giggs remains a vastly underrated footballer, whose cause needs to be fought. Occasionally, something crops up to support that notion – a silly Twitter poll, a throwaway line in an article, a discussion of who should be the first two players in the Premier League Hall of Fame, which gets hijacked by Liverpool fans.  The truth is, of course, that Ryan Giggs is not vastly underrated. When the BBC, even recently, did a poll...

I have made a list of the best England men's cricketers of the 21st century, across all the formats, and have factored in the whole careers of everyone who played any cricket for England at any point from 2000 onward, so some of them have careers which go back a long way earlier than that. These 20 years have been a lot better than the previous 20 years - England have achieved everything they could have possibly hoped to - they've won two major tournaments, they've won the Ashes several times, they've won the Ashes in Australia, they've won against everyone everywhere, they've reached Number 1 in the world. It's been a long way from perfect, but there's been a lot of fun along the way. I've decided to weigh up all the formats, as something has clearly shifted in the last decade and we, England cricket fans, finally consider limited overs cricket to be of significant value. Therefore, to dismiss the likes of Eoin Morgan and Jason Roy as merely...