Taking sport too seriously

For fear of sounding too grumpy or annoying anyone ... I've done Most Overrated Sportspeople, but what are the Most Overrated Sporting Events? All hype. Consistently disappointing. Self-mythologising. Barely sport at all. Inexplicably popular etc The Masters ... the obvious place to start. I quite like the Masters, but the fact that it thinks itself the most important thing in the world and a quasi-religious experience does my head in. It rarely turns out to be a great pure golf event (it was this year, I admit), it's the same course over and over, a limited field, it's a bit racist, an enormous way up its own arse, and I often feel it punishes good golf too much and doesn't punish genuinely bad shots enough.. So, yeah, not that I haven't watched all four days of it every year for about three decades. the Masters is the most overrated sporting event going. The Old Firm game ... Graeme Souness fiercely saying it's bigger than Liverpool-Everton, bigger than ...

I'm watching cricket. I love cricket. But I'm not sure what cricket to watch, because cricket's on two channels. On the one hand, there's some very exciting test cricket between England and South Africa, but (sacrilege!) I'm also finding myself flipping over to Australia's T20 Big Bash League on the other channel. I flipping love the BBL. It's the first T20 I've really relished. The IPL, the Ram Slam, the Caribbean Premier League, even our own T20 Blast, I can entirely take or leave - I can find them crass, garish, boring all at once, but I'm completely sold on the BBL. It's become a yearly sporting highlight, a wonderful background to these cold winter mornings. People complain about the modern Australian commentators being too matey, and I have found that in the past, but I love the mateyness of the guys they've got for IPL. I love Gilchrist and Ponting in particular - serious and knowledgeable, funny and good-natured. Fleming is a smoo...

I suppose Jonah Lomu's death is not a shock, considering he'd been desperately ill a few times before. It's striking how much it's clearly hit home, though, even in such a ghastly week as this. Despite my cold republican, rugby-shunning hear, I was moved by this little detail   http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/34876711 . He was a guy you never forgot. I first saw him at the Hong Kong Sevens in 1994 - it's quite rare for a Sevens player to cross over to 15-a-side so despite the extraordinary impact he made there, you couldn't be certain. He almost didn't make the All Black squad for the 1995 World Cup due to fitness concerns but when he got there, he changed rugby. It's simple and true. Everyone's been trotting out the line "first global superstar" this week, but it's exactly right. The modern professional game is created in his extraordinary image. That game against England is written in my memory. I watched it at school on ...

My post, a few months ago, about who, right then, were the best sportspeople in the world, inevitably made me look a fool, to an extent. I thought I'd look back and see who I was right about, who I was completely wrong about. Here was the 50/100 I listed. But I'm going to put bold those ones where I'm wrong, based on current performance (or retirement!), and write a list of names who I missed out. The first 50 Gennady Golovkin (Kazakhstan, Boxing) Rory McIlroy (UK, Golf) Floyd Mayweather (USA, Boxing) Ashton Eaton (USA, Decathlon) Missy Franklin (USA, Swimming) Tom Brady (USA, American Football) LeBron James (USA, Basketball) Kumar Sangakkara (Sri Lanka, Cricket) Alberto Contador (Spain, Cycling) Lionel Messi (Argentina, Football) Marianne Vos (Netherlands, Cycling) Valerie Adams (New Zealand, Shot Put) Mo Farah (UK, Athletics) Marc Marquez (Spain, Motorcycle Racing) Tony McCoy (Ireland, Horse Racing) Ronaldo (Portugal, Football) Usain Bolt (Jamaica, ...

I don't tend to be one for big sporting theories - more medium-sized. What I mean is, when it comes to the England football team losing all but one Penalty Shoot-Out in a major tournament and Germany winning every one for over 30 years, I'm not interested in ideas about overarching national psyche, but I'll extend to the notion that Germany used to practice it more, a couple of times it was down to luck, it became self-perpetuating, some England players therefore went into shoot-outs with fear, it became more than likely it would continue to happen. That's my idea of a sporting theory - "lots of little things" serves to explain hoodoos and superstitions and patterns in my book. So, what's the big idea behind England's major sporting teams' recent profound failures in World Cup? Recent, you say? Perennial, more like it... But no, recent is right. Things have changed. Things have got particularly bad. For decades, across football, rugby and, to a l...

At my desk at home, directly in my eyeline, every day, I see the evidence of my life's pursuit, the yellow covers of the 32 almost identical Wisden Cricketers Almanacks for every year from 1984 to 2015. These are my own years of watching and loving cricket; that's why this list will encompass the slightly awkward figure of 31 years. It could just as well have been 30. There'd have been no change. I haven't found much about sport to write about lately, and since I'm always happy considering and compiling a list, this seemed the obvious task for me to get the ball rolling again. I put together something similar for Football a few months ago, though I limited that to post-2000, to avoid going out of my depth in pretending to remember players from the 80s and early 90s I couldn't actually recall that well. I didn't feel that would be a problem for cricket - I've watched huge amounts of cricket since 1984, as much as could be watched, really, and there is...

I keep on meaning to write at length about the spectre of cheating in sport, horrible as it is, that makes fools of us all, that won't go away. I haven't got the time or the heart, but here are just a few thoughts in light of recent events. I admire the people that are so appalled by it that they sever contact with sports that they used to love - forget cycling, forget athletics, they say, and that's that. If you're like me, however, and you're too much of an addict, you love the stats and the struggles and the stories, they keep your life ticking over, the truth is you have to lie to yourself a bit. I haven't watched athletics and boxing over the last couple of decades without knowing there was a large percentage of cheaters in there, and I know that I don't have a perfect radar capable of picking out the baddies and the goodies. Plenty of my favourites will have cheated, I know that. They'll have lied and lied and cheated and cheated. When the ...