Bounce: Matthew Syed

Matthew Syed, possibly unintentionally, has produced an explosively revolutionary text. Not a bad achievement for a man who used to describe himself as a Christian Socialist, a man who stood as a parliamentary candidate for Tony Blair’s New Labour Government, a man who is currently employed in Rupert Murdoch’s mean and nasty global media empire. Of course a man is entitled to move on, and one should not so much be judged on where you have come from but rather where you are heading. And, in my view, Syed has produced a damn fine revolutionary text which, furthermore, is written in a style and language that tens of millions of ordinary people, young and old, will be able to relate to.

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Pele: The Autobiography by Pocket Books

While the global financial speculators have been busy at their dirty work distorting and undermining global currencies, which themselves are on the brink of ruination due to the mountains of debt accumulated by successive governments, I thought I would indulge in a little light escapism. The impending bankruptcies haunting the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) not to forget dear old Blighty, do not make for pleasant day-dreaming, so a few days off to read Pele’s autobiography seemed in order. In a lovely fairytale of a story, written with humility if not a little naivety, I was able to fill in many gaps in Pele’s life, a life that has touched most people of my generation no matter what their country of origin.

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Ping – The People’s Sport

Try as they might, efforts over the past twenty years to promote football as the universal people’s sport, have always rung a little hollow to me. Maybe if we consider football as the people’s spectator sport, the case becomes a lot more convincing. But in terms of grassroots participation, ping pong, or table tennis as the European enthusiasts prefer, gets the vote every time. Just witness what happens when you set up a couple of tables in a public place and leave a some bats and balls seductively lying around. In no time at all the tables are full and a queue is forming to be next on.

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It’s not About the Bike! by Lance Armstrong

I picked up a copy of Lance Armstrong’s autobiographical work for no particularly reason, though somewhere in the vaults of my decaying brain I did recall some major controversy concerning his Tour de France victories. That could only mean one thing; Armstrong was embroiled with the rest of those cheating, drug taking, and performance- enhancing European bikers whose evil deeds seem to dominate the cycling news year after year. Working on the old adage that there’s no smoke without fire, I had little doubt in my all-to-quick-to-judge mind that Armstrong was as guilty as hell. No one could win the gruelling Tour de France without a little help-up from the pharmaceutical companies. Read More…

Invictus: John Carlin, Book Review

Read the book forget the film. Paradoxically, all enthusiasts of the coming FIFA football World Cup In South Africa should read John Carlin’s Invictus, which focuses not on football but on the 1995 Rugby World Cup that was also held in that country. A Hollywood style film has recently been made on the basis of the book, though I couldn’t bring myself to watch it because films rarely catch the nuances of a complex story and Clint Eastwood the director, rarely offers any nuances in any of his films. Carlin’s book on the other hand is a classic, smartly written account, with all the political empathy needed to do this remarkable story justice. Read More…

We can see right through the Glazers

Today, on the 28th day of February, 2010, a significant historical event will take place, the full repercussions of which, only time will tell. But make no mistake, history is in the making. Today, at Wembley Stadium, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Manchester United football supporters will make a highly visual protest at the corporate play-thing their once proud community football club has become. Across the globe, football fans will witness the first substantial attempt by fellow football fans, to wrest back the ownership of their club from the cold, corporate world of global finance.

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Olympic Legacy – ePetition response

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ensure adequate funding for those Olympic sports for which UK Sport has not so far confirmed details.

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Young Gifted and Gay

I find it extremely perplexing that after twenty years of running a table tennis club and a full forty years of involvement in table tennis, I cannot recall a single instance of a player openly declaring his/her homosexuality. Surely if the one-in-ten statistic is anywhere near accurate, London Progress Table Tennis Club must have had its fair share of gay members. Similarly, the English table tennis community ought, governed by that same statistic, to have had hundreds, if not thousands of gay players over the past 100 years. Yet an eerie silence hangs over the whole question. Just where are our gay table tennis players? Read More…

A Festival of Olympic Elitism

With the exception of the state sponsored Chinese competitors, can you imagine any of the Olympic athletes competing at the winter games in Vancouver being from anywhere other than a privileged background? I’m happy to be proven wrong but the sort of lifestyle required to be slogging up and down ski slopes and the like just does not seem to chime with the day to day grind of working class life. And if the odd proletarian competitor did slip through the net, you can rest assured they are even more unlikely to be among the medal winners.

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John Terry and a Parallel Universe

There were a couple half decent articles in The Sun the other week. It happens every couple of years. The first one, by a Jane Moore, was entitled, What does JT say about Britain? 3/2/10 It starts out with an attention grabbing paragraph: Alicia Douvall is the psychologically damaged cosmetic addict who ricochets from one shallow sexual liaison to another. Unsurprisingly, one of her willing participants was the England captain John Terry, who she claims had sex with her in a nightclub toilet while his then girlfriend Toni was pregnant. What a classy fellow. I suppose the key words in that opening paragraph are, psychologically damaged, and that, along with the word, shallow sums up the theme of the rest of the piece.

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Simon Jenkins – Bourgeois Londoner

I love to read Simon Jenkins on the question of the much hyped Olympic legacy. Jenkins has from the very start consistently decried the mega stadium approach in favour of something more down to earth. I seem to recall his plea that we use our existing venues rather than create shiny new white elephants. On this I wholeheartedly applaud him. But his latest piece in the London Evening Standard ‘Spend Olympic Money On Making London Beautiful’ 2/2/10, ( a newspaper now owned incidentally, lock, stock and barrel, by an ex KGB officer and now billionaire Russian Oligarch), is off the mark, though I do believe his intentions were honourable.

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Londongrad: The Inside Story of the Oligarchs by Mark Hollingsworth & Stewart Lansley

Londongrad is a jaw dropping read. If it was wrapped up into a James Bond film you would pass it off as unbelievable fiction just a bit of fun. But this is not fiction, this is the real thing and it certainly is not fun; Russian gangster capitalism spilling out onto the streets of London, complete with lethal poisonings, exploding helicopters and shadowy KGB/FSB units tracking down oligarchs that refuse to play ball with the Russian government. When they are not betraying or killing each other in deadly feuds, they are buying exclusive London real estate just as fast as it comes onto the market.

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Bring Back the Hard Bats

A slightly surreal interview with Barry Hearn appeared in The Guardian recently (5/01/10 Anna Kessel) which caught my imagination not just for what he had to say about sports promotion but also for the sheer energy and enthusiasm of the man. Hearn started out an East London chancer, the son of a bus driver and a born optimist. He made his mark in the 1980’s promoting snooker players before moving on to boxing where he represented such notables as Chris Eubank and Naseem Hamad. His portfolio then expanded to include darts which, as chairman of the Professional Darts Corporation, he oversaw a remarkable renaissance in the fortunes of that sport. Read More…

The Curious Case of Matthew Syed

Matt Syed is most definitely becoming a positive force in sports journalism. From right in the belly of the beast, Syed is regularly producing thought provoking editorials which, along with the long established excellence of Simon Barnes, now makes The Times the most thoughtful sports pages on offer. This is a painful admission given my hostility to all things emanating from the Murdoch empire, but does create an interesting anomaly, even something approaching a paradox. In an empire dedicated to its own capitalist expansion, Murdoch has allowed a dissenting voice.

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Tiger Woods and the Morality Brigades

There is little doubt that Mr Tiger Woods has set himself up for an almighty fall. By playing the all American, clean living family man, his philandering ways were certain to trip him up big-time sooner or later. That day has now come. His squeaky-clean image is in tatters. Some sponsors are deserting him. His carefully constructed family image is in ruins. And to add salt to the wound, the moral high-grounders are on his back. It’s an all together different type of birdie that the world is now interested in. Acres of newsprint have been devoted to the fall of the Tiger. Nearly all, to some degree, castigate the man for either his lapsed morality or his outrageous hypocrisy.

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50 people who fouled up football

As soon as I heard the title I rushed out to buy it. A mistake. What promised to be a definitive text on the soiling of The Beautiful Game proved to be just an amusing and cleverly written collection of anecdotes, personal hobby-horses and cheap gossip, all of which lets the real culprits right off the hook. The collection starts off promising enough with a few pointed pages about the man himself; Mr Roman Abromovich. But Henderson offers his readers no real insights into how Abromovich accumulated his billions, nor how he learnt to play the new game of gangster capitalism that replaced the old decrepit Soviet system. Read More…

While FIFA Fiddles the Planet Burns

First a confession. I am genuinely and unequivocally looking forward to the World Cup in South Africa. I’d be a bigger hypocrite than usual if I tried to deny it. A whole month of football mania slap bang on top of the climax to the current Premier League and UEFA Championships. What joy. And by the time its all over the big clubs will be gearing up for their pre-season friendlies. The circus never ends. Drip, drip, drip. The addiction will be fed with barely a break. Oh yes, I’ll feign disinterest and reel off a few lines of cynical detachment but make no mistake, just below that veneer of cynicism lies that little boy from 1966. ‘They think it’s all over’. and all that stuff. I’ll be hooked, don’t worry about that!

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Boom and Bust in Dubai

If there was ever any doubt that the fortunes of professional sport were increasingly tied in to the general fortunes of the world economy, last week’s financial news from Dubai should settle those doubts once and for all. ‘Dubai’s attempt to become a financial and entertainment metropolis, with a special emphasis on hosting elite sporting events took a dramatic backward step as news of the state owned leisure company, Dubai World pleaded for a ‘repayment holiday’ on its $80 billion debt package.

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Sport – Does It Even Matter?

There are approximately six and a half billion of us humans on planet Earth. Of those, one billion of us go hungry every day with some 14 million children dying every year through lack of food and clean drinking water. Thats equivalent to nearly three holocausts every year, or 770 million children who have starved to death since Ive been alive. Of course these figures only include children. The statistics are far more damning if we were to include adults. Another one billion of us experience the humiliation of experiencing hunger at regular intervals during our lifetime.

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Why Matthew Syed is Wrong

Matthew Syed has produced a beautifully crafted article on the global dimensions of football, the so called, the beautiful game, but in the process has made a fundamental mistake. Syed writes, When future historians look back at the age of globalisation, it is not the Americanisation of the planets culture that will amaze them most, nor the pervading presence of brands such as Coca Cola and Nike. No, it is the global conquest of football. Well I could imagine a certain school of historians peddling that line, but more grounded observers will quickly come to the conclusion that football, like sugary soft-drinks and over-priced, slave labour produced sportswear, have been driven by multinationals for their own avaricious ends. Football, footballers and indeed, all things sporting, have become commodities to be bought and sold to the highest bidder. Read More…

The BNP and Sport

This week the BNP were themselves a type of sport whereby the political class argued bitterly over whether to allow this nasty little fascist grouping to have prime time TV exposure or whether a blanket ban should starve them of publicity. Nobody is quite clear who won that game. Was it victory to the BNP, who claim to have had their best ever recruiting week in their miserable little history, or was it a comprehensive win for the forces of light over the forces of darkness. The next general election will help decide that one, What is certain, is that nobody from our respectable political classes is owning up to being responsible for the one million people being on the housing waiting list or the millions of young people who have been denied the chance of an apprenticeship or any type of meaningful work.

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