Sporting Polemics

Marina Hyde takes off the gloves: Olympic Notes No 2

Thursday, 02 September 2010 21:03 |

Praise be to the sporting gods. It is not only Matthew Syed and myself who have had a gut-full of Olympic hype. Marina Hyde writing in the back pages of The Guardian 26/08/10 gets right down to her bare knuckles and lays one fair and square on the nose of the IOC, while landing a sharp kick to the FIFA groin whiles she’s at it. I send her my hearty congratulations. Just cast your eyes over her opening salvo to get a taste of what she has in store.

Liverpool For Sale

Thursday, 02 September 2010 21:00 |

It was Des Kelly in The Mail 9/8/10 who for me, came closest to hitting the proverbial nail on the head, with respect to prospective new owners for Liverpool FC.

In a blistering broadside of a heading, ‘Get real, we sold our soul to Chinese ages ago’, Kelly dismisses those who bemoan that another sporting jewel in the crown is up for sale to the highest foreign bidder. Kelly correctly argues that the sale of British sporting assets is already well advanced.

How Did Sport Get So Big? Tim De Lisle, Intelligent Life, Summer 2010

Wednesday, 28 July 2010 15:40 |

In keeping with the title of this quarterly magazine, a cultural offshoot of the more well-known The Economist, Tim De Lisle has produced a highly intelligent essay on the new religion we commonly refer to as sport. De Lisle starts off by offering his readers a comparison between sporting coverage in 1966, the year of England’s lone international football triumph, and 2010 when sport is ubiquitous and all-powerful. For a taste of the comparison of what corporate global sport has now become compared to the low key affair of the 1966 World Cup, De Lisle writes;

World Cup Journalism No7

Wednesday, 07 July 2010 18:48 |

Post-mortems on Team England’s early demise from the World Cup are a dime a dozen. Every TV pundit, newspaper sports writer and resident pub expert have got it summed up. Interestingly both the BBC and Channel 4 dragged in Matthew Syed, author or recently published, ‘Bounce: How Champions Are Made’, to try to offer their viewers some enlightenment, but all Syed could do was say how complex and unfathomable it all was, but could offer nothing that you hadn’t already heard from your next door neighbour. And, in an act of great marketing astuteness, Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski have got their analysis, ‘Why England Lose’ flying off the bookshelves. ( A full review to follow shortly) But it was two articles in the London Evening Standard that caught my attention, one by Jason Cowley, (Editor of the New Statesman) 28/6/10, the other by John Barnes, former England international, in the following day’s edition.

World cup Journalism No6

Wednesday, 30 June 2010 13:18 |

I still don’t believe it. It’s got to be one of those media April Fools jokes, except that it late June. It simply beggars belief that this is a genuinely kosher article. Yet it gets full page prominence in The Guardian 21/6/10 so I can only assume that Marina Hyde is on to something that we should all better know about. The blunt truth seems to be that FIFA has its own courts and these courts have the power to try and convict for any manner of misdemeanours relating to anything vaguely connected to their World Cup. I’m reading Hyde’s article for the forth time and I still can’t quite believe what I’m reading.

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