Month: December 2008

Darren Anderton has retired, but I’m absolutely staggered to discover that he’s only done it today. Yet there he is, large as life on Sky Sports News, looking the picture of health and happiness, bowing out at Bournemouth. Arsene Wenger thinks that there is a new generation of British players about to come through who…

The more closely one looks at Roy Keane’s resignation, the more one is driven for explanation to Hamilton’s Big Red Book of Psychobabble. It wasn’t that he was a bad manager. He didn’t even come across as an inexperienced one. Could he improve players? It’s a key skill, albeit one that several surviving Premiership managers…

And suddenly, it’s not so much of a son of Clough, son of Fergie kind of tale. That never worked for me anyway. As if playing for them was like touching saints’ relics and the ancient DNA rubbing off onto your fingers. When you have to shave, it can be hard not to interpret not…

In my imagination he is always shouting. On the touchline, at the training ground, in his office under the ghost of a sign that once said “I’m Frae Govan.” My mental Alex Ferguson lives a life of ceaseless outrage and sprays violent criticism like spit from a Hattersley puppet. The real man is fierce enough…

I was just months old when my parents split up, and for the next five years we lived in my gran’s rented two-up-two-down terrace. Mum worked nights and I was looked after by gran and her sister, “Bab”. Both were elderly widows, long past the storms of life. We were surrounded all day by their…

Everyone who watches football, I suspect, watches it in the hope of catching a note in it that’s peculiar to themselves. I watch it wanting it to tell me that this is still a world in which the extraordinary can happen, to remind me, when I need reminding, that I’m here and alive and it’s…

Every so often, one of the dwindling number of bloggers I read daily will offer up a kind of beginner’s guide to jazz: a bucket-and-spade type basics list of so-called “essential” albums. It’s always the same stuff, and always from the 1941-65 period Larkin described as “After Pound! After Picasso!” Miles, Bird, Coltrane, Shepp: all…