Annual jamboree can spring surprises and Masters champion could be at risk of repeating 2014 disappointment It has been a 2025 for the ages for Rory McIlroy. He cemented his legacy by completing a career grand slam with victory at the Masters. Then he carried Europe on his back at the Ryder Cup, defying the venom and spite of a braying Maga crowd. Now, though, he has one final devilish sandtrap to navigate: the curse of golf at the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year award. Only twice in the 71-year history of the event has a golfer claimed the honour: the Welshman Dai Rees in 1957, when he captained Great Britain and Ireland to Ryder Cup success, and the Englishman Nick Faldo, following his Masters success in 1989. It is a pitiful return. Especially given athletics stars have won it 19 times, Formula One drivers eight, and football and tennis players seven apiece. Continue reading...

YouTube video by Nick Drake - Topic

Centre with goal of inclusivity pursues a reassessment of the coaching and even the language of the sport “Cricket is shit if you’re shit at cricket. But everyone has been shit at cricket. Even Ben Stokes. When someone threw a ball at him for the first time, he didn’t smash it six rows back. Ben Stokes was shit at cricket, and then he got good at cricket, and he got good quick enough to stay in it. Because anyone who’s crap at cricket for too long thinks, this is rubbish, let’s fuck off.” Everyone wants cricket to be better. Everyone wants cricket to be more present in state schools, more open to those beyond its boundaries, less of a self-sustaining garden party. Or at least everyone says they do. Even the England and Wales Cricket Board, which has spent 30 years producing reports about how racist, sexist and elitist the game it oversees is, always with the same air of mild, patrician bafflement, as though this is all somebody else’s area of concern. Continue reading...

ALT: a woman in a white tank top is covering her face with her hand

The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) – the anti-state, anti-climate pressure group – received more than £640,000 from fossil fuel companies and Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate between 1957 and ...