Not so long ago, I was challenged to give the full names of every club in the Football League, including the Premiership, that has a suffix appended to their more recognisable names. There are 23. I eventually got 21 of them. The two that escaped me were Rangers and Celtic. How can that be, you might ask, when Rangers and Celtic don’t have any name after their main name; besides they’re Scottish and don’t count. Well, yes and no, or should I say, no and yes. It is true, they

“No society is more than three meals away from revolution.”     This saying is generally attributed to Vladimir Lenin – though probably erroneously – when he was tub thumping before the Russian Revolution of 1917, and I was reminded of it when we had a power cut in our village a few days ago. The ‘outage’ (I just love that American term) lasted for five hours and was very annoying. We have no gas supply where we live (we don’t have any street lighting either, but that’s anoth

I am no student of Scottish football, but I do from time to time check the table of the Scottish Premiership and have this season been rooting for Hearts, who currently occupy first place, if only because of a desire to see the historic hegemony of Celtic and Rangers broken for once. Hearts? I know so little about them, which prompted some research on my part. Heart of Midlothian is their correct name. They are the oldest club in Edinburgh, formed in 1874, named after the nov

The new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, the last word in design and architecture. In one of the recent televised matches of Spurs playing at home – I forget which one – Gary Neville was commenting on the funereal atmosphere in the stadium. “It’s all so eerily quiet,” he observed, “It just doesn’t feel right.” Now, I have not had the pleasure of attending a match at the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, but I do remember vividly the first ever professional football match I was taken t

I have just been watching the TV series Amadeus about the relationship between Mozart and Salieri, the Italian composer and teacher who lived in the shadow of the genius that was Mozart. Incidentally, I firmly believe that the Italian got a bum rap from the producers of the series as well as from Peter Shaffer, the author of the original play of the same name. Rumours had long abounded, into which the playwright shamelessly burrowed, that Mozart and Salieri had been bitter ri

To those experienced skiers amongst us, the news of the fire in an Alpine bar in Switzerland, though horrifying, will have hardly come as a shock. Most of us will have shaken our heads sorrowfully and privately believed that it was an accident waiting to happen. For 30 years, I organised and ran annual ski-ing trips at Malvern College, and I am too painfully aware how these things go. By their very nature, school ski-ing trips are not up-market; they are invariably cut-price,

“Where’s your helmet, Grandad?” That was the rudest thing that was ever said to me on a cricket field. It was, I think, the last time I played in a match. I had come to the conclusion it was high time to put away my bat for good. Though not yet in my dotage, notwithstanding the reference to being a grandad (many years away from that landmark), I just felt unable to step down a level from professional to club cricket and frankly wasn’t enjoying it anymore. I had come to the cr

ROBIN SMITH   1963-2025 Since the untimely demise of Robin Smith last week, I have been frequently asked by friends whether I knew him. In fact, the Smith brothers, Chris and Robin, arrived at Hampshire the year after I left, so no, I never met him, but I know plenty of former colleagues who did. The brothers came to Hampshire at the behest of Barry Richards, one of the county’s undisputed ‘greats’, who had seen them grow up and develop as cricketers in their native Durban an

Alex Hales I was reading an article the other day about the cricketer, Alex Hales. Outside cricket circles, his name is probably not on everybody’s tongue, though the general public might remember him as Ben Stokes’s partner-in-crime in that infamous punch-up outside a Bristol nightclub in September 2017. His cricket career, by contrast, has flown a little bit below the radar. He did play for England in 11 Test matches, but with only modest success. He made his name originall