| ||
| ||
| The Cheltenham Town manager, Martin Allen, has been suspended by the League Two club pending an internal investigation into allegations that he racially abused a nightclub bouncer. The club stated they had placed the 44-year-old on "gardening leave" while directors investigate the claims, which were made by the nightclub's staff in the Gloucestershire Echo. Allen has refused to comment. The nightclub staff alleged that Allen verbally abused the pearl jewelry bouncer, Garry Saintil, after he was refused entry into the Thirteen Degrees club in Cheltenham, calling him "a black bastard" in the process. "He was totally out of order," Saintil told the newspaper. "When he realised he wasn't going to be allowed into the club he became insulting and aggressive. There were racial undertones in the kind of language he was using and he referred to me as a 'black bastard'. "At one point he challenged me to come across to the car park opposite for a fight. He also threatened he was going to get someone to do me in. I just told him not to waste his breath. There's no excuse for that kind of behaviour. He was totally obnoxious." The Thirteen Degrees owner, Matthew Bull, called the behaviour "disgusting". "Our staff do a fantastic job and are all highly experienced. He was mocking their roles and making disparaging comments about how much they earn compared to him … We have had the players in here before and they have never given us any trouble. "There were a few un-PC comments made by him, including some racial abuse directed towards one of the bouncers. I don't intend to take the matter to the police. I think a biwa pearl banning order will be sufficient. He's not welcome here anymore." Cheltenham's statement, which confirmed that Jon Scholfield has been placed in temporary charge, said: "Due to adverse reports in the press today regarding Martin Allen the Board of Directors have informed Martin that he will not be required to attend work pending the akoya pearl outcome of an investigation into the allegations." Allen, a former West Ham player, took over at Cheltenham in September last year, following in the footsteps of his father, Dennis. | ||
| 0 Comments | Post Comment | Permanent Link |
| ||
| On the 7.35pm sports bulletin on BBC Radio 5 Live on Sunday they called her Beth Twiddle. In yesterday's Daily Mail it was necessary to wade through 14 pages of weekend coverage before locating a skimpy 150-word report, buried away in the basement next to the ice hockey results. Jenson Button was partly to blame, of course, but it was still no way to salute perhaps the pearl jewelry greatest feat ever achieved by a British athlete of either sex in the history of indoor sports. An exaggeration? Boxing, cycling and snooker will take up the cudgels but let's put the remarkable Beth Tweddle's triumph in the floor exercises at the world championships into some kind of perspective. Imagine the Maldives beating Brazil at football. Or the Falklands bowling out the Australians before tea. Britain used to do gymnastics in much the same way the Chinese did real tennis. Now, suddenly, we have our very own Olga Korbut, minus the red ribbons and primary school bunches but still a veritable media darling. At 24, Tweddle practically rates as a grandmother by comparison with the eastern European twiglets who used to flick-flack and somersault on to the podium. Moreover she swept the floor with her rivals, having crashed and burned in her preferred event, the uneven bars, a couple of days before. In February she underwent shoulder surgery, having narrowly missed out on a medal in Beijing. Her travails since taking up the sport as a hyperactive seven-year-old make even Button's 10-year wait for the Formula One title seem an easy ride. In all sorts of other ways, the success of our steel-willed heroine also deserves as much recognition as Button's high‑profile laps of honour. The latter may be the best thing to come out of Frome since Colin Dredge, the idiosyncratic Somerset seamer of blessed memory, and has come a long way from his boy-racer days when he drove the fastest go-kart in the west. But, sad to say, the sport he bestrides has become so discredited this year that even serious petrol-heads have begun to question their devotion. Outside Britain, let alone Somerset, you wonder how far Button's powers of perseverance will tilt the sporting world on its axis, particularly with the Flavio Briatore scandal still so fresh. Tweddle, on the other hand, is suddenly the can-do queen of biwa pearl a sport destined to be one of the centrepieces of the London Olympics. She will be 27 when the Games commence in 2012 but, regardless of her medal prospects, her latest achievement is a priceless gift for the organisers. Look, they can now say, it is possible to achieve anything in this country if you put your mind to it (and can afford the leotard). Never mind the fact that some of our elite gymnasts are still required to share hall space with toddler groups because of a continued lack of funding. The beauty of Tweddle is that she did not get where she is today by sitting on her petite backside eating doughnuts or posting risqué pictures on Facebook. In company with Tom Daley, Jessica Ennis and Victoria Pendleton, she has also proved that Britain can be highly competitive in disciplines which, traditionally, have been dominated by others. In a low-carbon emission, environmentally-aware world, there is also more mileage in gymnastics, diving, running and cycling than worshipping gas-guzzling billionaires. The only area where Button still holds the whip hand over Tweddle is in his playboy past. It is surely a positive that Britain finally has a world champion with an appreciation of the good things in life, as opposed to a monosyllabic, monkish automaton in a helmet. It also shows what a Japanese lingerie model can do for your lap-times. But once the partying is over, someone should invite Button to spend 30 seconds on a set of asymmetric bars. By the time they have scraped him off the crash mat and called an ambulance, Tweddle will have gained the limitless respect she deserves. Rugby's health warning just cannot be ignored For anyone who missed the weekend's Heineken Cup action, two trends are apparent in rugby union just now. The first is that margins are slimmer than they have ever been. The second is that the hits are now frighteningly big. Take a look at Matt Banahan's flattening of Mirco Bergamasco in the Bath v Stade Français game and the juggernaut impact of Henry Tuilagi on Ben Foden in Perpignan on Friday night. Then check out the footage of Andrew Sheridan's departure from the Sale-Cardiff encounter with a dislocated shoulder and the slow-motion replays of Saracens' Brad Barritt being knocked senseless in Toulon. The Banahan example is the most pertinent because it was widely regarded as a perfectly legal challenge. The only problem, according to those closest to the wreckage, was the 30kg difference in weight between the two players. Either way, it was a sign of the times. At the last count 11 of England's elite squad were unavailable for the start of the autumn Tests. The akoya pearl players cannot squeal in case they are perceived to be running scared. The rest of us have to make a call: do we sit wincing in the stand and continue to mutter about it being a man's game, or do we raise the alarm before a limp concussion victim fails to regain consciousness? To my mind, there is no longer any choice. The risks to players' health and wellbeing have become too glaring to ignore. | ||
| 0 Comments | Post Comment | Permanent Link |
| ||
| Did you know that Michael Owen is paid to promote a certain brand of watch? Don't all shout at once, it was something of a rhetorical question. If you haven't seen the Owen timepiece photographed or mentioned in various media outlets over the past few weeks then you simply haven't been keeping abreast of the news. In that case you probably don't know that Owen wants to go to the World Cup either, and is sure he would score for England if they would only deign to select him. You cannot say the boy lacks confidence and neither can Owen ever be accused of being indifferent about playing for his country. There are some who would argue Owen is so keen to play for his country he occasionally alienates the supporters of the clubs who pay his wages by appearing to have his priorities in the wrong order, though that might be a tad harsh. Such criticisms first surfaced while he was in the wilderness at Newcastle, and anyone caught up in that madness could be excused for pining for the relative sanity of playing for England. Secondly it cannot be easy bursting on to the international scene as Owen did in 1998, wowing the world and being confidently tipped to break the England goalscoring record, only to find yourself frustratingly under-used 11 years later with the target in sight. With just five more England goals, Owen could move past Jimmy Greaves into third place behind Bobby Charlton and Gary Lineker. Ten more goals would see him hit the half century mark and establish a new record in his own right. Owen is unlikely to score 10 goals should he get to South Africa this summer – no one is quite that prolific – but these are not unattainable totals for goalscorers who are also regular internationals. Owen has just missed a whole qualifying cycle and is now in danger of missing the finals as well. It is a moot point whether he would score an average of pearl jewelry a goal every other game if restored to the side, as he has suggested, just as it is debatable whether the successful attacking shape Fabio Capello has constructed for England would work as smoothly with Owen alongside Wayne Rooney instead of Emile Heskey. Yet while those two are the preferred England spearheads, two things are certain. One is that Heskey will never get anywhere near Owen's tally of 40 England goals. The other is that Rooney, if he keeps playing, will surpass it. Rooney turns 24 this month, plays in every game possible, and already has 25 goals despite a couple of injury lay-offs. Being almost six years younger than Owen not only means that Rooney has time on his side, it is currently allowing him to take injuries in his stride and come back just as strong. Owen is finding that increasingly difficult to manage. The strain that put paid to his latest audition for Capello, just after he had won the Manchester derby in thrilling fashion, was a stroke of bad luck – though not an entirely isolated occurrence. One can fully understand his frustration, and even sympathise with his desire to use his contacts and sponsors to talk up his chances and keep his name in the papers, though Capello is likely to remain impervious to the constant drip of a media campaign. Steve McClaren might have been more easily swayed, though McClaren was unlikely to biwa pearl have overlooked Owen for any length of time in the first place. Capello simply wants to see Owen do on the pitch what he is currently only talking about in interviews. Given what happened at the last World Cup, and England's still less than plentiful assortment of attacking options, Capello can hardly go out on a limb for someone who has yet to make an unanswerable case for himself in a Manchester United shirt. Owen's club form and fitness should be his first priority this season. When he scored his first competitive goal for United, at Wigan in August, he had no time for reporters waiting with microphones and open notebooks. "You cane me, then you want an interview?" Owen said as he brushed past, meaning that he was not about to accommodate people who had variously described him as finished, old or injury prone. Unprofessional as it may seem, I have to admit I thoroughly admired that attitude. For a start it was an attitude, and open hostility is preferable to half-hearted cooperation any day of the week. That's why Diego Maradona's widely reported rudery last week would have struck most reporters as a breath of fresh air.* For another thing it is always refreshing to find a footballer willing to be judged on his deeds rather than his words. Owen seemed to be admitting that he found the criticism hurtful as well as acknowledging that he had only just started to prove his doubters wrong. A single goal in a 5-0 win was nothing to get excited about, he appeared to be suggesting, not when he was so obviously confident that more would follow. What actually followed was a well-taken winner in the 96th minute of United's victory over City, then some self-promoting interviews, then the latest injury disappointment. Owen does not need to worry about attracting Capello's attention. The Italian knows all about his goalscoring ability and has been asked his opinion of Owen at just about every press conference he has held in this country. Always the answer is the same. He has to play. Not score, play. It was hard not to feel sorry for Owen at Wembley last week when he was forced to watch from the stands as England's attack laboured against Belarus, and in akoya pearl this particular case Capello's general goodwill gesture may not have been the best thought-through piece of man-management. Owen quite possibly feels the world is against him at the moment, and Capello in particular. This is not the case yet, though it could soon be if he continues to state his case in the press rather than on the pitch. There is still plenty of time; what Owen needs to do between now and the end of the season is demonstrate he still has the gift of immaculate timing. Over and above what he wears on his wrist. * Variation on an ancient joke. A London toilet cleaner tells a businessman with an urgent need to use the loo he is pleased to see him. "We mostly get drug-dealing, cottaging, coke-snorting and prostitution down here. When someone comes in with diarrhoea it's like a breath of fresh air!" | ||
| 0 Comments | Post Comment | Permanent Link |
| ||
| So there it is, the name of Jenson Button finally inscribed on the grand prix roll of honour at the end of a season in which a campaign that began with the rush of six wins in seven races appeared to have slowed to a crawl as it approached the chequered flag. There are many ways to win the world championship, and the 10th British driver to capture the title added to the suspense by taking the scenic route. Button may be still on the right side of 30, but he has had to wait longer to secure his title than all but one of his compatriots. The task that took Lewis Hamilton two seasons, Jim Clark and James Hunt four, Jackie Stewart, John Surtees and the two Hills, Graham and Damon, five and Mike Hawthorn seven to complete has occupied Button for an entire decade, longer than anyone except Nigel Mansell, the sweating, straining Sisyphus of Formula One, who rolled his boulder up the pearl jewelry hill for 13 fretful years before managing to get it to stay put on the summit. This coming January it will be 10 years since tears rolled down Button's boyish cheeks as he fell into the arms of his equally emotional father after being told by Sir Frank Williams that he was about to become Britain's youngest-ever grand prix driver. Less than a week earlier the lad from Frome had celebrated the end of his teenage years, and the future appeared to be one of unbroken promise. But it takes all sorts of experiences to make a world champion, and Button's path to the title has been strewn with obstacles. In retrospect his trials, although painful and sometimes humiliating, could be seen as a necessary counterbalance to the impression he can sometimes give of floating through life on a cloud of privilege and good fortune, with a yacht in the Monaco harbour, a yellow Ferrari and a string of girlfriends drawn from the ranks of pop singers, aristocrats and underwear models. But Button is not burdened with an overinflated ego, and a world championship is unlikely to change him now. According to his schoolteachers, he was careful to underplay his early success in karting -- "There was no boasting or bragging," one of them told me several years ago -- and he has remained an approachable and unpretentious figure, with much more to him (including a liking for competing in triathlons) than the celebrity nonsense. "We always thought that Jenson was outstanding," Patrick Head, Sir Frank Williams' partner, said in Monaco this spring, when Button was in the middle of his early-season winning streak with the Brawn team. "He's always had great driving skill, and now he has experience, calmness, judgement and other things. He's also in the right place." Too often in the past he had found himself trapped in the wrong environment, creating a superficial and misleading impression that caused him to be written off by two of the sport's most powerful men. The now-disgraced Flavio Briatore sacked him from the Renault team in 2002 in order to promote his own protégé, Fernando Alonso, shortly before Bernie Ecclestone advised David Richards, the BAR-Honda boss, against reviving the Briton's career. Richards's decision to ignore Ecclestone's opinion set Button on the path that would lead, seven years later, to his coronation as the 31st world champion in biwa pearl formula one's 60-year history. Even then, however, it was hardly plain sailing as Button navigated his way unsteadily through a series of setbacks. A mini-scandal when his team was suspended for making illegal use of a hidden device in the car's petrol tank was followed by the messy aftermath of Richards's mysterious sacking by Honda, an expensively aborted attempt to return to the Williams fold and a succession of poor cars. Among the most valuable weapons in a world champion's armoury is the instinct for joining the right team at the right time, and until this year it seemed to be the attribute Button most crucially lacked. Williams let him go (in order to honour an pre-existing commitment to Juan Pablo Montoya) at the end of his first season, he was ejected from Renault just as the team was becoming competitive enough to win titles, and even when a period of improving fortunes with Honda climaxed in 2006 with his first grand prix victory, that success proved to be a mirage as the team went into a sudden and disastrous decline. His judgement was not always sound in his choice of personal managers and advisers, and it took him several years to settle on one he believed he could trust. Throughout it all, however, his resilience earned growing respect from the paddock cynics. He stayed on good terms with Williams and Head, he refused to trade insults with those who denigrated his ability, and he earned the loyalty of the Honda engineers and mechanics by never complaining or making excuses when, instead of the Stradivarius he needs, they kept giving him plastic ukeleles. Most of all, when Honda suddenly pulled the plug before the beginning of the present season, he refused to panic. Instead of fleeing into the arms of a rival team, he saw the sense in staying put, voluntarily cutting his £12m annual salary by about two-thirds and showing his confidence in Ross Brawn, his new team principal. That act of faith played a key part in restoring the morale of team personnel whose livelihoods had been threatened. On the track he has shown that while some champions are bullies and others are stylists, his smooth precision puts him firmly in the latter category. It is no accident that he grew up admiring the calmness and consistency of Alain Prost while the young Lewis Hamilton adored the panache and charisma of Ayrton Senna. And now he has proved himself beyond doubt, in akoya pearl and out of the car, to be anything but a flaky underperformer. In answer to those who claim that his run of six wins in this season's first seven races, which laid the firmest of foundations for his title challenge, was the achievement of the car rather than its driver, he can point to Mansell's eight of the first 10 with Williams in 1992 or Michael Schumacher's five of the first six with Ferrari in 2002. These things happen in Formula One, and the champion is the one with the skill and intelligence to take advantage of his circumstances, as Jenson Button has done at last. | ||
| 0 Comments | Post Comment | Permanent Link |
| ||
| With the clocks rejigged to end British summer time this weekend, I was pondering seasonal matters when I came across one of 2009's bestseller paperbacks, Outliers: The Story of Success (Penguin, £9.99), by New Yorker whizz-kid Malcolm Gladwell. In an enviably skilful mix of pop psychology, anecdote, smoke, mirrors and statistical analysis, the author gaily and glibly piles surmise upon ye bleedin' obvious to conclude life's a doddling cinch as long as you're born in the right place at the right time. Dead-cert success, Gladwell reckons, is to get yourself born in the first three months of the year. January, February or March makes for a very happy birthday indeed. With star-billing assured: well, the finest Canadian ice-hockey players managed just that; so, for good measure, did most leading Italian footballers. Such a single criterion might have sold a zillion books worldwide, but it does not remotely apply in British sport and I spent half of yesterday poring over parchmenty old reference books in proving it. Only two (Crouch, January; Barry, February) of the pearl jewelry England footballers who started against Belarus at Wembley last week were born in the first three months of the year. A few years ago, Sir Trevor Brooking wrote a book listing Britain's 100 Best Footballers ever: only 17 of the 100 had birthdays between January and March. Likewise, I'm looking at Rugby World's nomination of Europe's 50 finest all-time rugby players: just 16 of them were born in a year's first three months. Christopher Martin-Jenkins recently did the same sort of thing for cricketers: of his England Top 10 – Grace, Hobbs, Barnes, Hammond, Rhodes, Hutton, Botham, Compton, Trueman and Bedser – only one (Trueman, February) had a birthday to back up Gladwell's dogmatic submission. Need I go on? Far more intriguing, I fancy, are my own findings. Does Gladwell want them for his next money-printing, party-piece potboiler? In Britain, goes my thesis, the sporting season in which birth occurs itself governs the activity at which a baby might grow up to shine. Simply, an overwhelming majority of good cricketers are born in the summer; in contrast, most fine footballers have winter birthdays. Take Wisden's list of England's all-time top-scoring Test batsmen – from Gooch's 8,900 runs to Thorpe's 6,744 via Stewart, Gower, Boycott, Atherton, Cowdrey, Hammond, Hutton and Barrington. All but three were born during British summer time (this year from 29 March to 25 October) – Atherton (born 23 March, by less than a week), Cowdrey in December, Barrington in November. Still, seven out of 10 makes for a fairly conclusive argument. On second thoughts, make that eight out of 10, because Cowdrey was born at Ootacamund on Christmas Eve 1932 in the very middle of a literal Indian summer. In fact, make it nine out of 10 because dear Kenny B, Berkshire-born soldier's son, always told you he'd actually been conceived under the southern stars of Africa when ma and pa were garrisoning the Empire. Precisely the opposite for football. During a BBC radio panel at the biwa pearl turn of this century my contribution was to reel off the best 25 English footballers I'd ever seen play; revisiting the list yesterday I was astonished to see that, incredibly, only one (Alan Ball, in May) was a summer-born baby and that all 24 of the remaining 25 had winter birthdays between October and April. A few years ago the esteemed athletics swot, Peter Matthews, revealed in Runner's World that no less than 11 of history's 13 fastest-ever British 10,000m runners were born in the winter, remarkably five out of the top six in just the four weeks between 30 December and 25 January. In weirdly dramatic contrast, of Britain's dozen fastest sprinters in history, all 12 were summer-born between April and September. Tennis, however, throws up a contrary tale. Of Wimbledon's first 100 annual championships, 34 men's singles champs were winter babies (18 born between January and March) and 19 had summer birthdays – while, in gloriously cranky reversal, 25 women champions were summer born, only seven winter born. Why? Why? Why? Are long-distance runners programmed at birth to enjoy the slog and muddy slurp of the season they were born into? Ditto footballers? Are the akoya pearl sporty boys and girls of summer smitten with a love and talent for their game by being laid in their cradles at the boundary's edge, comforted by the matey plick and plock of the ball under the blue-skied canopies of midsummer? Hot-shot author Gladwell was apparently paid $4m advance for Outliers. For his sequel he is welcome to use any of the above. For a cut. I'd reckon to shake on 50/50. | ||
| 0 Comments | Post Comment | Permanent Link |