Olympics

British Journalism Review

I grew up wanting to emulate Neville Cardus, the legendary cricket correspondent of The Manchester Guardian. In my Jesuit school, in the city I shall always call Bombay, Cardus’s essay on the cricketer Ranji was part of our syllabus. And while I realised that it would be difficult for me to be exactly like my hero – he spent his summers writing about cricket and his winters being the paper’s music critic – I felt sure that once The Guardian realised how wonderful my cricket knowledge was, they would find plenty for me to do in the winter. If nothing else, I could go on those long cricket tours which meant you escaped the English cold.

I must confess I have not fulfilled that dream. But then there are many other dreams I have not fulfilled, which include scoring a century in a Lord’s Test and the winning Cup Final goal at Wembley. However, while I may not have become The Guardian’s cricket correspondent, I have no complaints about how my career has gone. What worries me is that the younger journalists cannot even dream like me.

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Lord Coe receives his Lifetime Achievement award from the Duchess of Cambridge on Sunday. Image courtesy of The Sunday Times

The Evening Standard

After the magical summer that Lord Coe and his team conjured up, the reception he received as he stepped on to the stage at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards on Sunday came as no surprise.

An audience of 15,000 at the Docklands ExCeL Arena, including many of the Olympians and Paralympians who revelled in a home Games, hailed the man whose vision turned the dream of London 2012 into a glorious reality.

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Insideworldfootball

The Olympics always puts football in the box, if only for a brief two-week period.

Indeed, the very nature of football’s participation in the Games, with teams composed of players who hope to aspire to be the best, but are not yet the best, give it the status of an interloper. And as if to emphasise this status, football starts even before the Opening Ceremony. In the wider world, it may be the greatest of all sports, but in the Olympics it is just one of 26, and by no means the most important – that distinction going to track and field.

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It’s not easy to make Club England like Team GB

PlayUp

So goodbye Team GB and welcome back club England. The timing of England’s match against Italy, three days after the end of the Games, was very telling. For while this pre-season friendly – albeit it showed English football is not quite bereft of ability – is no time to make judgements about the post-Euro 2012 state of the game, it does allow us to assess the lessons the Olympics holds for the national game.

The first thing we have to avoid is a knee-jerk, exaggerated response that the Olympics and the wonderful glow it has created could now bathe English football in a new light. The idea that the spirit generated by Team GB could be taken and just bolted on to football and all other sports is nonsense.

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PlayUp

Image courtesy of PlayUp

2012 has created a host of memories and the success of the games has exceeded my most optimistic hopes.

But there is one memory of these games that I still cannot get over. The scene is the Archery at Lord’s. I am sitting on the top tier of the pavilion, a place very familiar to me. But now I am watching a Korean and a Mexican battle it out.

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