sport & selling

St George’s Park. Gleaming new tech-colossus/Bond-villain-liar style (delete as appropriate) HQ of English football. Greg Dyke. A man “successful” in telly administration? He proved fish out of water running infamous meddlers, sporting body The Football Association. He thought it a good idea to place a particular clock on

The Rio Olympics. Team GB win women’s hockey Gold. I avidly watched the entirety of their knock-out matches. Forget the fact that in both semi and final, vanquished opponents Kiwi then Dutch had all the play. Our girls never knew they were beaten. An incredible belief coursed through their

The vaunted “marginal gains” philosophy pioneered by all-conquering British cyclists once more produces peak performance in Olympic arenas. Continuous improvement has moved far beyond American-reject fed Japanese total quality management to underpin stellar sport success. At every turn during the Rio Games, there’s a story of how such forensic

I’ve happened to be in countries other than my birthland during an olympiad. I didn’t imagine I could watch quite so much table tennis when in Singapore. Or root so loudly for the Silver Ferns ladies basketballers in New Zealand. Or be so infuriated by the refusal to

Appointment to a committee is most people’s idea of hell. Needless ceaseless ego driven compromise produces the apocryphal camel when a horse was the answer. I couldn’t believe an example of such deadly groupthink tried hard to scupper England’s cricket chances this past fortnight. Our best bowler

> L’incroyable fiasco anglais L’Equipe newspaper headline, Paris 28 June 2016 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So England crash out of yet another tournament. Hardly can it ever have been more humiliating. Well done, Iceland. As one former player quipped, the world’s most highly paid team were beaten by“a country

[http://www.skysports.com/football/news/30385/10267972/leicester-win-premier-league-how-they-did-it-differently] Finding Nessie and Elvis alive were officially as likely to happen. Yet Leicester City beat 5,000 to 1 odds. They only went and won the Premier League. So much has been written trying to dissect how the miracle became reality.