Category Archives: Sport

Two face jail after watching footage of Emiliano Sala’s post-mortem

They face jail for stealing the footage, not watching it.

Sherry Bray, 49, and Christopher Ashford, 62, appeared at Swindon Crown Court on Friday where they admitted accessing CCTV footage of Sala’s post-mortem examination.

Ashford, of Calne, admitted three counts of securing unauthorised access to computer material between February 9 and 11 this year.

Bray, of Corsham, admitted three counts of securing unauthorised access to computer material between April last year and February this year.

First gay couple to play Wimbledon doubles call for backing from the sport

Yesterday’s man is today’s Masters champion. Impossibly, ridiculously, Tiger Woods is back on top in golf again, with his fused back, his pile of lost years and his talent somehow back from the dead.

I guess we could say he’s back….

A former football club chairman is suing his divorce lawyers claiming they failed to warn him that promotion to the Premier League would result in an extra £2.25 million pay off to his ex-wife.

Huw Jenkins OBE, 56, the former Swansea City boss, claims he was told by solicitors that his finances were “not stable enough” to reach a financial settlement with his wife Sian, 50, while the club was in the lower league.

However just three months later Swansea City won promotion from the Championship in 2011 to play the likes of Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal.

This resulted in his personal wealth massively increasing and when the divorce was finally settled in 2017, Mr Jenkins was ordered to pay his ex-wife a £2.25 million lump sum.

Divorce involves the settlement of the marital finances. If there’s more of them then there’ll be a bigger amount paid over. And, even if we take the more restrictive view of only those assets created or accumulated during the marriage itself this is still going to apply here, isn’t it?

Thus, how could the outcome be otherwise?

Whether his lawyers should have told him is another thing. But that he didn’t instinctively grasp this is showing a certain lack of nous, eh? Or, possibly, a certain amount of trying it on. As anyone who makes enough to then be able to buy into a football club has a certain amount of financial nouse, nu?

Sorta Galton’s Ox without the slaughter and dressing?

A British man who won the world camel weighing championships found himself embroiled in an animal rights row after the competition was deemed ‘barbaric’.

Can’t be much of a spectator sport really. Then I find out that’s not what they mean:

Qasim Hussain, 20, from Bradford, West Yorkshire, traveled to Pakistan to compete in the Kharack Mirpur annual event where the animals are weighed down with rocks before standing to prove their strength.

Mr Hussain’s four-year-old camel, Sheezada Kathreela, was loaded up with bags of stones weighing 1,800kg on his humps and back before getting to its feet and walking around in front of 20,000 spectators.

Perhaps camel weighting contest is more apt?

The state of Qatar secretly offered $400m to Fifa just 21 days before they were awarded the 2022 World Cup, leaked files appear to show.

The documents, seen by The Sunday Times, reportedly reveal that executives from the Qatari state-run broadcaster Al Jazeera – that was owned and controlled by Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani – signed a television contract making the huge offer.

The contract is said to have also included an unprecedented success fee of $100m that would be paid to Fifa only if Qatar was successful in the 2010 World Cup ballot.

The documents allegedly read: “In the event that the 2022 competition is awarded to the state of Qatar, Al Jazeera shall, in addition to the . . . rights fee, pay to Fifa into the designated account the monetary amount of $100m.”

Fifa sells the broadcast rights. That the broadcast rights are sold comes as less than a surprise therefore.

If Al Jazeera was going to hire the idiot nephews of every Fifa board member on $million contracts for advice over the broadcast rights then we’d have something. To the extent that we don’t already think they didn’t.

CARDIFF City footballer Emiliano Sala is feared dead after his plane went missing over the Channel Islands last night.

Sala, 28, was onboard the Piper Malibu plane with one other person, when it lost contact at 8.30pm near the Casquets lighthouse, off Alderney.

Air Traffic Control confirmed the plane was travelling from Nantes in Western France to Cardiff when it vanished.

It followed severe weather warnings about snow and ice issued across France.

The Argentine footballer was believed to be travelling back from France after completing his £15million club-record transfer from Nantes to Premier League strugglers Cardiff City FC.

Cardiff’s out that £15 million then.

Reading about the England rugby team just flying back from their 10 day “warm weather” training camp in the Algarve.

Err, yes, warm, sez ‘ee.

England’s hopes of training in hot conditions during their eight-day camp in Portugal were dashed today as heavy fell in the Algarve during their first session – with more rain forecast next week.

Conditions at England’s training camp in Vilamoura were more akin to an autumnal day at their normal base at Pennyhill Park in Bagshot as the players underwent a fitness session, which included speed work with sprint specialist Jonas Dodoo.

Weather down here is generally better, not always.

This isn’t strong enough to be a fact but there’s a tendency all the same:

West Country powerhouse – why the South West has become English rugby’s dominant region

Soccer was, largely enough, the game of the industrial proletariat. The West Country didn’t have a lot of that. It’s for this reason that there have been, at times, no Premiership teams south west of a Bristol to, erm, Southampton? line. One of the poorest areas of the country from the 1830s onwards, as that industrial prole thing first began, was Dorset. That old North South divide on poverty etc worked the other way a century and more back.

As I say, this isn’t true enough to be absolute fact but there’s a trend there, definitely.

Colombia players receive death threats on social media after losing to England at World Cup 2018

Was this Ms. BiS or Miss BiS?

‘Nuff said, eh?

Police in Germany say a hunter has died after being attacked by a wild boar he was trying to shoot.

The 50-year-old man was on a boar hunt with a dozen others near the north-eastern town of Greifswald on Sunday when he was attacked by the male boar.

Sometimes the boar wins.

She dazzled the nation at the London 2012 Paralympic Games, taking home two gold medals.

But now Hannah Cockroft MBE, the world record-breaking wheelchair racer who has won five gold medals for Britain, fears she will become trapped in a cycle of unemployment once she is too old to compete professionally, joining the ranks of Britain’s 800,000 young people who are not in employment or training.

Her comments come amid wider concern that the champions of London’s 2012 Games are falling into uncertain futures, with many having little work experience outside athletics.

This is rather what happens to all professional athletes, isn’t it?

England will unleash one of the fastest back-three units in the history of the game against Australia on Saturday after Jonny May revealed he had just clocked a sprint record that was faster than Usain Bolt’s average speed when the Jamaican set his 100 metre world record.

May was in a state of shock after he recorded a personal best of 10.49 metres per second in a 40-metre speed test last Saturday, which would equate to a time of 9.53 seconds over 100 metres. Bolt’s world record is 9.58 seconds, which he set in 2009.

How do they do a 40 metre speed test? Is it a standing start? Or accelerating to a mark then measuring speed over 40 metres?

This is his fifth grand tour, but it puts Froome in a new bracket in terms of his stature in the sport. It was his first outside of the Tour de France. It was a ‘double’ that no rider had ever managed before.

Several people have won the Tour and Vuelta in the same year. Although not, perhaps, in the “modern” age when the Vuelta occupies this position in the calendar.

Conor McGregor’s biggest weapon? His lack of boxing experience
The allure of Saturday’s much-hyped fight in Las Vegas is that no one knows what will happen in the ring – not least the overwhelming favorite, Floyd Mayweather

Everyone who knows about boxing is pretty sure what will happen……

Through the rest of the year, Palmer is one of just three or four regular riders on the island.

“The only thing that stops us going out is if the wind speed is over 38 mph – that’s dangerous if it’s a crosswind, and I’ve been blown off my bike twice. But the advantage of our weather is that no one will ever steal your bike, because no one is stupid enough to want to ride it in these conditions,” Palmer says.

I have as many recorded Tour de France wins as Lance Armstrong.

Although it doesn’t take 16 days on the Tour. 60 km will do it for me.