Sports Poets Society

It is curious that with footballers you just add and add and never delete. This bulging, unaudited list. Will it ever burst? 25 Oct 2025 - THE GUARDIAN / Sport Max Rushden I managed to watch last Saturday’s Match of the Day without knowing the scores. It really is one of life’s enduring thrills. So the first time I’d seen or heard of Loum Tchaouna was when he picked up the ball in the 68th minute at Turf Moor , looked around a bit and thought: “Sod it, I’ll just whack it from here.” And how! What a brilliant way to introduce himself to my brain – which was perhaps not his ultimate goal; in this instance a goal was very much his ultimate goal. By the time of this last-on-motd wonderstrike, I’d obviously spent the previous hour watching various other footballers at work – most of them pretty familiar. The odd one did require a cursory Google. Who is Eli Kroupi ? Who are all these Chelsea players? Do they really have the same sized squad as all the other teams? If I was cloning footballe...

‘I don’t need to be sitting there thinking what would Gary do’ Kelly Cates on Match of the Day and Sky Kelly Cates is ready to replace a broadcasting titan by doing it her way – in a busy season ahead on both Sky and BBC ‘To do something new and still have the live football ...  it’s really lovely to have that balance’ 14 Aug 2025 The Guardian Paul MacInnes Kelly Cates is about to begin the busiest year of her career. That, to be fair, is an estimate, because the football presenter and broadcaster has always been a grafter. From Setanta Sports to Channel 5 there are few places where she has not applied her deep knowledge and emotional warmth, and as of this weekend she will be the face of the BBC’s and Sky’s coverage of the Premier League. The action gets under way at a second home, Anfield, from where Cates will host Sky’s Friday Night Football coverage of Liverpool v Bournemouth. This follows two preview shows for the BBC, and precedes her first shift on Match of the Day. Asked w...

It should be seen as a genuine shared failing that the most widely amplified voice here is his 24 May 2025 - THE GUARDIAN / Sport Barney Ronay Welcome to the end, if you will, of a Linekera . As we head towards tomorrow night and last things, last days, last matches, Last Matches of the Last Days , towards the inevitable husky, poignant, carefully scripted farewell, towards the sense, because this is the BBC sofa, of something that feels less like a broadcaster ending his term of employment, more like three men in shiny shirts burying their pet rabbit. As we head towards all of this, it is probably a good time to look back at Gary’s best bits. This is easy enough. For the past 22 years, capped by this weekend’s accelerated farewell from the BBC, Gary Lineker has been an excellent sports broadcaster and an ideal avatar of the courtly, cosy, quietly A-list BBC identity. Not just very good saying things such as “And now to Goodison” in between some football highlights, but also perfect fo...

BBC STUDIOS▲ Gary Lineker’s BBC interview with Amol Rajan  was full of interesting anecdotes, and some contentious talking points too Lineker’s critics have got it wrong. It’s valid to talk about more than sport I had a producer once say:  ‘Can we not talk about domestic violence today?  It’s Friday’ 25 Apr 2025 - The Guardian Max Rushden The most extraordinary revelation to come from Gary Lineker’s interview with Amol Rajan on the BBC is that he’d sometimes come home from school to find Engelbert Humperdinck playing cards with his dad. Surprisingly, almost all the reaction to the conversation has ignored this bombshell – Engelbert apparently not such a big player in the culture war world; best focus on your Middle Easts, your Bravermans, your impartialities, Brian. Of course the job of news outlets is to pick out headlines but it does appear almost no one has watched the whole programme. It’s essentially a nice wide-ranging interview covering the career of one of the be...