Sports Poets Society

TOM JENKINS/THE GUARDIAN; MARTIN RICKETT/PA West Ham last played at Upton Park in 2016  Nuno Espírito Santo has walked into a dispirited club You can still visit Upton Park now, but it looks a little different 2 Oct 2025 - The Guardian Jonathan Liew Graham Potter still turned up for work on Saturday morning, even though there was no work left for him to do. A team meeting was arranged, at which Potter announced to general bewilderment that he had been sacked. Potter left. Training was delayed because nobody was available to take it. Eventually the new coach, Nuno Espírito Santo , arrived on site and hastily began preparations for the Everton game on Monday. Perhaps it was inevitable that West Ham United’s big set-piece appointment went the same way many of their set pieces have gone this season. Consider the evidence. A bungled sacking. A fiesta of contradictory leaks and briefings. Chaotic performances on the pitch. A vacuum of leadership and direction. Catastrophic recruitment. ...

25 Aug 2025 The Guardian Jonathan Wilson - Selhurst Park Football has become the country’s soap opera. It’s a point David Goldblatt makes in his new book Injury Time: it seems absurd to think now that in 2001, the BBC persuaded UEFA to delay kick-off of a Champions League tie between Liverpool and Barcelona so viewers could first find out who shot Phil Mitchell. By 2020, EastEnders was being bumped from its slot in the schedules for an FA Cup fifth-round tie between Liverpool and Chelsea. As the big television soaps have declined, it is football that has become the great national obsession, not just in terms of what happens on the pitch but also the endless politicking off it. Nothing could exemplify that better than this game at Selhurst Park, a patchy and unsatisfactory draw played out in an atmosphere of fraught tetchiness. Crystal Palace and Nottingham Forest are two very respectable clubs with fine traditions, but there is no great history between them. If a Palace v Forest fixt...

Nottingham Forest’s simplicity is deceptive: it looks easy because it is so well planned 19 Jan 2025 - THE OBSERVER / Sport Jonathan Wilson There was a period when datawallahs insisted confidence didn’t exist – which came as a surprise to almost everybody who has ever played sport at any level. There are days when you feel invincible, when every putt drops, when every ball pitches in the right place, when you claim every cross. And there are days when your club may as well be a Toblerone, when catching the easiest dolly seems an impossible feat of calculation and coordination, when your legs simply will not function. Vast screeds were written dismissing the “hot-hand fallacy”. Then, in 2020, the journalist Ben Cohen wrote The Hot Hand , which demonstrated a flaw in previous calculations and decided that the hot hand – a term from basketball referring to a player on a scoring streak – does exist. From a layman’s perspective, the tests employed always seemed so artificial to be highly qu...