'He was a nightmare to play against, he'd nip & push you!'
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BBC News
2 minutes ago
- BBC News
Hove Beach Park to host padel and racket sport tournament
A Brighton beachside park will host a racket sport festival this week to try and introduce the sport to new Rackets Festival will take place in Hove Beach Park from Monday 21 – Sunday 27 July to promote tennis, padel and pickleball to people in the event comes after the opening of the £13.7m park, which includes tennis and padel courts, and will include visits from tennis star Judy Murray and former Wimbledon doubles champion Jonathan Fulcher, founder of The Progress Tour which is hosting the event, says the event is "bringing together racket enthusiasts as well as the local community in a celebration of sport, community and education". During the week-long festival, racket sport players can take part in tournaments as well as receiving workshops from coaches and experts, including former Fed Cup captain Murray, mother to Grand Slam winners Andy and Jamie event will also feature exhibition matches from pro players alongside music and pop-up food and drinks Beach Park's padel courts opened in December 2024 ahead of the full opening of the park in park was mostly paid for by a £9.5m grant from the government's Levelling Up fund and also features a BMX track, skate park and new café.Padel became one of the largest growing sports in the UK, with more than 30 millions players across the Brighton, more than 1,000 people signed a petition calling for indoor tennis courts not to be replaced with padel courts after plans for more facilities at the Withdean Sports Complex were mooted by Brighton and Hove City Council.
Telegraph
2 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Time to discuss alternatives to Australia as a Lions destination
To get some perspective on this series you only need to look at the respective match XVs and benches available to both teams. The fact is that you would struggle to select more than a handful of Australian players over their Lions' counterparts in a combined 23-man squad. This is nobody's fault, but people should stop pretending that it is not so. The Lions' previous aim of recording a whitewash in the series should be an imperative not a hope, now that the gulf in class has been laid bare. It is right to give Joe Schmidt and his squad credit for the improvements they have made in the past 18 months, but they are still a long way off top Test status and a shadow of some of their illustrious predecessors. The Wallabies will get better in the remaining two Tests but so should the Lions. Their line-out set piece malfunctioned in a way that could have been telling in a tighter contest and their inaccuracy around try-scoring chances can be rectified. In terms of relative merits of what might come, the gap between the sides should not close if both sides improve as they ought to. Of all the statistics you can scrutinise from the first Test, the most telling is that the Lions made around twice as much ground after contact as the Aussies. This meant that breakdowns were constantly moving forward in the Lions' favour, with the Australian defence pressured continually. If that equation cannot be neutralised, it is difficult to see how Australia are going to be able to play from an even field, and even if they do so, you have the fact the Lions' bench is going to be far more experienced and talented than anything the Aussies can summon. US Eagles would be ideal opponents – if they improve I am aware from speaking to several Lions' committee members there have been discussions about whether to strike out in different directions in the future. The problem is that South Africa and New Zealand will remain premier touring destinations, so you are talking about a once in every 12 years tour. It might be that Australia has recovered its place at rugby union's top table by then – but what if things go backwards? None of this is straightforward. Talk of taking on France is misguided. A format that contains only Six Nations players would imitate the world's oldest and premier rugby union tournament, which has been consistently popular and commercially successful. The United States would be ideal, if the Eagles could deliver long hoped for standards, but what if you commit to it and improvements do not come? There are many factors that work against the US vision and I cannot see them being solved even in the medium term. Touring the Pacific Islands and Argentina would be good for the image of the game but commercially challenging and the Lions are about making money in the professional era. One challenge is the R360 professional circus, which is said to be imminent. Where do the Lions fit in a rugby world that might see all its top players playing against each other 16 times a year? What is the attraction of Lions players taking on opponents who might already be regular team-mates or adversaries?
Telegraph
2 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Sir Nick Faldo is sport's most improved broadcaster
Given that the man has won six majors, it might not be the most coveted trophy he'll ever squeeze on to what must be one of sport's most groaning mantelpieces, but if they are giving out awards for the most improved sports broadcaster, Sir Nick Faldo would be in with a strong shout of scooping the prize. The golf legend himself, and those who have been working with him, deserve a lot of credit: where he was once wooden and grumpy, he has now become a co-commentator of good humour, insight and feeling. His work for Sky Sports at the Open in this renewal was excellent. It is hard to think of a better match-up of ex-player analyst and current player situation than Sir Nick on the relentless front-runner Scottie Scheffler, and he delivered not just on the golfing challenges of such a win but the mental requirements as well. In the taxonomy of British sporting greats turned broadcasters, I would put Sir Nick in the same category as Stephen Hendry: perceived during his imperial phase as a remorseless, aloof grinder, revealed in his later years to be surprisingly jolly company on the telly and probably not such a bad bloke all things considered. Perhaps it is not surprising that a personality type that would toil fanatically at one endeavour could focus that work ethic upon mastering another discipline, although that being said, it is not hard to think of some ex-players who remain as lumpen on the mic after 10 years as they did on day one. For instance – and while it is hardly the crime of the century – Sir Nick used to have an irritating habit of saying 'smidgen' all the time. Someone has clearly put in a smidgen of work advising him to tone that down a smidgen and the result is more than a smidgen of an improvement. You see? It grates. And now he's stopped it. So fair play. I am confident in speculating that someone of Sir Nick's clout and single-mindedness would not have noticed this sort of tic on his own nor made efforts to correct it unbidden, therefore I can conclude that he has been open-minded enough to accept notes on his broadcast work from a trusted adviser. There was even a genuinely funny bit about having to go on a diet before the Ryder Cup because he had caused injury to a chair. Credit must go to the golf bods at Sky, who have created an environment in which Sir Nick can succeed and overall put on a top-notch package for these majors. Peter Alliss had been synonymous with and indivisible from TV golf for so long – perhaps too long – that Sky were obliged to go for a different sort of approach whether they liked it or not, and this has become more distinctive year on year for a while now. Sky's coverage might lack the raconteurish, moving-smoothly-through-the-second-bottle charm of an Alliss or a Test Match Special but that has in fact worked in its favour because it has allowed Sky to play to its strengths with innovation and technical insight to tap into the fact that a lot of people watching actually play the game and want to get better at it. Flights of lyrical fancy might be thinner on the ground than the BBC coverage of yore but that's not necessarily a problem if you like the technocratic, graphical wizardry approach that Sky has made its own. In fact, the only colourful language to be heard this week came when the microphones kept picking up various potty-mouthed outbursts from players who had hit bad shots, Rory McIlroy at least twice, with the commentators having to apologise each time. Anyone who has ever attempted to hit a one-and-three-quarter inch ball into a teacup 400 yards away with a small bit of metal on a stick would surely forgive the occasional swear word. Around these parts at least, there was no blue outburst when they welcomed Sir Nick to the microphone each time and, given that he was once at best a 24-handicapper on the telly, this represents progress indeed.
