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Ticket prices are proving an expense too far and some fans are ditching the Premier League for local community clubs
As the season draws to a close, and the cost of living crisis continues to bite, football fans will be thinking about the expense of attending regular matches. In Germany, Fortuna Düsseldorf last week said they would offer free tickets to supporters, but how are English clubs responding to financial pressures on their fanbase?
According to the Office for National Statistics, 38% of adults are spending more on everyday items. For match-goers, ticket prices are often proving an expense too far.
Continue reading...Shadow secretary for culture calls for root and branch review of top appointments
Ministers are facing fresh demands to bolster the independence of the process to find the next BBC chair after claims that “cronyism and sleaze” have damaged the role and the corporation’s reputation.
The government has been pressed to depoliticise the appointment of the job after the resignation of Richard Sharp, a Tory donor. He quit after an independent investigation found he had failed to reveal critical information about his role in facilitating a loan for then prime minister Boris Johnson when applying for the job.
Continue reading...After being forced to quit social media, political journalist Rafael Behr was able to see its corrosive influence clearly. How can we repair the damage caused by a system that plays on our worst impulses?
In the first weeks of my convalescence I developed a capacity for time travel. I had to spend a lot of time in bed and, floating on the edge of wakefulness, half-conscious, I discovered I could explore scenes from my past in exquisite detail. I wondered if it was a side effect of my various medications and whether it would be permanent. It was almost hallucinogenic and not unpleasant. I couldn’t replay whole scenes from my youth, but I was able to transport myself back to old places – only interiors. I could feel the contours of the Artex on the walls of my childhood home in the late 70s. I could smell the damp on the charcoal-coloured carpet in the living room of the flat I rented with friends when I left university.
I could explore these spaces with fingertip precision, inch by inch. I remembered the angles of door handles and the action on light switches.
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
Continue reading...Rangers were league champions in 1992 but the cup proved elusive – until a Chinese restauranteur and a group of ball boys spurred them on to beat Celtic on a wet night at Hampden
Although it ended in a league and cup double, Walter Smith’s first full season as Rangers manager was far from a procession. After grabbing the title in a final-day shootout with Aberdeen in May 1991 – less than four weeks after the dramatic departure of Graeme Souness to Liverpool – Smith had to rebuild quickly. With five players in and five out, it was the busiest summer of the club’s nine successive titles in that era. Because of Uefa’s imposed maximum of four foreign players, Smith had very little choice.
The most significant change was in goal, where he replaced the much-loved Chris Woods with Andy Goram. By October, it looked like a bad joke and one made on national television, no less. “Which Scottish football internationalist,” asked A Question of Sport host David Coleman, “took two wickets in the NatWest Trophy?”
Continue reading...I hoped to find a police force that had learned from its many mistakes, but even now I cannot give that assurance
Between June 2014 and September 2015, Stephen Port drugged, sexually assaulted and murdered four young gay men in east London, leading to a police response that was criticised by a coroner for a large number of “very serious and very basic investigative failings”. Eight years after Port murdered his last victim, what has changed in terms of the way the Metropolitan police might cope with similar circumstances? I have looked into that, and the sad answer is not enough.
What happened remains shocking. Anthony Walgate was Port’s first victim. He was found dead outside the block of flats where Port lived, after Port rang 999 to report finding a young man collapsed. Anthony had died from an overdose of GHB, which is sometimes known as the “date rape” drug.
Matt Parr is HM Inspector of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services
Continue reading...Think of those presenters who reigned at Fox News before: Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck. There’s an endless supply of horror
It is a truism of the US news industry that no one is bigger than the network itself, an insight that Donald Trump – binned by Rupert Murdoch last year – may still be painfully processing, and which this week became suddenly clear to Tucker Carlson.
The former cable news host, who, it was announced on Monday, had “agreed to part ways” with the network, has hired an aggressive Hollywood lawyer – and in line with the preferred volume of the man generally, seems unlikely to go quietly. Even as the share price at Fox dropped in response to the news, wiping $500m (£400m) off its value in apparent flattery of Carlson, the question remains pertinent as to how much he, and those like him, matter as individuals.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...One of the sensational claims in Prince Harry’s legal case against News UK appears difficult to prove
Among the many extraordinary claims in Prince Harry’s legal case against News UK, one stands out: the allegation that there was a secret deal between Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper group and the monarchy to stop members of the royal family suing over phone hacking.
The prince suggests that this arrangement was known about by his late grandmother Queen Elizabeth II, Prince William and leading courtiers. Harry claims that under the terms of this supposed deal, royal victims of phone hacking would receive a settlement and an apology when all the other phone-hacking cases had concluded.
Continue reading...Weeds protect the soil and nurture insects and birds – now they are finally having their time in the sun at the Chelsea flower show
The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has declared that this year’s Chelsea flower show is all about weeds, but not as we know them. Four of its 12 show gardens will feature plants traditionally regarded as weeds, which are now being rebranded as “resilient” and “heroes”. Weeds are no longer flowers in the wrong place, according to this year’s organisers, but exactly where they should be, softening the designer’s edge and adding a wild note to far corners. I do love an about-change from the marching band. It’s so full of fanfare and drama.
Except it’s not really new, wild things have been creeping into Chelsea for many years now. Just ask Mary Reynolds, the Irish environmentalist and author of We are the Ark whose gold-winning show garden in 2002 was noted for its “subversive use of weeds”, plants that she is still very much using today in her design work.
Alys Fowler is a gardener and Guardian columnist
Continue reading...The writer E Jean Carroll is seeking damages after accusing the former president of sexually assaulting her in the mid-1990s
The rape case brought in New York against Donald Trump by famed advice columnist, E Jean Carroll has caught the attention of America as the latest legal drama to involve the former US president.
The case is so far the only one to come to court among more than a dozen allegations of rape, groping and other sexual assaults made against Trump.
Continue reading...Tucker Carlson will find new ways to spew his toxic lies. But at least you won’t pay for it on basic cable
On any other day, the revelation that anchor Don Lemon was out at CNN would have been a big deal in the world of media news.
But Tucker Carlson’s abrupt toppling from his prime-time perch at Fox News not only overshadowed that development by a mile, but it threw the whole right-wing media ecosystem into a tailspin.
Continue reading...Fox News, one of the world’s most powerful media organisations, effectively admitted it broadcast untrue information. What happens now?
There are always plenty of grounds for cynicism about the state of the news media, but in the last week we seem to have arrived at a new set of low expectations.
Fox News, having settled its defamation case with Dominion in the US and with Lachlan Murdoch withdrawing proceedings against Crikey in Australia, the Murdoch news empire has effectively admitted what was already clear: that it knowingly broadcast untrue information.
Continue reading...The point of reading a book, seeing an art show or listening to an album is to be absorbed – but this can also be bewildering and, at times, dangerous
Like many writers, I struggle to manage accounting. The only inventory that comes naturally to me is writing books, this interior work of zero use to the local council. I was young when I learned how alarmed one should feel by the arrival of bills, any letter without a handwritten address experienced as body shock. But through my parents I learned that female artists can process these sorts of anxieties through their work. My dad took me, as a kid, to see Tracey Emin at the Tate. My mum accompanied me to Alice Neel, Louise Bourgeois and Sophie Calle.
A decade ago, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, I went alone to see Kara Walker’s My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. I sat on the leather bench reading her righteously wounded break-up letter, and sobbed. Because it was on the wall. So it must mean something. I didn’t mean anything in the world yet and I didn’t mean anything any more to the person I’d loved. But her devastation was in a museum, framed. And that was a big piece of getting me through. Art can do that. You can ride its coat-tails until you find your feet. I went home and started writing my memoir Your Voice In My Head, a call and response – even if she never reads it.
Continue reading...The crowds at LIV Golf in Adelaide this week are proof Australians are so beguiled by Greg Norman they will buy into his Saudi-backed slogan that ‘golf is a force for good’
In a late 19th-century issue of Vanity Fair a caricature of famous big-bearded cricketer WG Grace carried a caption that read simply ‘Cricket’. In Australia, from about 1980, a Greg Norman version might have read ‘Golf’. The man was Australian golf. He didn’t have to sky-dive from planes to promote tournaments (though he did), his presence was enough. And it still is.
This weekend Norman has brought LIV Golf to The Grange Golf Club in Adelaide, and Australian sports fans, as ever, appear powerless against his siren song. The golf course is heaving with over 35,000 fans daily. Admission has been sold out for all three rounds. A ticket into the ‘Cellar Door’ marquee back of the 12th green – known as the ‘Watering Hole’ and styled like the PGA Tour’s ‘Party Hole’ in Arizona – is $1200. The hole is surrounded by similar marquees and ‘sky boxes’. After a golfer’s shot, good or bad, plastic beer cups rain onto the tee like frothy white mortars.
Continue reading...Volodymyr Zelenskiy may be forced to accept an unpalatable compromise, however well his troops do on the battlefield
This is how the war ends: Ukraine’s long-awaited spring counter-offensive succeeds in recapturing some or even lots of occupied territory. But Russia’s more numerous forces, dug in behind minefields, tank traps and dragon’s teeth, remain in control of parts of the Donbas and Crimea. As autumn begins, it’s plain. There’s to be no clean sweep.
Amid huge destruction, big Russian losses, critical Ukrainian manpower, weapons and equipment shortages, and waning appetites for an endless war of attrition, Kyiv’s western backers begin to push for a negotiated ceasefire or “durable truce”, pending a longer-term settlement. China gets in on the act, too.
Continue reading...Blades stand in way of Manchester City’s quest for treble and are ready to ‘attack the game’ in FA Cup semi-final
Last week George Baldock enjoyed watching Manchester City obliterate Bayern Munich courtesy of complimentary tickets from Erling Haaland, but he and his Sheffield United teammates travel to Wembley for Saturday’s FA Cup semi-final fully aware they cannot afford to hand the striker any freebies. Baldock went to the Etihad Stadium with the Blades midfielder Sander Berge, who is close with his Norway teammate and stayed with Haaland after the match. So it is good to have friends in high places? “Exactly, it’s who you know,” Baldock says, smiling. “He’s a monster, isn’t he? He is a goalscoring machine. Everything he touches at the minute seems to turn to gold.”
Baldock and his teammates stand in the way of City’s quest for the treble. Sheffield United’s manager, Paul Heckingbottom, presented a video analysis of Pep Guardiola’s side on Thursday and Friday, and his squad are under no illusions about the severity of the task. Baldock has studied clips of City’s wingers and forwards to prepare. “You owe it to yourself to give yourself the best possible opportunity to nullify them in the game,” he says. “With the quality of players like [Kevin] De Bruyne, sometimes they can put it in an area where it is impossible to defend. Some of the goals they score, it’s not because of bad defending but formidable attacking play. We’re not just going there to make up the numbers. We’ll go there to attack the game and try to have a go.”
Continue reading...The defending champion and world No 1, Iga Swiatek, showcased all her experience to book a semi-final place at the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix in Stuttgart. Swiatek fought back from a set down against Karolina Pliskova to claim a 4-6, 6-1, 6-2 victory. She will now face the Tunisian Ons Jabeur, who dropped only three games in seeing off Beatriz Haddad Maia 6-3, 6-0.
Swiatek is one win away from reaching the final in her first tournament for over a month after suffering a rib injury.
Continue reading...Transport secretary defends PM after he is criticised by senior Conservatives for ‘dithering’
Rishi Sunak is right to delay the decision on the fate of Dominic Raab, a senior minister has said, as the prime minister pores over a lengthy report into allegations that his deputy bullied staff.
Mark Harper, the transport secretary, said on Friday morning Sunak was doing the right thing by waiting to make his mind up over whether Raab should resign over the allegations, a day after he received the report from Adam Tolley KC.
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