Angelo Dundee!
Angelo Dundee has died and that is sad.
The BBC has shown a clip from the famous Henry Cooper/Cassius Clay fight, where Cooper hit Clay with half a house and dumped him on his bottom. In this clip, Dundee is seen in the ring with a fag in his mouth.
How times have changed! Would any of the audience be allowed to smoke now, let alone the trainers of one of the fighters?
The Luckiest Footballer Alive
Former Tottenham midfielder Hossam Ghaly, was lucky not to be involved in the rioting in Port Said, despite playing for one of the teams involved. Apparently, he’d been sent off before the trouble started and was in the dressing room.
Can there have been a better time and place to get a red card?
When Was The Last Time Sussex Had Two Teams in the Fifth Round of the FA Cup?
With Crawley beating Hull at the KC Stadium and Brighton beating Newcastle at home by the same score, it means that Sussex has two teams in the fifth round of the FA Cup for the first time. Brighton of course did make the 1983 Cup Final.
I do suspect that the draw might be fixed so that they play each other, as who would fancy a trip to the Deep South.
It’s actually quite a small list of counties that have two League teams outside of the obvious, like Greater London, Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Tyne and Wear and a few others, who have two clubs anyway. I can find Bristol, Derbyshire, Devon, Essex and Hampshire. And of course Sussex.
One Of My Least Favourite Stadia Will Get a Station
The Ricoh Arena at Coventry is a reas9onable stadium, unless you want to get there when the buses aren’t running from the centre. That happened on News Years Day in 2011 as I reported here.
But it would now appear that by December 2013, it will have its own station! About time too!
Should Paul Scholes Captain GB in the Olympics?
Rules say that for Olympic football, you must pick an under-23 side, but you are allowed three overage players in your side. This article in the Daily Mail says that Giggs, Scholes and Beckham could be those overage players.
Obviously others will have their view and especially, when it is known, who’s not going to Euro-2012.
Liverpool Supporters Boo Evra
The Suarez affair has not shown Liverpool of their supporters in a good light. Watching the match today between Liverpool and Manchester United, there is a lot more booing of Patrice Evra.
I think, it’s going to need some sort of punishment to bury all of this.
Incidentally, it doesn’t seem that the supporters behaviour is not much better at Loftus Road, where Chelsea and John Terry are playing.
It wwould appear that we might be winning the battle against rscism in football, but now we have another one, where supporters use a racist incident to stir up trouble.
It was the Crowd What Won It
At Liverpool University, in I think, 1968, the University Rugby team, got to the final of the British Universities Rugby Cup. Usually, this final would have involved two of the more sporting universities. But somehow, we got there and would have been long odds to win against Loughborough.
However, some old fart, decided to have the final at Birkenhead Park just across the Mersey one Wednesday afternoon.
So the whole University marched down the hill to the ferries and virtually filled the ground.
To say we were raucous would be an understatement, but Loughborough fell apart under the battering from the crowd and Liverpool won the trophy for their only time.
In the Telegraph next day, we were described as a mini-Kop that nearly rioted.
It was certainly an afternoon to remember.
An Enterprising Aussie
it has been reported on the BBC, that outside the ladies singles final in Melbourne today, between those two grunters; Maria Sharapova and Victoria Azarenka, there was a man selling ear-plugs at $3 a pair.
The Olympics Will Start With A Ring of Class
I was a bit surprised when Danny Boyle was asked to devise the Opening and Closing Ceremonies for the Olympics. But he is certainly crestive as his films show.
The first thing to be published about the ceremonies is that the Opening Ceremony will start with a bell and it will also be used in the Closing Ceremony.
But it won’t be any bell!
It will be a bell cast by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, just a few miles away from the Olympic site. It is the oldest manufacturing company in the UK and can trace itself back to the fifteenth century.
Harry ‘Forgot Secret Monaco Account’
This was the headline on the front of last night’s Evening Standard and it refers to a claim by Harry Redknapp at his trial for tax evasion.
I have a simple question. If he couldn’t remember this, what hope has he got of remembering how one of the players he is interested in buying has played?
So why would anybody bother to employ him?
The Anonymous Widower 