Recently in General sport Category

Having been absent from the blogosphere due to holidays and illness, it's time I dipped a toe back into the waters. So, with a mild word of warning that this blog probably shouldn't be read before the watershed, here we go.

Actually, it wasn't Jimmy Anderson who did it. It wasn't Paul Collingwood and it certainly wasn't Monty (if in doubt, don't touch it) Panesar.
It was me.

I blame my nan on my mother's side - for Nora Harrod was a proper punter.
Decades before At The Races and Racing UK, years before Teletext gave instant access to that day's racing results, Nora and her husband Charlie, a retired carpet factory worker, would sit every afternoon in their living room in Kidderminster, with a copy of The Sun and a mug of tea, poring over the form and flicking on the radio every 30 minutes for the sports news and the racing results.

I've always had a liking for Paul Broadhurst. I followed the last days of his career as an amateur golfer after I began journalistic life on the local paper in Tamworth in 1986 and he's been a mainstay of The Post's golfing coverage ever since.

By now, you will be heartily sick of reviews of the sporting year. Newspapers desperate to fill pages, at a time when no-one wants to advertise and no-one's reading anyway, give more space to the year's events than they did when they first took place.

This contravenes my usual self-imposed policy of keeping my blog musings locally-based but the following agency report caught my eye in an idle moment this morning and at a time of year when no-one is remotely interested in news, I feel it my professional duty to make sure you do not miss it.

To those of us of a certain age, the double-page spread of rugby action on pages 42 and 43 of Monday's Birmingham Post would have brought back memories.
On the left, a marvellously atmospheric photograph of steam rising above a scrum during Saturday's Worcester-Bourgoin European Challenge Cup tie at Sixways.
On the right, a wonderful study in mud, taken by the Coventry Telegraph's Mark Radford, of players during the Coventry-Plymouth Albion game at Butts Park Arena.

Five weeks? That's almost as long as the football closed season and long enough for me to grow a new job title as assistant content editor (sport).
I feel I should apologise from my absence from the blogosphere for that length of time, a state of affairs caused by a combination of technological problems and ill health.
The former should now have been resolved, the latter is something I have to handle and which I shouldn't be troubling the reader with.
The hiatus was a shame because I had just started some hares running about the Post's new-look sports pages and had already seen some interesting replies.

So the Hitman has had it has he? Ricky Hatton proved his doubters, who had written off his career, wrong when he convincingly beat Paul Malignaggi in Las Vegas on Saturday night.
At 30 years of age, Hatton may not have the raw power and ferocity he once had, but it is far too premature to say he still can't enjoy at least two more top class international fights.
Okay, he faced an opponent who had the punching power of small child, did more running than Paula Ratcliffe and more holding than you will see in an episode of Strictly Come Dancing, but he was elusive and fast. Just the sort of opponent Hatton needed to face to dispel the myth that he was ponderous, too slow and too predictable.
Hatton probably went into the fight under more pressure than at any stage in his career. After the defeat to Floyd Mayweather Jnr and his unconvincing comeback victory over Juan Lazcano, many believed his powers were on the wane. Added to that Hatton was going into his first fight since splitting with mentor and former trainer Billy Graham.
It was appropriate the fight was held in Las Vegas because it seemed Hatton was having one last turn of the roulette wheel to resurrect his career, and he certainly came up trumps with a rejuvenated performance.
Like Joe Calzaghe, Hatton has fantastic support and can command rock concert-style crowds to his fights, and it looks like he will have another big pay day soon when he faces the winner of the Manny Pacquiao and Oscar de la Hoya fight this weekend.
Whoever is in the other corner, a new-look Hatton fighting in front of a big crowd at Wembley Stadium would be a fantastic occasion and would be a memorable fight.

There is no doubt technology has advanced our lives. The very fact that I am sat here, bashing my thoughts into a laptop which will soon upload my musings to a live webpage is testament to that fact.
A few years ago there simply wasn't any such thing as an on-line Blog and a few years before that if someone had mentioned the word laptop you would have thought it was something you used to eat your dinner off in front of the TV.
However, there is one aspect of my life that hasn't been enhanced by technology and that is my love of sport, in its purest form. My tolerance for technological invention in the sporting arena stops at the development of 24-hour day satellite sports channels. In every other way, technological enhancement has diminished my love of watching sport.
Take football, the game I grew up loving and am now lucky enough to watch for a living. How has technology enhanced the game? I can't think of one thing.
Perhaps it is that devotion to nostalgia that I used to bemoan in my own father but now equally embrace, but wasn't football coverage better a decade ago?