Recently by Martin Warrillow

I discovered pretty early on in life that I'd never make a golfer. Actually, I discovered pretty early on in life that I'd never make an active sportsman of any sort but that's another story.

I've moaned enough times on here about the money-obsessed nature of football these days, from the Premier League right down to the Conference National and below. But something happened this week to remind me of the game's everlasting ability to touch the hearts and stir the emotions of people of every age, of every nation, of every lifestyle.

I'm grateful to my colleague Rob Tanner, for bringing readers' attention to the thrilling end to the non-league football season, in particular the battles involving Burton Albion and Tamworth.
Burton can look after themselves (or maybe they can't, as they sit on the verge of blowing a 17-point lead) but as you may have seen by now, Tamworth clinched the Blue Square North title this week, courtesy of a fist-gnawingly tense 1-0 win over Hinckley Town at The Lamb.

Of all the sports to have sold their souls to television and money, I think cricket has suffered the worst.
Did you know there is still one match to go in England's interminable tour of the West Indies? Actually, if the dispute between the West Indies players and authorities over (guess what?), money, is not resolved, it may have finished already.

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.

"Of course, if we go up, we'd have to change the entire team," complained a workmate as we discussed the previous evening's football results. "I wouldn't back any of them to get a first-team place next season."

Where do Yeovil Town play? What about Dagenham and Redbridge? Or Stockport County?

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.

In these times when the revenue from a Champions League first group stage tie can pay Cristiano Ronaldo's wages for, oooh, four days, the FA Cup is not as important as it used to be to the big teams.
But criticism of the cliché which has third-round day as the best day of the football calendar is actually coming at the argument from the wrong end.

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.