Brian Viner

Recently by Brian Viner

Brian Viner: Why the US missed the Ryder Cup

Saturday, 27 September 2008

Last Sunday afternoon, while Europe's 12 best golfers, give or take Darren Clarke, were yielding the Ryder Cup by an uncomfortably large margin to the resurgent Americans, Europe's 4,612,892nd best golfer managed to recover a little continental pride by beating three good ol' boys over the May River course at Palmetto Bluff, South Carolina, albeit with a slice of luck when an errant, lake-bound drive bounced back into play off a "Do Not Feed The Alligators" sign.

Home And Away: My Special Relationship with America never fails to leave me agonised

Thursday, 25 September 2008

On Tuesday I got home from a brief trip to South Carolina, freshly riven with the ambivalence about the United States that I first felt when I lived there for a year at the height of the Reagan era, and that has resurfaced on every one of maybe two dozen subsequent trips. What an admirable, maddening country it is.

Brian Viner: Ryder Cup looks super to us but is superfluous in US

Saturday, 20 September 2008

By the time you read this the first day's business in the 37th Ryder Cup will be done and dusted, and I, the Almighty and Richard Branson willing, will be on the other side of the Atlantic, albeit not in Kentucky where the action is, but a couple of states down and right a bit, in South Carolina. Actually, I'll be pretty close to Kiawah Island, where the United States regained the Ryder Cup in 1991. They say that sport is all about timing and I suppose the same can be said about sportswriting. The right place, 17 years late, is bad timing.

Brian Viner: Let me tell you about Mr Barker

Wednesday, 17 September 2008

Country Life: 'A man of enormous charisma, kindness and rectitude, Mr Barker was pivotal in the life of the school'

Brian Viner: I can exclusively reveal why the banks collapsed

Wednesday, 17 September 2008

Nobody yet seems to have connected the collapse of Lehman Brothers with the development of the Large Hadron Collider, so let me be the first, although I should preface my theory with an admission that I understand even less about particle physics than I understand about investment banking, and what I understand about investment banking could be written in thick marker pen on the back of a proton.

Brian Viner: Italians take credit for slick first act in new Capello opera

Saturday, 13 September 2008

Croatia 1 England 4 is not a where-were-you-when moment in quite the way that the Kennedy assassination was, or even Germany 1 England 5. But I have a slightly more interesting answer than eating a rusk, which is what I was doing when JFK was shot, and sitting with my mate Derek in my front room, which is where I watched Sven Goran Eriksson's team run riot in Munich. I spent Wednesday evening at a bar called 442, on Via Procaccini in Milan. The owner is Milanese, but the dozens of scarves pinned to the wall, Barnet FC rubbing fringes with FC Barcelona, proclaim his interest in the global game.

Brian Viner: Star turn from Bedser proves cricket is not just a batsman's game

Saturday, 6 September 2008

On Monday evening, at the end of a splendid black-tie dinner at the Hilton on Park Lane, organised by the Lord's Taverners to celebrate cricket's 10 surviving centurions – the men who made at least 100 first-class hundreds – I sought out my colleague Angus Fraser and mused that such a glittering occasion would never be staged for comparable feats of bowling; celebrating the 10 bowlers who have taken more than 400 Test wickets, for example. Angus did not disagree. As every trundler knows, cricket has always been loaded in favour of batsmen, and the advent of Twenty20 tilts the balance even further, so it was gratifying, if a little paradoxical, that the star turn at Monday's event was a bowler, 90-year-old Sir Alec Bedser.

Brian Viner: The tedious bias of restaurant reviewers

Wednesday, 3 September 2008

Country Life: 'There's something rather wholesome about having to wait three days for a consignment of parsley to turn up'

Brian Viner: Six of Sobers impossible without half a dozen of Nash

Saturday, 30 August 2008

The Last Word

Brian Viner: Gold is more precious than any gong

Saturday, 23 August 2008

The Last Word

Brian Viner: Courgettes were never far from my mind

Wednesday, 20 August 2008

Country Life: 'When I used to spend the summer in Cornwall I never had the same level of vegetable separation anxiety'

Brian Viner: Crazy game can make you sane again

Saturday, 16 August 2008

You don't have to dislike football to welcome the new Premier League season with arms firmly folded. The first Saturday of the season, heralding another nine-month burst of feuds between managers, savaging of referees, flawless triple Salchows with pike in the penalty area, and men on £100,000 a week agitating for better pay deals, always seems to arrive just a little soon. This is not, however, a broadside questioning the sanity of those of us still in love with the beautiful game, despite its disfiguring scars. On the contrary, it is intended, on the very day that we roll our eyes at the thought of more Premier League madness, to show football can do wonders for one's sanity.

Brian Viner: I always used to tackle the litter louts. But no longer – I am just too scared

Tuesday, 12 August 2008

We should all be just a little ashamed that in last night's Panorama, it took an American, albeit one so Anglophilic as Bill Bryson, to lecture us on our littering habits. As the President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, Bryson's particular beef is with those who defile our hedgerows, but in Panorama he also found, rather depressingly, that in the London Borough of Camden last year there was a 0 per cent chance of a person dropping litter being apprehended by the police (across the river in Southwark, by happy contrast, 3,000 litterbugs felt the long arm of the law).

Brian Viner: No medals for taking moral high ground

Saturday, 9 August 2008

Dominic Lawson, not a name that regularly kicks off a sports section, raised some pertinent comparisons in this newspaper yesterday between the hosts of this year's Olympic Games and the hosts four years hence. Lawson made the point that, although we can all feel legitimate revulsion towards China for its human rights abuses, Britain is not exactly unblemished in that and many other areas.

Brian Viner: A circus true to its roots

Wednesday, 23 July 2008

Country Life: 'We were by far the most cheaply educated people under the Giffords Circus big top in Cirencester'

Brian Viner: Irishman's incredible double created from spirit and nerve

Monday, 21 July 2008

Once a man has one major under his belt, he knows he can add another

Brian Viner: Racket of today drowns out slow brilliance of Borg

Saturday, 5 July 2008

It is 28 years to the day since Bjorn Borg beat John McEnroe in what is surely still the most thrilling of all Wimbledon men's singles finals. Roger Federer's defeat of Rafael Nadal last year was a doozy, and the first time Federer had been taken to a fifth set in a Grand Slam final, but he completed that set in relative comfort, 6-2.

Brian Viner: Country Life

Wednesday, 25 June 2008

'Like plenty of other naive souls, we left the city in search of a cheaper as well as a simpler life. What a laugh!'

Brian Viner: Tiger has a bad knee... the Goose, foot in mouth

Saturday, 21 June 2008

Winston Churchill once described golf as "a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose". Had the great man lived to see the best of another kind of great man, he might have reconsidered. In winning the US Open at Torrey Pines, Tiger Woods deployed the 15 weapons at his disposal – 14 of them in his bag and one of them, his preternatural willpower, in his head – as effectively as Churchill's hero, Henry V, used his longbowmen at Agincourt.

Brian Viner: Trouble in Toytown as sporting gods play

Saturday, 14 June 2008

On Monday afternoon, I motored through the Cotswolds – one never drives through the Cotswolds, only motors – with a smile on my lips and a song in my heart. It was a glorious day, the kind of still, summer's day of which P G Wodehouse wrote that one could hear the roar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadow.

Brian Viner: Elect a leader who doesn't split infinitives

Friday, 13 June 2008

There are several sound reasons to despise the TV commercial launched this week by the Republican presidential candidate John McCain in the hope of undermining his Democratic counterpart, Barack Obama. The ad shows Obama seemingly looking sympathetically at a picture of the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the accompanying message reads: "Is it OK to Unconditionally Meet With Anti-American Foreign Leaders? Elect a Leader With Good Judgment."

Brian Viner: Country Life

Wednesday, 11 June 2008

'If your house has to be haunted by someone who's 400 years old, it might as well be a serving wench'

Brian Viner: Absence really can make a fan's heart grow fonder

Saturday, 7 June 2008

On the pavement outside The Rocket, a pub near Euston Station, a message on a blackboard invites punters to "watch Euro 2008 here – at least England can't lose!" There's no arguing with that, indeed from where I'm sitting, in seat 1, row A, of my living-room, there's a great deal to be said for a tournament in which, whatever happens, not a single Englishman will direct a penalty with deadly precision into the goalkeeper's arms, or against the crossbar, or into the phalanx of photographers behind the goal, before sinking in agonised disbelief to his knees while 11 foreigners run around leaping on one another.

Brian Viner: I'm electrified by this man of 10,000 whats

Wednesday, 4 June 2008

The lengthy interview granted to Sir David Frost by Sir Alex Ferguson, screened last night on Sky Sports 1, has generated considerable excitement in the sporting world. Trumpeted by the press yesterday as the first "feature-length" interview with the Manchester United manager for almost a decade, it was undoubtedly a coup for Sky, and required viewing for anyone remotely interested in football.

Brian Viner: A bygone era of gentlemen and pulmonic wafers

Saturday, 24 May 2008

As I sit at my keyboard, on the first morning of the second Test between England and New Zealand, whatever might be the collective noun for cricket writers – a backward point perhaps – is settling down in the media centre at Old Trafford, preparing for a day of cricket, or rain, or both. As they plug in their laptops, I wonder how many of them are familiar with the name of William Denison?

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