Brian Viner

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Brian Viner: Germany says auf Wiedersehen prat to a great anti-hero

Saturday, 17 May 2008

Every year on FA Cup final day, the broadcasters like to remind us that the big match is being beamed live to 184 countries around the world, and will be watched by an audience of 1.6 billion people, from fishermen in Shanghai to beekeepers in Saskatchewan. This we take as affirmation that English football still rules the planet. Never mind the inadequacies of our national team, unable to qualify for Euro 2008; never mind the dwindling number of Englishmen playing for our leading clubs; the blue riband occasions in English football still capture the world's imagination. So we are told, and so we like to believe.

Brian Viner: We'll always have Paris – and our bikes

Wednesday, 14 May 2008

It has sometimes been hard, down the years, to arrive back in this country from a holiday abroad and not find immediate, grumpy fault with everything. To stop myself venturing down Victor Meldrew Avenue, as it were, I have sat on trains halted by the latest points failure just outside Didcot, or sat for hours on motorways with two lanes inexplicably closed in both directions, or joined the great mooching multitude on the London Underground for one short, horrible journey costing £4, or simply listened to a series of very loud mobile phone conversations, pointedly reminding myself of the many reasons why I enjoy living in Britain.

Brian Viner: The naked truth about football, not a pretty picture

Saturday, 10 May 2008

Far be it for this column to blow its own trumpet, but here goes anyway. On 11 August last year, on the opening day of the Premier League season, it began thus: "You don't have to be Nostradamus, or even Eileen Drewery, to predict what is going to happen in the Premier League season, which begins today with no certainties except that Manchester United will win it, Chelsea will finish second, Arsenal will finish third and Liverpool fourth. That I know this before the season kicks off is of course dispiriting beyond belief, and means that as a source of excitement I must already focus on the relegation battle: any three from Derby County, Wigan, Birmingham City, Fulham, Reading and Sunderland."

Brian Viner: A knight to challenge Sir Alex in footballing derring-do

Saturday, 3 May 2008

How, I wonder, might we estimate the total number of column inches devoted in the national press this week to the exploits of Manchester United and Chelsea in reaching the first notionally all-English European Cup final, and to the achievements of their respective managers, Sir Alex Ferguson and Avram Grant (a total which I confess to boosting myself elsewhere in today's paper)?

Brian Viner: The mystery is how Goss and his crew find courage

Saturday, 26 April 2008

About 15 years ago, I was offered an interesting journalistic assignment: spending four days and nights on a fishing trawler off the coast of Cornwall. In February. My editor thought that I was just the man to write a colour story about the experience, but in the end, it became clear to him that I probably wasn't (manacling myself to railings outside his office screaming "please, please, please don't send me to sea" might have planted the first seed of doubt in his mind).

Brian Viner: Don't despair: polite people do still exist

Wednesday, 23 April 2008

Trying to find uplifting words in the national press can be like fishing for marlin in Lake Windermere, so I am indebted, as Cyril Fletcher used to say on That's Life! to John Grist, whose letter in these pages yesterday put a spring in my step and a song in my heart.

Brian Viner: Mark Speight and the shattering of a child's illusions

Thursday, 17 April 2008

In December 1971, when I was 10 years old, an American actor called Pete Duel killed himself. To my friends and me, the news came as a horrible blow. Duel played the outlaw Hannibal Heyes, alias Joshua Smith, in our favourite TV show, Alias Smith and Jones.

Brian Viner: Country Life

Wednesday, 16 April 2008

'My face was all but obliterated by a gooey mess. It was not comforting that Robert Mugabe had suffered similarly'

Brian Viner: Does Tiger burn too bright to keep up with Jones?

Saturday, 5 April 2008

Our betting correspondent, Mr Hey, with whom I am privileged to share this page, knows as well as I do that every gambler, like every fisherman, has a story about the one that got away. And while I hesitate to call myself a gambler, lest I give the wrong impression to my mother, who reads this column and was married for 24 years to a compulsive gambler in the form of my late father, I have been known to press into the palms of Mr Ladbroke the odd tenner, one of which accompanied a betting slip marked "double: Durham Edition to win the Grand National, Nick Faldo to win the US Masters".

Brian Viner: Country Life

Wednesday, 2 April 2008

'As P�rigord is for truffles, Bresse for chickens, and indeed Barnsley for chops, so is Herefordshire for snails'

Brian Viner: History is bunk so Everton must put hoodoo to bed

Saturday, 29 March 2008

Stoked up by the media, football fans have always enjoyed the idea that certain fixtures are subject to well-established jinxes, that it is 30 years since team X won in London or 20 seasons since team Y prevailed in Manchester, or that for team Z a particular stadium is a "bogey" ground, and that the weight of history is consequently tilted against them.

Brian Viner: Beattie breaks the mould ... 27 years after the event

Saturday, 22 March 2008

A fortnight ago in this space I explained the predicament of 41-year-old Linda Uttley, once a super-fit forward with the England women's rugby team, but now suffering from a rare form of terminal cancer. Last Friday at a hotel in Richmond a dinner took place to raise funds for Linda's care, and a number of readers of this column were moved to make donations, for which I offer my –and, more to the point, her – gratitude.

Brian Viner: Country Life

Wednesday, 19 March 2008

'In Herefordshire, where practically every town has a top-notch butcher, Delia has slain the sacred cow'

Brian Viner: Cup runneth over with true spirit of 'Fantastic Four'

Saturday, 15 March 2008

Last weekend, 44 men collectively breathed life back into the FA Cup. But I wonder whether the blazers at the Football Association feel as indebted as they should to the players of Barnsley, Cardiff City, West Bromwich Albion and Portsmouth.

Brian Viner: Raise a glass – or six – to Uttley, a true rugby spirit

Saturday, 8 March 2008

To previous generations of international rugby union players, popping into a London nightclub for 20 minutes, reportedly to drop some tickets off for a mate and without consuming any alcohol, must seem like a laughably innocuous reason for a dynamic rising star for Wasps and England to be dropped two days before the Calcutta Cup match. Take a former star for Wasps and England, who one evening on tour in Paris, in 1992, stripped almost to the buff and, covered in butter and salt, took on and beat a French No 8, a hulk of a bloke called Bernard, in a sumo wrestling match. Linda Uttley could teach Danny Cipriani a thing or two about painting the town red.

Brian Viner: Country Life

Wednesday, 5 March 2008

'I was going to visit Miss Whiplash the other day, but she advised me not to, as the police were coming'

Brian Viner: Drogba's theatrics adding insult to Eduardo's injury

Saturday, 1 March 2008

Every weekend, English football at the top level produces at least one particularly striking image – be it a great goal, a wonderful save, a nasty foul, an unseemly scrap, an incandescent manager or a card-brandishing referee – that dominates most of the back pages on the Monday morning and that those of us still in thrall to the game, despite its manifold flaws, continue to talk about well into the following week. By the following Saturday, the image has faded, ready for a new one to take its place. Thus the season passes.

Brian Viner: Ashes to Ashes, Trescothick and the 'taliswomen'

Saturday, 23 February 2008

As far as I am aware, I'm not related, even on my mother's side, to Emmeline Pankhurst. Emily Davison, the suffragette who threw herself in front of the King's horse in the 1913 Derby and died of her injuries, has never been one of my heroines.

Brian Viner: If Gordon's in the South Seas, could his bubble burst?

Thursday, 21 February 2008

A few days before it was announced that Fidel Castro was stepping down as the President of Cuba, a gigantic image of Gordon Brown, with a red flower jauntily tucked behind his right ear, was projected on to the side of the Houses of Parliament.

Brian Viner: Country Life

Wednesday, 20 February 2008

'On BBC Hereford & Worcester, people can promote their own events. This is radio at its best'

Brian Viner: Closer our idols fly to the sun, more we enjoy their falls

Saturday, 16 February 2008

Sir Ian Botham, as perhaps you read, refused to commentate on the second one-day cricket international between New Zealand and England this week, after arriving at Seddon Park in Hamilton to find that the Sky Sports commentary box was actually a Portakabin mounted on high scaffolding. "I don't do heights," he said. "I'll go in helicopters and planes but they're meant to fly. Commentary boxes aren't."

Brian Viner: The set of odds that all gamblers ignore

Friday, 15 February 2008

As the son of a heavy gambler and sometime bookmaker, whose betting shop in Liverpool in the 1960s was successful only as a counterblast to the old adage that there is no such thing as a poor bookie, I learnt with sadness that an acquaintance of mine, the prolific betting correspondent Angus "Statto" Loughran, has been declared insolvent with large debts owed to unnamed creditors.

Brian Viner: Masterclasses in sporting life from the old school

Saturday, 9 February 2008

My old school – King George V Grammar School for Boys, Southport – has been much on my mind this week. On Monday I received my copy of The Red Rose, the magazine of the Old Georgians' Association, and it contained the sad and unexpected news that my old Latin master, T B L Davies, passed away a couple of months ago.

Brian Viner: Country Life

Wednesday, 6 February 2008

'If the existence of 37 foxes rather than 37 schools were at stake, metropolitan Britain would doubtless be outraged'

Brian Viner: Poulter's mouth joins his trousers in being a bit loud

Saturday, 2 February 2008

The last refuge of a sporting scoundrel – when something he said on the record to a journalist has landed him in hot water – is the claim that he was "misquoted", or his words "taken out of context".

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