Although a TV writer and reviewer by trade, Mike Ward has written on sport for titles including FourFourTwo, the Daily Telegraph and Today. He's the author of Gullhanger, a season in the life of Brighton & Hove Albion FC, appears regularly on talkSPORT – as well as numerous other radio stations – and has co-hosted BBC Sussex's football phone-in.
I genuinely am utterly clueless about American Football. Or almost utterly. Obviously I’ve caught glimpses of the occasional match on telly, but I’ve certainly never sat through a whole one.
By Mike Ward | Sport | Wednesday, 27 October 2010 at 10:51 am
I’ve been scouring the newspapers for domestic cricket news. And something rather startling has occurred to me. There isn’t any. Honestly. Absolutely none whatsoever. To the point where I’ve started to think, ‘Hang on, have I made this whole thing up? Does cricket actually exist? Or did I just dream it?’
Because now I stop to [...]
They’re talking about cutting back on the number of Twenty20 cricket fixtures next season. I can’t say I’m unhappy about this.
Twenty20 is the version of cricket I like the least. Which I guess is slightly odd, because, as a latecomer to the game, and therefore in no position to label myself a traditionalist, I think [...]
I am such a fool. On reflection, what I should have done was reach across, grab it, snaffle it out in my trouser pocket and take it home to flog on eBay. David “Bumble” Lloyd’s pork steak, I mean. It’s not as if he wanted it.
“I’m giving up on this,” he’d already declared in frustration, [...]
Assuming we all agree – and I think we should, or else we’ll be here all day – that football is the world’s most exciting game (my disillusionment is with its culture, not with the spectacle itself), then I think it’s fair to say that the Uefa Champions League is the world’s finest sporting tournament.
And, [...]
It may seem rather an odd time to be arguing this point, but football could learn an awful lot from cricket.
I base this statement, let me stress, on 40-odd years as a football supporter – and four whole months as a cricket fan. So please feel free to suggest I’m talking absolute tosh.
Over the course [...]
By Mike Ward | Sport | Tuesday, 7 September 2010 at 12:35 pm
Strange question, this, sort of, but how long do you need to have been following a sport, or a particular team, before you’re allowed an opinion on it?
A week? A month? A season? A lifetime?
Get it wrong, butt in before your views are considered valid, before you’ve paid your dues or clocked up an acceptable [...]
The poor bloke trying to flog old cricket books isn’t exactly doing a roaring trade. Then again, it’s rather hard to browse through the titles when his entire stock is draped in an enormous protective tarpaulin.
A few yards along – just past the decidedly incongruous ice cream van – the chaps manning the official Sussex County [...]
Probably the bit I liked best during Saturday’s Hampshire-Somerset twenty20 final – certainly the real laugh-out-loud moment – was when, with just one ball to go and everything still to play for, the funny man strolled on with his pot of paint.
Yes, here we were, at the crucial, nail-biting point in the biggest domestic cricket [...]
After more than 40 years of following football to the exclusion of every other sport, I’m turning my attention to cricket.
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