Martin Samuel

3 weeks ago | thetimes.com | Martin Samuel

News being anything that makes the reader say “Gee whiz!”, the revelation that budget shortfalls mean the police are going to pick and choose which crimes to investigate seems rather underwhelming. Haven’t they been doing that for years? Decades, even?

3 weeks ago | thetimes.com | Martin Samuel

The best laid plans and all that. Back in 1993, England were playing Norway in Oslo. The World Cup qualification process was in a perilous state but Graham Taylor, the manager, had a trick up his sleeve. He was going to play three at the back, with Gary Pallister picking up Norway’s tall striker Jostein Flo. The problem was that he feared this plan would get out.

3 weeks ago | thetimes.com | Martin Samuel

The strange thing is, nobody really calls it the farmers’ league. Maybe in a few memes, on the odd message board, in some of the more heated corners of social media, but no serious football person thinks of Ligue 1 as a competition for agriculteurs. What is a farmers’ league anyway? It would be one in which the players are part-time, which France’s are not, and the football crude, which French football is not.

3 weeks ago | thetimes.com | Martin Samuel

“The end of the glitter,” was how Paris St Germain president Nasser Al-Kheleaifi described his club’s change of direction. Yet as cannons fired confetti into the Bavarian night sky, PSG were very much this season’s glitter band. The best team in Europe by word of mouth and now by deed, the most emphatic champions in the history of this competition — no one has ever won the final by a five goal margin — and the most captivating watch, too. PSG blew Inter Milan away in Munich in way others could not.

3 weeks ago | thetimes.com | Martin Samuel

Towards the end of the film This Is Spinal Tap, the band is forced to play much-diminished venues. Lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel has quit, along with manager Ian Faith, and the tour is being run by ambitious Jeanine, girlfriend of lead singer and rhythm guitarist David St Hubbins and a devotee of yoga and astrology. They arrive at the next location to see the billing “Puppet show” with, beneath it, “and Spinal Tap”.