Time to talk about some actual sporting success?
By John Cushing, May 2025
When even Sky Sports are promoting the NEXT season in the Premier League, surely it’s time to remove those footy spectacles and look for some actual sport going on?
With everything done and dusted at the top and bottom, it’s incredible the amount of coverage a place in the Champions League is getting in the sporting world. Will it be Chelsea, Forest or Aston Villa in Europe? Whoopee do! Who cares!? Half of Fleet Street’s finest seemed to even want to get away from it, heading to Munich to ‘finally’ see England captain Harry Kane win a trophy aged 31! (Surely two lines in the paper would have sufficed but well done for getting a weekend away!) And Liverpool v Arsenal on Super Sunday was like watching the Community Shield ‘friendly’ with most of the players seemingly with one foot in the sand and on their summer holidays already! (Bet Trent Alexander-Arnold wished he actually had been!)
As a football fan, sports journalist and former News Editor I still find it incredible that even meaningless football matches still get so much coverage. Are we really that desperate?
Over the weekend, I appeared on Times Radio, looking ahead to the day’s sport - it’s something I really enjoy and even had some good comments about it on socials! We did a bit of cricket (which was my suggestion as the IPL was postponed and then hopefully restarted!) and also discussed the brilliant start to 2025 for Jack Draper and Emma Raducanu in the tennis world - both still winning on clay in Rome - watch out for Wimbledon! But apart from that the rest of the discussion was about football, and qualifying for a competition next season, not winning anything this year! I was pretty vocal that not sure anyone apart from supporters of those teams care!
We could have discussed Josh Tarling - the youngest ever rider to win a stage of the Giro D’Italia and his first Grand Tour win for Ineos Grenadiers (the ‘other team’ in Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s life - away from Man Utd!) I remember discussing Josh during Paris 2024 as a medal contender for Team GB and he just missed out on an Olympics medal by 2 seconds finishing 4th in time trial, after cruelly suffering a puncture on the streets of the French capital. He was someone to watch last summer - why not talk about him this summer?
And sticking with the Paris 2024 Olympics, the games were Great Britain’s best for athletics in 40 years - as the likes of Keely Hodgkinson won 10 medals in the Stade De France. This weekend, Great Britain’s 5 relay teams booked a place at the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo with a stunning gold medal in the women’s 4x100m beating the Americans, Jamaicans and Spanish. What was even more incredible is the final team included two international debutantes Nia Wedderburn-Goodison and Success Eduan, joining Paris Olympic medalist Amy Hunt and British indoor champion Bianca Williams to win the World Relays in Guangzhou, China. And these events weren’t run in the middle of the night UK time - but early Sunday afternoon prime sport viewing time - unless you were watching the Champions League battle between Newcastle and Chelsea of course!
These British athletes were the stars of last summer, and Tarling and British sprinters will be again in LA in 3 years time I’ve no doubt. If they’re good enough to be talked about then, why not now? Paralympic champion Will Bayley and Paris medalist Bly Twomey also won their second golds of the week in the mixed doubles Para table tennis at the ITTF World Para Challenger Lasko in Slovenia.
So the athletes are clearly doing their bit. We’re also doing our best to cover these events, generate interest and maintain that Olympic and Paralympic feeling in-between Games. But we also need support, to help spread the word through radio, audio and podcasts. Get in touch if you can help us help you!
But in this rare summer where there’s no international men’s football tournament (even Man City & Chelsea don’t want to play the FIFA Club World Cup do they?) let’s hear more about sporting success, rather than potential European places!
