Hamilton takes Top Gear challenge

From BBC Sport

Formula One star Lewis Hamilton is to swap his multi-million pound, 230mph McLaren to drive a modest family car for BBC Two’s Top Gear show on Sunday.

Hamilton gets behind the wheel of a Suzuki Liana and takes on Top Gear’s resident driver The Stig by trying to post the fastest lap around a track.

The 22-year-old Briton is out to beat The Stig’s blistering time of one minute 44.4 seconds.

Hamilton’s time will be revealed during the programme which starts at 2000 GMT.

Former Formula One stars Nigel Mansell, Damon Hill, Jenson Button and Mark Webber have already taken part in the programme’s “star in a reasonably priced car” feature.

The select group of former drivers is pitted in a separate category to stars such as Hugh Grant, Simon Cowell, Ellen MacArthur and Gordon Ramsay who have all taken the challenge in the past.

Hamilton, who narrowly failed to win the world championship in his rookie season after losing out to Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen by one point, also goes head-to-head with presenter Jeremy Clarkson in a studio interview.

The McLaren driver talks about the thrill of crashing and how he still cannot avoid his dad’s driving tips.

“He truly believes he’s a better driver than me and that if he had been given the opportunity, he would be in F1 right now,” said Hamilton, who also admits it has been his dream to appear on the show.

Elsewhere in the interview, Clarkson asks who Hamilton would want to be his team mate next year and speculates he presumably wants someone useless - to which the driver answers: “Do you want a go?”

BBC 606 Debate: Can Hamilton beat The Stig

Where you can find all you dont need to know about lightsabers

Pak Spin-Cornered Tigers Face Extinction

From Cricinfo writer Kamran Abbasi’s Blog-Pak Spin ‘The Mysterious World of Pakistan Cricket’

Pakistan fans have been wondering for over a year about what happened to the legendary cornered tiger spirit? The Twenty20 world Cup offered a brief reminder of what it was meant to be like but ever since Shoaib Malik’s team has been cornered and cowering. The captain has faced criticism for his unwillingness to bare his teeth and his fellow writers have barely raised a growl.

Encouraging performances have been sporadic and insufficient to revitalise Pakistan’s Tigers, young of age but weary of soul. As if a loss of spirit wasn’t enough, the physical health of Malik’s shrinking violets means that they are barely able to field a team in Kolkata. A psychiatrist would be examining the likelihood of psychosomatic illness.

Unfortunately for Pakistan it is the bowlers who are afflicted. By some margin they have been the better half of Malik’s team, and it is the batsmen, who failed so miserably in the second innings of the first test, who must now carry the battle to India.

I hate to say this but Pakistan’s best bet in Kolkata must be a draw. With the bowling attack that they are rumoured to be able to muster, India’s batsmen must sense a kill. The cornered tigers face extinction. This is a battle for survival. Pakistan fans will want to know their team has the stomach for it.

Click here to get to Kamran Abbasi’s blog

Alan Shearer should climb off sofa and show that he wants to manage

By the Times’s chief sports correspondent, Matt Dickinson

If Alan Shearer was unusually impatient to have become a manager, he could have been one at 25. It is amazing to reflect that, in his desperation to keep his star striker, Jack Walker, the then-Blackburn Rovers owner, offered Shearer the opportunity to be player-manager at Ewood Park in the summer of 1996.

Remarkably, Shearer took the offer seriously enough to have phoned Kenny Dalglish to ask his advice. More extraordinary still, Dalglish told him to take the job. “There are not many players of your age,” Dalglish said, “who would get that kind of chance.” Indeed there aren’t, and for good reasons.

Managing a top-flight club is no job for a 25-year-old striker without a day’s experience, whatever his status. There is an argument to say that such a high-ranking role should not even be given to a 37-year-old who has never previously coached a team except to gain his badges.

As Fabio Capello said of the decision to make Gianluca Vialli manager of Chelsea, it was “like putting someone who has never driven behind the wheel of a Formula One car”. Even so, quite a few people seem to think that Shearer is equipped to manage England.

It is a campaign that has a fair degree of public support, but it fails to convince, however many references are made to Jürgen Klinsmann or Marco van Basten, two other great strikers who took over their national teams after minimal time at coaching’s coal face.

At least Van Basten had spent a year with the Ajax B team while, in Klinsmann’s case, the circumstances were unusual in that he did not have to worry about qualification for the 2006 World Cup. Shearer would be thrown straight into a hazardous campaign and it really would be a step into the unknown, with trips to Kazakhstan and Belarus. After the traumas of the past 18 months, the last thing that the FA needs is to be taking a gamble on England’s 2010 World Cup prospects with an unknown quantity.

Shearer may have the making of a decent England head coach, but not now, even if he would have the instant respect of the dressing-room. That is easily lost by a couple of defeats.

So if we are ruling out Shearer for England, what about Shearer for Newcastle United, where he is an idol, a legend, a god? Tyneside would hold street parties if he became manager, particularly if it was in place of Sam Allardyce, who is not exactly garnering popularity in the North East.

The assumption ever since Shearer left Blackburn for Newcastle is that it will happen one day and, while the former No 9 has been very careful not to fan the flames or to heap any pressure on Allardyce in his remarks on Match of the Day, the speculation will mount if results continue to be abject, as they may well do, with Blackburn Rovers and Arsenal in opposition over the next eight days.

The assumption that Shearer will take the job on one day comes hand in hand with an assumption that he will be good at it. But can we be certain? Perhaps all we know for sure is that there is something about Shearer, a seriousness of purpose, that would make you think twice about betting against him.

Steve McClaren - A Tribute Song

This was so hilarious I couldn’t help putting it up.

Only a genius can live up to England’s great expectations

By the Times’s Simon Barnes

No coaching job is impossible. The England job, so abjectly vacated by Steve McClaren last week, is not impossible; what, after all, is a coach required to do? A very good coach consistently enables players to achieve the best results they are capable of. That can be done with any team or individual. Sven-Göran Eriksson came close to doing it for England, with three successive quarter-final finishes and 2½ near-immaculate qualifying campaigns. McClaren fell short. England were capable of qualifying for Euro 2008 and messed it up.

The problem with being a football coach is not coaching but the expectations of your employer. Which, unless your team are owned by Roman Abramovich, means the expectations of supporters. Thus a Manchester United manager is required to win the league title at least every other year, the Arsenal manager to do so one year in three, the Liverpool manager at least once, soon. About 15 Barclays Premier League managers are expected to provide a top-ten finish; all 20 are expected to avoid relegation.

Clearly, then, not all expectations are capable of realisation. That’s why football coaching is a somewhat silly business. An England manager is expected to win the World Cup, a trophy the country has won once in 18 tournaments, having entered 15. A brief glance at England’s record demonstrates that with a good coach the country generally provides a quarter-final sort of team. So the job has a silly expectation.You come in, do your damnedest and, if you are a very good coach, you will leave with a quarter or a semi to your name and your reputation undamaged - everywhere except England.

But there are coaches of genius who enable players to achieve results beyond their capabilities. If England expects a World Cup victory, they need someone capable of making the players play better than they do normally. In other words – are you listening in Soho Square? – the safe candidate can only fail.

Harmison sets inevitable tone

Last Friday was an anniversary. A year ago, England began their defence of the Ashes. It was so bizarre that, initially, my brain was unable to process what my eyes had seen. The first ball of the series caught by second slip; alas, not off the edge of the bat.

“It was the way he took it,” David Lloyd said at dinner that evening, more than once, each time miming Andrew Flintoff’s nonchalant big-handed take, as if catching wide balls was a tiresome part of second slip’s routine. “Did you write about it at all?” Just the 800 words, Bumble.

Stephen Harmison set the tone of fight and defiance for the Ashes summer of 2005 with his terrifying first over at Lord’s and he set the tone of horror and dismay for the return series with that extraordinary first ball. It led, with dreadful inevitability, to England’s still unbelievable capitulation in Adelaide. Adelaide remains one of the great sporting experiences of my life – that is, if you count horror, misery and despair as a sporting experience.

Robbo for England!

By the BBC’s Derek ’Robbo’ Robson. 

The speculation is rife in the Blue Bell. Who’s going to fill the shoes of Steve Mclaren

Not that he didn’t fill them and everything else he was wearing last Wednesday when Carson waved the Croat’s first past.

Capello could be grabbed right away, but is he tarnished by the Juve experience? And is he ready to work with British numbskulls?

Benitez seems to be packing his bags, but could he resist a rotation or several? And frankly, I don’t understand Rafa.

Harry Redknapp could do a job, but could you look at them forlorn chops if things, much like his own comely visage, started to fall apart?

O’Neill’s ruled himself out, Klinsmann might listen to offers and must have been impressed with Bentley’s swallow-dive at Fulham yesterday.

Shearer? It’s got to be a bit cosier in that studio than it is under an umbrella in the pouring rain.

Mourinho? Yes, of course, especially if the FA gets sacked and replaced by a bunch of ladies.
Anyway, so we’re chewing all this over when Tony Thompson, five pints down but still coherent said what all drunks say at a moment like this. ‘All right, Robbo, if you’re so bleeding clever, you do it!’

Yep. ME.

Now before you all say you’re not taking this seriously, Robbo, let’s look at the evidence.

I’ve got no experience. This brings a fresh perspective. You know, ‘no fear’ and all that.

I’ve never won owt as a coach, but that didn’t stop Keegan, Taylor and Hoddle.

I’m from Teesside so I won’t take no s***, and I won’t be in a hurry to go back there either.

The name’s Robson which worked OK in 1990.

I’m English.
I’m cheap.
I’d be honoured.

So let’s go for it, eh? Here’s my manifesto pledges. I admit it’s unlikely I’ll get the post so these commitments will have all the sincerity that the Lib Dems can afford to give.

Big fish who outgrew Norway’s small pool

By the Times’s Gabriele Marcotti. Despite not having played professional football, he is in my opinion one of the best football pundits around unlike most of the other guys around who weren’t very good players and certainly aren’t very good analysts.

For a while they were the epitome of Champions League longevity. Which is remarkable when one considers who they are and where they come from. Rosenborg, the Norwegian champions who face Chelsea on Wednesday, hail from Trondheim, a city with a population of a shade more than 150,000 and a ground, the Lerkendal, holding nearly 22,000.

The money men did not have Rosenborg in mind when the Champions League concept was hatched in the early 1990s, yet they reeled off 13 domestic titles between 1992 and 2004. Perhaps more impressively, they qualified for the Champions League proper on eight consecutive occasions, a record that stood until 2004 (and it took none other than Manchester United to surpass them).

Their presence made a comparatively small club familiar to a far wide audience. Along the way came plenty of highlights, including victories away to AC Milan and Borussia Dortmund, as well as a 2-0 win over a Real Madrid team who went on to win the European crown in 1998. And then there are their feats from this season: holding Chelsea to a draw at Stamford Bridge and beating Valencia at home and away.

When I think back to those teams, my mind is filled with images of a bunch of white-clad, unshaven giants (with the exception of the 5ft 6in Jahn “Mini” Jakobsen), most with unkempt hair. They had names like Erik, Bent, Frode, Vidar and, most memorably, Roar, as in Strand, who is in his thirteenth season at the club.

Such sustained success is remarkable, not least because when clubs of Rosenborg’s stature make a splash on the European scene, bigger clubs normally raid their squad. And yet this has not happened to any significant degree. Some, such as John Carew and Vegard Heggem, did move on. Others, such as Harald Brattbakk, left twice only to return shortly afterwards both times. Most, like Strand, stuck around for the ride, forsaking higher wages and greater exposure elsewhere.

Conventional wisdom cites two key factors behind Rosenborg’s success. The first is Nils Arne Eggen, the long-time manager. He was in charge from 1988-2002 (with a year’s sabbatical in 1998) and has twice returned as a special adviser. Eggen is one of those monumental figures who often surface in football’s provinces – think of Guy Roux at Auxerre. He was a creative thinker and a sterling man-manager.

His unorthodox 4-3-3 formation, which often featured wingers the size of target men, and his sudden counter-attacking surges are the stuff of tactical legend. Man for man, most of the players who have pulled on a Rosenborg shirt over the years have been unremarkable in terms of ability. Yet there they were, fighting on equal terms with Europe’s giants.

Rosenborg won a further two domestic titles after Eggen’s departure, but there were signs that things were not right and, in 2005, they finished in mid-table. They won the title again in 2006, albeit after a turbulent season during which they had three managers. Despite their Champions League success, this year was again disappointing domestically: another managerial change and a fifth-place finish.

Eggen has loomed in the background, but at 66 he has no interest in a full-time role. The highly respected Trond Sollied is expected to take over next year and that may be Rosenborg’s best hope of moving forward.

She can Read Reality Television

She can read reality television with uncanny ability. Five minutes into the program she knows that the gay chef, the one with the balding mohawk, will be asked to leave, told to pack his knives. The vagaries of throwaway statements are her tealeaves. She sees the expressions of judges, the subtleties of editing. She never misses. The selected tearfully packs his knives, as was preordained.

She can read reality television and this week she watches from Nashville, from The Grand Ole Opry Hotel, where she is attending a trade show. She and a workmate buy six-packs and watch the program in their hotel room. She boasts of her talent, predicts, and once again is right. The tough girl, the one with the streak in her hair, the one that got into all the fights, packs her tools.

She can read reality television but he cannot. At home, he packs his belongings, looks around the apartment, pats the dog on the head one last time. There’s no need to write a note. She will not be surprised to find him gone, having deciphered the signs. She can read reality and will already know.

Author : Sean T. Rogers

Number 1020: Godwin Wars