By ANTON RIPPON CHRISTMAS is coming and the spirit of Scrooge is alive and well in the EFL Championship. A football club that cannot afford to play its players’ wages has banned a local sports journalist after he posted a gif of a scene from the film “The Muppets Christmas Carol”. I understand Wanderers’ players […]
As Richard Scudamore prepares to ride off into the sunset after changing the financial face of football thanks to tv revenue, ANTON RIPPON looks back at how the sport started to cash in. WHAT a difference 35 years makes. Of course it does, it’s half a lifetime ago. But I am still marvelling at how […]
By ANTON RIPPON It’s an old joke: the Queen fits the exact profile of a Manchester United supporter – she knows nothing about football and she lives in London. That, of course, in unfair to the tens of thousands of knowledgeable United fans, some of who actually do live in Manchester. And now the Manchester […]
By ANTON RIPPON Two regional dailies led a 50-strong field that included national newspaper tipsters going into the last day of the 2018 Racing Post Flat season naps competition. Melissa Jones (pictured above), horse racing correspondent of the Gloucestershire Echo, and “Fortunatus” of the Sheffield Star were almost neck-and-neck with Jones holding a small lead […]
By ANTON RIPPON A 238-strong list of the “most respected journalists”, as nominated by their peers, includes only 20 sports journalists – and is extremely lean on representation from the red tops. Published by national training body the NCTJ, the list is the result of a survey in which journalists who are working in the […]
By ANTON RIPPON Frank Johnson, whose most precious technical aid was the pen-knife he used to sharpen his pencil, has died at the age of 78. Johnson worked for the Northern Echo for 43 years, all but one of them as the paper’s Sunderland reporter. He also covered athletics and greyhound racing. He joined the […]
By ANTON RIPPON AN award-winning photographer whose work regularly adorned the sports pages of the nation’s newspapers during Brian Clough’s glory days – and who was once nearly shot down by police who thought that his helicopter was trying to free a great train robber – has died. Les Parkin covered Derby County when they […]
Voting is now open for the SJA2018 British Sports Awards sponsored by The National Lottery. As far as ANTON RIPPON is concerned, there is only one contender for sportswoman of the year and that’s Dina Asher-Smith, who won the Pat Besford outstanding performance award at SJA2015. Here’s why. Dina Asher-Smith believes that she can now […]
Geraint Thomas’s Tour de France trophy has been stolen during a nationwide tour but that’s nothing when compared to the day England lost the World Cup. ANTON RIPPON reveals all. IT was hot news. On March 20 1966, England lost the World Cup. No, really lost it. The trophy is still one of football’s iconic […]
By ANTON RIPPON WE all have our sporting memories, and it seems that the older we get the more important they become. As they say, it’s an age thing. Now the remarkable library of books on rugby union, collected over many years by former SJA chair, the late Terry O’Connor, is helping older fans of […]
