Category: Sports

Watching this weekend’s English Premier League matches, it’s clear that “everybody expects” that by the end of the season three of the top four slots will be filled by Chelsea, Manchester United, and Liverpool. ((Of course everyone also has an opinion as to what the order should be…)) But which will be the fourth team? Arsenal? Tottenham? Everton? Or (mirabile dictu) will Manchester City prove to be more than a flash in the pan? I hope it will be Spurs, with Berbatov and Keane weaving their magic, and Lennon finally coming into his own. But the early signs aren’t promising.
So who do you think it’ll be? Or are the “big three” going to falter? ((I just watched Manchester United vs. Tottenham, and ManU’s defence was absolute rubbish. A fair score would have been 2-1 to Tottenham, including the penalty for Brown’s handball.)) It’ll be interesting to revisit this blog entry at the end of the season.

After the soap-opera of Saturday’s qualifying, it was nice to see the Hungarian Grand Prix come down to simple head-to-head driving. Yes, of course the track is hard to pass on – but not impossible, as Alonso showed early on. All of the top four (Hamilton, Raikkonen, Heidfeld and Alonso) drove well.
Which leaves Massa. OK, starting 14th is nobody’s idea of a good time, but the great drivers would accept it as a challenge and fight their way up the field. Instead, Massa spent a lot of his time stuck behind third-tier drivers like Sato, and he never looked competitive. More to the point, he didn’t look like a championship contender. Success in racing depends on driving skill, intelligence, physical fitness, and temperament. And is it merely coincidence that as soon as Michael Schumacher leaves the team, Ferrari starts to stumble, both operationally and technically? (Actually, I think Ross Brawn‘s “sabbatical” may be more significant.)

Extraordinary goings-on at the qualifying for Sunday’s Hungarian Grand Prix this morning. Hamilton had been comfortably fastest in the first two sessions, but in the third… Well, here’s how the BBC reported it:

The 22-year-old British rookie was fastest until the Spaniard pipped him by 0.107 seconds with his final lap of the session in the dying seconds. Hamilton was unable to reply after being forced to wait behind Alonso at their final stop, leaving him too little time for a final flying lap. Afterwards, Hamilton refused to be drawn in to criticising Alonso for delaying his exit out of the pit lane ahead of his final run.
“There’s not really much to say – you saw what happened,” he said. “The team did a great job and we had very good pace, but I’m not aware of what happened. You should ask the team.”
When asked as to how long he missed out on setting a final quick lap, he tersely replied: “About the same amount of time I was held up in the pit stop.”
Explaining his hold, Alonso said: “The team held me back in this. We tried to have some space with the Ferrari (Raikkonen) in front of us.”
But team boss Ron Dennis said: “It is a matter to be discussed within the team, and we will do so later.”

There only seem to be two alternatives: incompetence by the team, or deliberate balking by Alonso. And when you compare what happened with the meticulous procedure that the team followed in earlier pit stops, it’s pretty clear that Alonso held up his team mate deliberately. It sounds as if Ron Dennis agrees. I guess this means that Alonso doesn’t believe he can beat Hamilton with sheer skill.
At most circuits, Hamilton would have a chance to out-drag Alonso to the first corner, but at this track the “dirty” line is much slower than the “clean” line. Perhaps if there’s a cloudburst after the GP2 event, to wash away all the “marbles”…
UPDATE: Gossip on the boards suggests that Alonso’s personal trainer (or “his personal physio Fabrizio Borra”) was shouting instructions to Fernando over the team radio during that controversial pitstop. Many fans are pointing out that when Schumacher baulked the entire field at Monaco last year, he was sent to the back of the grid. Meanwhile Planet-F1 is reporting that the stewards are investigating the incident. Throughout it all, Hamilton is displaying remarkable grace under pressure. [UPDATE 3: Well, maybe not quite as much grace as I thought.]
UPDATE 2: This in from the Beeb:

Alonso and Hamilton, as well as team principal Ron Dennis, were summoned to an FIA inquiry to explain why the Spaniard had stopped for such a long time.
“The commissioners decided that Alonso unnecessarily interfered with another competitor, Hamilton, and he has been penalised five places on the grid,” said an FIA statement.
“The attitude of the team at the end of qualification was considered prejudicial to the interests of competition and motor racing.”
McLaren immediately appealed the decision but this will only cover the withdrawal of points not the personal penalty handed out to Alonso.

In other words, Ron Dennis agreed that Alonso got what he deserved, but argues that the rest of the team had nothing to do with it. What do you think are the odds that Alonso will be driving for McLaren next year?

Watching Lewis Hamilton’s McLaren bury itself in the tyre wall during qualifying, after a mechanical failure in the pits caused his right front tyre to fail.
Hopefully he’ll be OK to race in the European GP tomorrow. Of course he’d be starting from 10th on the grid, so realistically he would be unlikely to finish on the podium. Unless it rains, of course.
In the meantime, enjoy this:

Indianapolis: Another Grand Prix, another pole position, another victory for Hamilton. Simply amazing. And another “I must be dreaming” story: teenager Sebastian Vettel, standing in for Robert Kubica after his crash last week, brings the BMW Sauber home in 8th place and scores a championship point in his first GP. ((However it seems that Kubica will be fit for the French GP in two weeks time, so this may be Vettel’s only appearance in 2007.))
At the end of last season, people were wringing their hands and worrying about what would happen to F1 after Michael Schumacher’s retirement. The answer seems to be, “the best bloody F1 season in ages!!!”

Lewis Hamilton at the Canadian Grand Prix: first pole, first victory, total command of the race! Wonderful.
But what a bizarre race. Crashes, black-flagging, crashes, pit errors, crashes. Raikkonen and Alonso duking it out – that’s not unexpected, but they were fighting over 10th place! Alonso was completely out of form, making mistake after mistake and finally being beaten in a fair fight by Takuma Sato. There were four safety cars. Behind Hamilton, Heidfeld and Wurz came in second and third. And Kovalainen, after a horrendous practice and qualifying during which he wrecked the car, blew an engine, and then wrecked the car again, came through from dead last to finish fourth. Of the 22 starters, 8 retired and 2 were disqualified.
The biggest crash of the day was Robert Kubica‘s frightening 180 MPH barrel-roll, and the medical team seemed to take an age to get him out of his shattered car. However they took him to hospital in Montreal and (at this point) he seems to be awake and in stable condition with a broken leg.
As for Hamilton, in his first six Grands Prix he has finished 3rd, 2nd, 2nd, 2nd, 2nd, and 1st. Simply amazing.
UPDATE: As The English Guy points out, the frequent safety car periods mean that Hamilton’s final margin of victory (4.3 seconds) doesn’t reflect the extent of his domination. In addition, the new (U.S. style) safety car rules allow lapped traffic to overtake the safety car and rejoin at the back of the “train”. Without this, Hamilton would certainly have lapped most of the field – perhaps all of it.

Without any real competition from Ferrari, today’s Monaco Grand Prix was a chance for McLaren to put on a splendid show, and they did. Alonso drove beautifully, and Hamilton continued the unprecedented string of performances that are causing people like Jackie Stewart to tip him for true greatness. They lapped all their rivals up to Massa in third place (and Massa himself lapped his team-mate Raikkonen), but they never eased off. It was fascinating to watch the difference in their styles: Alonso was absolutely consistent, lap after lap, while Hamilton was always seeking to push just a little harder, relying on his extraordinary car control to recover when he stepped over the limits.
Having said all that, this was Monaco. Passing is almost impossible. Alonso took the pole, led from the start, and only a mistake would have allowed Hamilton to come in first. But that didn’t stop people from moaning that McLaren had prevented Hamilton from getting the win. From the BBC:

“I’m sure everybody feels – and a lot of people will feel it in England – that there is favouritism or some penalisation that is given to either Lewis or Fernando,” Dennis said.
“We are scrupulously fair at all times in how we run this Grand Prix team.
“This circuit has to be addressed in a team way, and that is why we have won 14 races here.

Exactly. I’m confident that Hamilton is going to win a GP this season, and he has a good shot at the championship. Let’s not get melodramatic.
Speaking of melodramatic, WTF is happening to Ferrari? Paging Ross Brawn. And these super-soft tyres look like a really bad idea.
UPDATE: Oh dear, here come the FIA bureaucrats.

The Malaysian Grand Prix turned out to be a classic. First we had a nail-biting down-to-the-wire qualifying session, with the top four drivers duking it out until the last second. This produced a finely balanced grid, with a Ferrari alongside a McLaren on the first and second rows, and with the mercurial Massa on pole. Of course we all knew that the Ferraris were going to be quicker, after Raikkonen’s domination of the Australian Grand Prix.
Except it didn’t turn out that way. Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton forced their way to the front at the first corner, leaving Massa stuck in third. While Alonso raced away, Hamilton held back, holding a precise line and speed so that Massa couldn’t quite get past. On lap three, Massa outbraked Hamilton, but he was carrying too much energy into the corner and Hamilton slipped past. Three laps later Massa tried again and made the same mistake, but this time he wound up in the gravel trap. He rejoined in 5th, which is where he finished. (Perhaps Massa’s car was damaged, but I must say that I found his subdued driving after the off-track excursion very disappointing.)
For most of the race, Raikkonen remained a distant third; he was nursing an engine that had been damaged in Australia. But towards the end he decided to throw caution to the winds and attacked Hamilton. The Englishman was having troubles of his own – his water bottle was empty, and the track temperature was over 130F – and Raikkonen was running about half a second a lap quicker. That doesn’t sound much, but with a couple of laps left the gap was down to about one second. But Hamilton kept his nerve, and came home in second place. Two Grands Prix, two podium finishes – not a bad start to his career!

Sometimes the best sporting events don’t involve the top clubs fighting it out for a championship. In today’s match, West Ham were desperate for any points that they could salvage to stave off their (increasingly likely) relegation from the Premiership at the end of the season. [I have long thought that something like this would be a definite improvement for the smug cartels that make up U.S. sports. But I digress….] Spurs are in wonderful form right now: even though Keane was out, Berbatov is playing beautfully, Defoe shows hints of being a future Ronaldo, and Robinson is one of the very best keepers anywhere.
The match was an absolute classic. West Ham started out with a ferocious energy that startled Spurs and left the visitors 2-0 down at half time. But early in the second half, a pointless foul gave Spurs a penalty, and 12 minutes later they scored a second goal. West Ham looked broken, but they kept at it, denied Spurs time and time again, and fought back. So it was 2-2 with five minutes to play – plus a hefty chunk of extra time, due to an epidemic of heavy tackles. (The Hammers had six players booked.)
In the 85th minute, West Ham scored to go 3-2 up, but 4 minutes Berbatov equalized. Full time. The minutes of extra time ticked by, and it seemed that either club was capable of scoring, but couldn’t quite do it. Finally, just when I was thinking that the referee’s watch must have broken, West Ham threw everything into a final attack, Spurs won the ball and counter-attacked, the West Ham keeper blocked Defoe’s shot but couldn’t hold on to the ball, and Stalteri tapped it into the net. Whew! It was just like something out of a comic book.
And kudos to the producers of the Fox Soccer Channel, who realized what a gem this game was, and cancelled a couple of “classic football” shows in order to rebroadcast today’s match again.

I’ve got into a nice, relaxed pattern on Sunday mornings: I make a pot of coffee, curl up in front of the TV with the coffee and a pack of oatmeal-and-raisin cookies biscuits, and watch back-to-back English Premier League matches for four hours. It’s a nice, predictable, comfortable habit.

Until this morning.

First West Ham beat Manchester United 1-0, which means that Chelsea are only 2 points behind ManU (sorry!) the Red Devils at the top of the league. And then Spurs, hitherto winless on the road, beat Manchester City, breaking their perfect home record. The second match included one of the prettiest goals I’ve ever seen: a glorious 20-yard half-volley by Tom Huddlestone (pictured).

Great viewing, but hardly the relaxing Sunday morning I had anticipated. In fact I’m going to have to dig out the vacuum cleaner to clean up all the cookie crumbs….