arwebb

I should have been watching the Opening Ceremony tonight from Bordeaux where I'd planned to take in some football tomorrow before heading to the Parc des Princes on Sunday. Sadly, I've had to scrub that for various reasons though I intend to make a brief trip over during the Paralympics in late August.

I really hoped tonight would be different from the tedium that I usually find in opening ceremonies but it hasn't. Still, our French friends shouldn't give a stuff what the rest of the world makes of it. This is their night like it was outs 12 years ago. My goodness, that feels a long way away.

Terrific race too. Sadly not a profitable one for this punter.

I'm not so sure, mainly because I don't think the CGF has a better option than hoping something will somehow turn up. It's as bad as that. I can't see the Commonwealth Games being a more attractive event to host in a year's time than it is now, thus making a delay to 2027 pointless, and I also can't see how a decision to cancel the 2026 edition at this point (even if that comes with the aim of holding a centenary event in 2030) would be viewed as anything other than the equivalent of signing a final death warrant. Unless a left-field alternative like Qatar can be pulled off, it seems to me that the only hope remaining is some sort of London-based rescue act which probably would not need the same level of UK government support as other parts of the country.

I understand the point and I can't see that they would be either, partly because Villa have planning permission to go ahead with the expansion and the argument being put forward for not proceeding with it by this recently arrived executive who doesn't seem to be endearing himself to Villa fans seems somewhat weak to put it mildly. But I also struggle to see what they can realistically do about it. Even if they wanted to move the games somewhere else, there is no alternative venue of similar size in the region and the option of leaving the entire Midlands region without a host venue seems somewhat excessive.

I would have thought Villa Park would get a last 16 game but, even if the expansion were going ahead, I doubt it would have secured them a quarter-final anyway. If we assume that both semi-finals and the final will be at Wembley, then I would have thought the most likely quarter-final venues would be Cardiff, the Etihad Stadium, Tottenham and either Hampden or Dublin (probably Hampden), with three of them offering bigger capacities than Villa Park. There's also been talk about increasing capacity at the North Stand end of Villa Park for years without anything moving forward.

Quite a lot of media coverage this week speculating about whether the intended Belfast venue for 2028, a redeveloped Casement Park will actually go ahead and what might happen if it doesn't. The Times - Euro 2028 organisers fear Casement Park won’t be ready Publicly, the Irish FA are still talking a good game and it may be that the restoration of the Northern Ireland Executive that is widely expected to proceed this weekend can help in that regard. But even if it does go ahead, it's still controversial among Northern Ireland football fans notwithstanding the fact that it's the only game in town in terms of Northern Ireland being able to play tournament games at home in 2028. I really hope that we don't get to the point of games being reallocated but discussion of this sort in the press doesn't bode well.

If it was the Evening Standard reporting this quote rather than this particular site, I would be inclined to take it a lot more seriously. In any event, as much as his main opponent appears to have some weaknesses in terms of policy detail, Mr Khan's immediate issue is to make sure he's still in a job beyond early May.

Not sure if I was the only one checking the calendar before reading this but part of me certainly wondered if April 1 had come round already. I can't imagine anyone doubting the suitability of the Lake Placid track for the job but surely a closer solution is a better one.

I'd suggest that is an absolute certainty. There has certainly been an upswing in visible republican sentiments here in the UK since the late Queen's passing so I can't see why Australia would be any different, particularly with the time that has passed since the debate was at its height. Going back to the 2026 debacle, I've spent the last few days in Yorkshire where there seems to be some discussion (at least in the press) about the possibility of some sort of northern coalition stepping up to host. Yorkshire Post - Could Yorkshire come to Commonwealth Games' rescue? Alistair Brownlee gives his verdict Yorkshire Live - Should Yorkshire and the North bid to host 2026 Commonwealth Games? I can see the theory of spreading it both practically, given the shortage of time to get ready, and politically, both in terms of the huge challenges facing local government at the moment and the potential for this to promote other long-standing policy objectives in the north of England. But do I see it happening? Not really.

Whether Blatter knew it at the time, or only recognised it once he met his own fate, I think he, and we, have to recognise that a World Cup in Saudi Arabia was inevitable one day from the moment Qatar was awarded 2022. We may still have ended up here without that decision being taken but there is no doubt in my mind that the path to this point began on his watch. What is so galling about this decision is how utterly blatant the whole set-up process, particularly the ridiculously convoluted 2030 hosting arrangements and the undue haste for bids to be submitted, appears to have been. Yet for all that one could say about how FIFA seems to be, if anything, worse under Infantino than it ever was under Blatter, the awarding of 2034 to Saudi Arabia just doesn't have the same shock quality to me that the awarding of 2022 to Qatar did. We just don't know what the consequences of this decision will be yet.

The politician was not wrong.

The only way I can see it working, certainly for the men's competition, would be to run it on similar lines to football as an age-restricted tournament with a limited number of over-age players allowed in each squad. If it's not, you're going to have three franchise leagues (Major League, the Hundred and the CPL) all being disrupted and I wouldn't want to be the English cricket administrator who had to deal with the knock-on effects of that. Ultimately, though, cricket needs to decide what it wants to be. If it wants to be a truly global sport, then being in the Olympics makes a degree of sense, particularly if it were to become the big prize for T20 in the way it seems to have done for rugby sevens. But if that comes at the cost of losing the heritage of the West Indies as a collective, for example, or the demise of other forms of the game, that will not be a price worth paying for a lot of people.

And if last night's game in Paris deserved to be a final, tonight's spectacle between France and South Africa is every bit as compelling. Whoever wins this, my expectation of England in the semi-final next Saturday is less than zero.

Speaking from a nation where memories of a divisive referendum remain all too fresh, I fear the reason is as simple as that for many.

A wonderful game last night. Ireland will probably rue their start and that missed penalty in the second half but, ultimately, that game has only proven the unfairness of the draw for this tournament. That game deserved to be a final.

I think World Rugby deserve credit for trying to make this tournament fairer than previous ones have been to the lesser nations. Had we had the four and five-day turnarounds that the Tier Two teams have had to put up with before, there would have been even more mismatches than there have been. The performances of Portugal and Uruguay in particular give me cause for optimism if World Rugby puts its money where its mouth is between now and when we get to Australia in four years' time. I understand the reservations about expansion but I'd much rather seen expansion than a pulling up of the drawbridge of the kind we've seen in cricket in recent years. Ultimately, what has to happen is that Tier One nations must play Tier Two ones more frequently. We talk about it at every World Cup and the talk needs to be translated into meaningful action.

As much as I think everyone recognises the draw for this tournament has been horrendously lopsided, we have got four quarter-finals that all look difficult to predict. That said, as far as tomorrow night's (UK time) blockbuster is concerned, I don't think you should overlook the burden of history that is on Ireland given they have never won a World Cup knockout game. I just have a feeling that, perhaps with a bit of the Joe Schmidt factor, will help to get the All Blacks over the line. I think Wales will probably have enough to get past Argentina, but Steve Borthwick's team selection for England worries me against Fiji. The best game of the weekend for me, and the hardest to call, is the hosts against the holders on Sunday night. If I had to put my last pound on the outcome, I'd lean towards the French to win a very close one, but I certainly wouldn't be confident watching it.

It's inevitable that the Commonwealth Games will be blamed, at least in some quarters, for Birmingham City Council's financial problems now and it will not help the search for new hosts going forward. But Birmingham is by no means an isolated case. Councils up and down the country have been struggling with their finances for years. While others have already gone down that road, the miracle is many more haven't so far. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if more do in the coming months.

Thatcher wasn't bothered about sport in general, not just the Commonwealth. Certainly the Birmingham bid for 1992 didn't get any Government support and I don't think either of the Manchester bids did either (bear in mind decisions on those were both pre-Lottery funding of elite sport), so I'd agree with you about Edinburgh 86. However, while I take your point about the IOC's 'London or nothing' message, I think the success of Manchester 2002 was absolutely critical to London 2012 in that it helped to persuade the then Labour government to back the bid. Without that, we wouldn't have had a hope in hell of winning that bid, particularly in the field we were up against.

There can be no doubting the existential crisis that the Commonwealth Games is currently facing. If the extent of that crisis had not been made clear by either Victoria's withdrawal in 2026 or the current lack of interest in hosting the centennial event in 2030, the fact that a senior official is openly talking about the possibility of delaying the 2026 game should leave absolutely no room for confusion. Although it wouldn't surprise me one bit if it came to pass, the idea that the Commonwealth Games may be no more is one that I find very sad, particularly having spent some wonderful days in Glasgow when that city was a superb host nine years ago. I think one of the main problems the Commonwealth Games has had is that it falls between two stools in terms of events and their potential legacies. On the one hand, it's not a big enough event to be staged with the sort of grandeur and scale one might expect with an Olympics. Yet, on the other, it is too big for a lot of nations to foot the bill of hosting without generating the kind of benefits that would justify that expense. I've no doubt, for example, that Wales would be a brilliant host if the political will was there to go for it, but its record of going for big single sport events (Rugby World Cup, Ashes Tests, Ryder Cup, Champions League final) suggests a view that similar benefits can be accrued at a fraction of the cost. Current economic challenges mean that problem is not going to go away any time soon either. So is there a solution? Can the Commonwealth Games survive this time? Despite the currently gloomy picture, I do think they can if there remains a willingness for member nations to take part and if the CGF is able to buy itself some time to work out what the future looks like. Doing the latter necessitates getting a new host on board for 2026 quickly and, given the seeming lack of appetite in Australia or elsewhere at the moment, I think there is little choice but to come back to the UK and probably to either London or Birmingham. If that can be done soon, then that should give the CGF some breathing space for economic outlooks to brighten and potentially open up the field for 2030 and beyond. If that doesn't happen, or unless another solution emerges, it's probably over.

How many of the facilities from 2018 are still in place on the Gold Coast? If they're largely good to go now, and can be good to go in three years' time, surely that's a better solution than embarking on a search for a completely new host or going cap in hand elsewhere.

Looks like Bach is doubling down and making himself look even more ridiculous than he already had. Paris Olympics 2024: IOC not on wrong side of history over Russian and Belarusian athletes - Bach If he, or any Russian apologists for that matter, really believe this tripe, does that mean the IOC was on the wrong side of history when it banned apartheid South Africa in their warped world view? Get real or get gone.

This is scandalous. Absolutely scandalous. Olympics 2024: Ukraine should drop threat of boycott - IOC If Bach seriously believes this, he should resign before he does any more damage. Despicable.

If this analysis is anything to go by, it seems as though Wimbledon and the LTA may be forced into a change of approach by the disgraceful attitude of the international tennis bodies. Wimbledon and LTA face decision over whether to lift ban on Russians and Belarusians