The Best and Worst of ...

Latest posts

• The best and worst of the World Cup – 2010 South Africa
• The best and worst of the World Cup – 2014 Brazil
• The best and worst of the World Cup – 2018 Russia
• The best and worst of the World Cup – 2022 Qatar
• The worst of the Winter Olympics

In the “The Best and Worst of … Sports” we take a sporting event or a team and pick out not only the greatest moments from the history of that sport, but also the not-so-great moments. Sport is about both success and failure, about triumph and disaster, about lucky victories and unlucky breaks, about freakishly good form and unexpected collapses. There’s a yin and a yang to it that makes you appreciate the victories more when they come. And it’s what makes you a real fan – following your team through thick and thin.

I speak as a fan of Middlesbrough FC – winners of one solitary significant piece of silverware in almost 150 years as a league club; as an England cricket fan whose expectations were moulded in the 1970s and 1980s – decades when we were routinely murdered by Australia and the West Indies; as an England rugby fan whose views were shaped in a decade when Wales were unstoppable. There’s generally been a lot more thin than thick, but it does make the good moments, as few and far between as they are, all that more special.

So, in each blog post, my quest is to find the moments of magic, of brilliance, of joy, of uncanny good fortune, but also to balance them with the opposite. I invite you to read and see whether you agree or disagree with my selection. Even if you don’t you should enjoy reliving some of sports greatest and worst moments.