The Sporting Hack

It is unlikely that a 70-0 hammering at the hands of Wigan Warriors will singularly seal the fate of London Broncos, however the scoreline from Saturday’s Challenge Cup won’t have helped. The Rugby Football League arguably didn’t help the sole representatives of the capital by electing to stage the televised match at Leigh Sports Village, a stadium with a Wigan postcode. For a sport that prides itself on the pillars of fairness and competitiveness, it seemed to be a peculiar move, but in hindsight was rendered irrelevant. Soured: Aussie Jamie Soward (right) was brought to London just for the Cup What is relevant and real is the future of the Broncos as an entity hangs in the balance; a fact long known to the rugby league fraternity, but brought sharply in to focus for all to see following such public humiliation. You could, perhaps, even say that the RFL were quite clever to host the game so close to Wigan, so at least they could draw a crowd rather than hope f...

When seven players sign for a football club during the close season, there is often very little made of it. That particular club will more than likely have either replaced their manager with someone who wants their own side or have had a poor season previously and are looking at rebuilding. Not Watford. Gianfranco Zola has not been sacked and Watford didn’t have a bad season either, narrowly losing out on Championship promotion via the play-offs at Wembley in a 1-0 defeat to Crystal Palace. The Hornets have indeed signed seven players; all in one go, all from one club and all for nothing.  Nada, zip, zilch. In what can be described as a ‘crafty’ or ‘creative’, Watford’s owners, the Pozzo family – who also own Italian side Udinese and Spanish outfit Granada – have allowed the Hornets to take the Udinese septuplet (Diego Fabbrini, Gabriel Angella, Almen Abdi, Christian Battocchio, Marco Cassetti, Davide Faraoni and Javier Acuna) plus Granada’s Daniel Pudil to...

As soon as the bunch of sprinters cross the finish line under lights on Paris’ iconic Champs-Elysees to signal the end of the centenary edition of the Tour de France, a nation, or more pertinently a county, will start counting down. For the next time the 200 hundred or so Lycra-clad cyclists will take to the road to compete for the Maillot Jaune, they will be in Yorkshire, or Leeds to be more precise. Two stages have been organised for the White Rose County, from Leeds to Harrogate and York to Sheffield to test the peloton’s class of 2014 before it moves south to London for a day and back to its spiritual home. While the economic benefits to the region, England’s largest, are obvious, Yorkshire will provide two key ingredients to the biggest cycling race in the world: stunning scenery and passionate fans. While it is unlikely that defending champion, Team Sky’s Chris Froome, will be out taking snaps of the picturesque Yorkshire Dales and North York moors, the mere...

#TSHontheattack Allez Riblon. Any Frenchman winning a stage on the Tour de France is pretty special, particularly when the stage is the famous Alpe d’Huez, notorious for its sheer size and imposing gradient. But for Frenchman Christophe Riblon to secure his country’s first win in this, the hundredth edition of the tour when organisers had seen fit to honour the occasion with two separate climbs of the mountain, well it was hard not to be swept up in the emotion of it all. Even the most hardnosed of sports fans must have cracked a little, as Tour leader Chris Froom did late on, when the 32 year old skipped past the hard-working American Teejay Van Garderen and allowed himself a good 500m to lap it up and become the darling of the tricolour for 2013. The long legs of loopholes; Cook. Aaron Cook’s omission from Team GB’s Taekwondo squad for last year’s Olympic Games sparked controversy in the sport as the world number one had been overlooked in favour of Lutalo Muham...

Well that's handball surely? Welcome to a special edition of ‘On the Attack’ this week, as the football season draws ever closer, there is plenty of material to focus on and so we have given the 11 aside game its own little page on The Sporting Hack. The ‘regular’ #tshontheattack will follow shortly with news and views from the rest of the sports world. France’s 3-0 defeat over England’s women in Sweden yesterday knocked the three lions out of Euro 2013 in what was a poor campaign for Hope Powell’s side. It caps a dismal summer for all parties at FA headquarters after England’s men's under 21’s and under 20’s sides were knocked out of European and World Cup competitions respectively – none of the trio managed a single victory. Stuart Pearce (U21’s) paid the price for losing all three group games in Israel and was duly sacked by the FA and it would not be a surprise to see Powell either jump, or be pushed, following a fifteen year spell in charge. We all know about t...

KP's Pedal Power. Le Tour de Lords England head in to the second Ashes test at Lord’s tonight knowing that a victory would all but kill Australia’s hopes of snatching the urn back from Alistair Cook’s men. Both sides though come in to the game with mixed emotions. England will be elated at the fact that they went 1-0 up in the series thanks to a 14 run win, but know how very close they were pushed. For Darren Lehman’s men, they can take heart from rushing England and taking them away from their usual knack of controlling events in what was a gutsy performance in Nottingham, but the sort of close encounter they really needed to win to stand a chance overall. The equation is simple for the tourists; ruffle England’s feathers again and they might square it. There is no pressure on Lehman, that’s why he threw the untried and untested Ashton Agar in to the cauldron of, not just test cricket, but Ashes cricket. Even the staunchest Australian did not expect that ...