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More questions than answers as the Ashes reaches half-way

There is so much uncertainty ahead of the Edgbaston test that one almost needs reminding that we are approaching the series midpoint and not its opener. Particular question marks hang over the respective weaknesses of the two sides, Australia's pace attack and England's middle order.

With the pitch saturated and the Birmingham rain expected to persist through the weekend, taking 20 Australian wickets may be beyond England, in which case the result could be decided by the staying power of the home side's batsmen. The loss of Pietersen is more of a psychological blow - he's looked troubled and distracted in the series; Bell is a competent replacement with two Ashes series behind him, form in the county game and a point to prove. But KP provides the middle order with solidity - without him they may not score less runs in most innings but they are more open to a collapse of the kind that cost the series in the West Indies. The opening partnership between Cook and Strauss becomes crucial.

The tour match at Northants told us that Stuart Clark is ready to enter the fray, providing economy and maintaining consistency of pressure on the England batsmen. This improves the Australian side. He is likely to come in for Siddle, but the pressure on Johnson mounts and with Australia needing victory to level the series, they are unable to carry him much longer. Brett Lee is unlikely to be fit for Headingley but this may still be Johnson's last chance to impress in the series.

The Worm finds it hard to foresee an England win this week, suspecting the rain will take too much time out of the match. A draw would be a good result, leaving them one win from regaining the urn, and this will depend on how England bat and how Australia bowl.

It's football but not as we know it

In the next few weeks the press will bombard us with the latest news and speculation from the Premier League with only an England victory in the Ashes likely to keep Fergie or Benitez off the back pages. But in the relative calm of late July, spare a thought for two clubs which will meet on the first day of the season some four divisions lower in the football pyramid. On August 8th Kingsmeadow will host a match between AFC Wimbledon and Luton Town. In 2005/6 Luton finished in tenth place in the Championship whilst Wimbledon missed out on a third successive promotion when they lost in the playoffs of the Isthmian premier league. In the three years since, Luton have dropped out of the league with three successive relegations whilst Wimbledon have once again completed back-to-back promotions.

Long-suffering supporters of both clubs remember Wembley glory in 1988 with Wimbledon FC beating Liverpool to win the FA Cup and Luton beating Arsenal to win the League Cup.

The turn of the century marked the demise of both clubs as first Wimbledon was controversially relocated from its south London roots to Milton Keynes in 2002. AFC Wimbledon was formed by the fans in protest, and from player trials on Wimbledon common followed by a 4-0 defeat at Sutton in their first game they have now been promoted four times in seven seasons. In the same period Luton Town ran into financial trouble with three separate periods in administration between 2003 and 2009. In this period Luton were four times forced to sell their top scorer whilst also being docked 50 points (20 of these were for financial irregularities).

Like a pair of phoenix each club managed to salvage something from the ashes with Luton winning the Football League trophy in 2009 and Wimbledon setting the record for most league games without defeat at any level in senior league football with an impressive run of 78 games between February 03 and December 04.

 

So when you buy your paper on August 9th skip back a few pages from the frenzied speculation about which multimillionaire has decided that £100k a week is not enough compensation for his efforts and cast your eye on the result between the Wombles and the Hatters. Better still come to quantumofsport.com.

EPL preview: Can Liverpool finally return to the top of the tree?

As we continue our build-up to the new Premier League season, Liverpool follower Dupin forces himself to take a dispassionate look at whether this year will finally be their year...

Liverpool and Manchester United are tied on 18 top flight triumphs apiece but everyone knows where the momentum lies behind that stat. Despite considerable cup success and some attractive ensembles in the meantime, Liverpool have not prevailed in the real benchmark of success - the league - since the 1989-90 season, when Kenny Dalglish was at the helm. You half suspect that the summer appointment of ‘King Kenny’ to a senior role at the Youth Academy is a wistful nod to those halcyon days. As current manager Rafael Benitez manoeuvres his chessmen and says his Hail Mary’s, is there anything to suggest that he can go one better than last season and finally bring the coveted Premier League title to Anfield? Let’s take a look at the principal players from back to front in an indulgent fan’s first XI selection, not forgetting (mindful of Liverpool’s oft-cited Achilles heel of a lack of strength in depth) the prospective supporting cast - and see whether they’re strong enough to do the job...

Tour de France 2009 - Bore de France

The 2009 Tour de France, which finished today on the Champs-Elysées with Spain’s Alberto Contador in the winner’s yellow jersey, promised much but in the end has to go down as a big disappointment. This correspondent was genuinely looking forward to this year’s edition of Le Tour, with the return of seven-time winner Lance Armstrong - a major rival to and team-mate of Contador - set to make for an intriguing few weeks in the saddle. A comment attached to our original Tour curtain-raiser fuelled the enthusiasm still further, with a touch of 80s nostalgia and with it a reminder of great cycling duels past. But Roche v Delgado or Lemond v Fignon this was not. True, there was a flurry of activity in the opening stages, with potentially important seconds won or lost here and there. And a gruelling few days in the mountains in the last week of the Tour looked, on paper, a mouth-watering prospect. Unfortunately, the intervening couple of weeks were - at least as far as the overall yellow jersey classification was concerned - a non-event. Things warmed up when the Alps finally arrived but Contador, a strong climber, quickly established a decisive advantage that he never looked like relinquishing.

Far from being a ding-dong battle, the much vaunted Contador-Armstrong match-up resulted in a stifling and uneasy co-habitation of the two men within their Astana team. For the best part of a fortnight there was an awkward phoney war between them, a kind of truce that did nothing for the Tour as a racing spectacle, with constant talk of tensions behind the scenes in the Astana camp. At the same time, the Astana team was so strong all round that, until late in the Tour, other riders and teams were largely unable, or unwilling, to try to challenge their control of the race. Astana was so strong in fact that they were happy to let Nocentini, a relatively unknown Italian from another team, stay in yellow for days, as the Astana boys lay in wait for the appropriate moment to take on the leader’s mantle and for the in-team rivalries to play themselves out. This was a dose of Tour pragmatism that again did nothing for excitement levels: the prestige of the yellow jersey should mean that you try to take it and wear it as long as humanly possible, but the onus is on the team concerned to keep their man in yellow, and that takes extra effort in terms of management of the peloton - effort that Astana was happy for another team to take on.

The dominance of Astana and, ultimately, of Contador, were not the only issues in this year’s Tour. As is the case in every Tour, you could bet your bottom dollar that riders scoring plucky breakaway stage victories - exciting as this is to watch in its own right - were not a threat to the overall Tour lead, or at least not overall Tour victory come Paris. Where stage victories came down to big bunch sprints - invariably a hair-raising display of jostling and speed - there was, ultimately, little competition. Sprinter Mark Cavendish was so strong that, when it really mattered, he was to all intents and purposes unbeatable in the dash for the winning line. This was all to the great credit of Cavendish and his team. But it was another measure of this year’s Tour that, for a time, while little else was happening, significant chunks of debate were devoted to the question of “Can Cavendish be beaten, and if so how?” Answers were not easily forthcoming as Cavendish proved capable of winning even on finishes suspected not to be prime sprinter run-ins.

Another problem this year was the design of the Tour itinerary. As said, on paper, some tough days in the mountains in the last week looked a compelling prospect. This included a penultimate-day shootout on the legendarily punishing climb up the Mont Ventoux. This was in effect a last-day shootout, given that the actual last-day stage into Paris is rarely more than a ceremonial procession for the yellow jersey-wearer. But, with Contador able to resist all attacks, the first two places on the podium were already all but settled heading up the Ventoux. The battle was really only for third and the minor places. Try telling the thousands of fans lining the ascent that this year’s Tour was dull. But it was something of a denigration of the Ventoux’s great standing in the sport that, concerning the general classification, it witnessed little more than end-of-Tour minor-place manoeuvrings. The very prospect of a tough mountainous end to the Tour also arguably made it that much more anaemic earlier on, with riders reluctant to burn themselves out too early.

Can anything be done to spice up Le Tour and generate a more genuine scrap for the yellow jersey? There are no easy solutions. A shorter - perhaps two-week - Tour with fewer flat, ‘transitional’ stages? - surely a commercial no-no. Shorter and different sorts of stages on the same day? - a physical and logistical nightmare. More time trials against the clock? - well maybe, but not so many that you give too much to the time-trial specialist, and certainly not more team time-trials, which only reinforce existing disparities. Fat time bonuses awarded for sprints en route or for stage victories? - tempting, but just another incentive for breakaways to be closed down. All we can really suggest is to include more undulating medium-difficulty stages - not punishingly mountainous, but testing or technical enough to do something to split up the main pack.

In the end, you’re relying on the riders to be evenly matched enough to generate a close contest. Unfortunately, here too the signs may not be good for the future. As Contador won the individual time trial in the Tour’s final week, he underlined that he is far more than just a climber. Some even took this as a cue to whisper that he may now have it in him to win a number of Tours in a row from here.  Things have been said before about potential spells of domination that have not materialised (Jan Ullrich, anyone?) But still, Contador’s apparent ease in this Tour (Armstrong tensions aside) may not be good news for those that are only just getting over the long reigns of Indurain and Armstrong over the last couple of decades. A Schleck could fancy his chances of a Tour win at some point; Wiggins has emerged as a strong Tour rider this year; and Armstrong - an impressive third this time - may well continue to win admiration for his Tour return, prospectively as part of a different team. But, on current form, Contador is likely to have the legs on all of them next year.

F1 Hungarian GP: Hamilton wins, and who else?

Lewis Hamilton’s victory today at the Hungarian Grand Prix brought his McLaren team back to winning ways in resounding fashion. True, the bumpy, twisty Hungaroring circuit is not necessarily a reliable guide to performance elsewhere. But McLaren have clearly made a huge leap forward after a dismal first half of the season, and, with no major upheavals in the F1 regulations on the cards for 2010 (not forgetting the abolition of re-fuelling from next year), it is a leap that could be ominous in the longer term for the rest of the grid.

McLaren’s resurgence also has implications for how the rest of this year’s championship will play out. It would take a miracle for Hamilton himself to get back into title contention, but nevertheless, a more competitive McLaren is an intriguing new element in the title mix. Indeed, it is not the only potential new element, with signs this weekend of improvement from Renault (pole position) and Ferrari (a perhaps surprising 2nd), and with Williams knocking on the door of the podium too. The theory is that a now struggling Brawn - and championship leader Jenson Button in particular - would benefit from having McLaren and others take points off Brawn’s only realistic title rivals, Red Bull.

The logic holds to a point. Yes, Red Bull’s Webber was prevented from making bigger inroads into Button’s lead today by Hamilton, and a plucky Raikkonen. With Red Bull man Vettel not finishing, a rather lowly Button, in seventh position, almost begins to look like one of the day’s winners, in damage-limitation terms. But look at it another way: if the relative developments in performance are such that there are three cars (including a McLaren) between Button and the Red Bull ahead of him, that’s still not convincing enough for Brawn with seven races left, unless Red Bull undergo some form of sudden collapse.

It had been tempting to put down Brawn’s recent performance wobble to track conditions. Whichever way you cut it, in Hungary, which was supposed to be more to their liking, the Brawn problems began to look less transient. All this means Mark Webber was one of the big winners in Hungary. He has closed the gap at the top of the championship and taken the upper hand (even if not yet decisively) over teammate and title rival Vettel. It doesn’t mean Webber will be world champion, but it’s more concrete than talk of virtual alliances.