Sport Opinion

LEEDS athlete Alexandra Bell is already used to proving people wrong.

Saturday’s game between Arsenal and Sheffield United will be a clash of styles, but I would rather be in the Blades’ camp at the moment.

The sight of Alistair Brownlee jogging around his home city last summer, his face contorted with pain and an acceptance that he was no longer good enough, jarred with everything we had come to revel in about this remarkable athlete.

It saddens me when some clubs go into the FA Cup half-hearted.

Winning breeds confidence, and Leeds will take a lot from pushing Arsenal so hard on Monday. That belief can only help them in the second half of the season.

AS the saying goes, it is always the darkest before the dawn.

THE SUSPICION that this would be an intriguing Test series, tough to call and with more twists and turns than you could shake a stick at, has not been allayed by events in the opening two games, England following defeat at Centurion by 107 runs with victory at Cape Town by 189 runs.

IT WILL not have escaped your attention that one of the great debates in cricket at present is whether Test matches should be shorn of their fifth day.

Modern forward lines are so fluid that centre-forwards need to have the ability to play wide as well, and even in the hole.

For Beth Mead to be voted The Yorkshire Post’s Sports Hero of 2019 shows how much the women’s game grew last year.

It should be one of the most exciting weekends of the football season, but increasingly it is becoming one of the more depressing.

IF ENGLAND’s cricket tour of South Africa was an actual person, it would be the sort of person who is constantly blighted by horrendous misfortune.

ENGLAND: “WE need a miracle.” Ben Stokes: “Hold my beer.”

THE FLU bug running through the England camp has seen several players confined to quarantine at the team hotel.

IT’s that time of year again when we ask you to put your thinking caps on, get together with your sports-mad friends and make your choice over who should be crowned Yorkshire’s Sports Hero of the Year for 2019.

LEEDS UNITED are, along with current Championship leaders West Bromwich Albion, out in front of their promotion rivals by some considerable margin.

IT does not seem two minutes ago since everyone was waxing lyrical about Rob Burrow as the Leeds Rhinos legend retired from the game he had graced so long.

The annual parade of champions and celebrities that is the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year show, got me thinking about the bigger picture as the chapter closes on the decade.

“Not again!” That was my first thought when I was covering the Manchester derby for Sky and another racist incident broke out. It feels like every time I am on there at the moment there is some sort of racist incident, yet every time another one happens I am still shocked by it.