KEVIN KEEGAN (1951 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Kevin Keegan, who has died at the age of 75 after a short battle with cancer, was the closest thing English football ever produced to a human pinball. Small, bouncy, and possessed of an unquenchable desire to ricochet off larger opponents, he turned what might have been a career of quiet competence into a spectacle of perpetual near-miss genius. 

Born in 1951 in the sort of Yorkshire mining town that produced character rather than comfort, Keegan began at Scunthorpe United, a club whose very name sounded like a mild medical complaint. From there he exploded onto the national stage at Liverpool, where he won league titles, the FA Cup, the UEFA Cup (twice), and finally the European Cup in 1977. Bill Shankly, never a man to waste hyperbole on the undeserving, recognised in Keegan a player who compensated for any technical shortfall with the energy of a man trying to outrun his own shadow. He was not the most gifted, but he was the most willing, and in professional football that often counts for more than pedigree or poise. 

Then came Hamburg, where the boy from Doncaster became European Footballer of the Year twice. The Germans, who admire efficiency above all things, found themselves enchanted by this pocket dynamo who treated every match as a personal crusade against gravity. Keegan’s time abroad was a masterclass in how to be both hero and slight national embarrassment: he once appeared in a perm so magnificent it looked borrowed from a backing singer in a German disco. The hair, like the man, refused to stay down. They called him Mighty Mouse, a nickname that managed to be both affectionate and faintly sardonic, as if the footballing gods had looked down and decided that what the game really needed was a forward built like a jockey who played like a man late for his own coronation. 

Back home, spells at Southampton and especially Newcastle United confirmed his status as a cult figure. At St James’ Park he was more messiah than mere mortal, a status he later solidified as manager, leading the Toon from the bottom of the old Second Division to within a whisker of the Premier League title in 1996 before the familiar Keegan alchemy—brilliant, chaotic, ultimately exhausting—took over. His England career, 63 caps and 21 goals, included the captaincy and a brief, unhappy spell in the managerial hot seat that ended, characteristically, in a blaze of honest emotion rather than cold calculation.

Keegan was never one for the calculated understatement favoured by more patrician football men. He spoke in exclamations, played in italics, and lived as though the offside trap was a personal affront. His warmth was genuine, his ego manageable, and his capacity for self-parody a rare gift in a sport that too often confuses pomposity with gravitas. In an era of prima-donnas and accountants, he remained gloriously, defiantly himself: a working-class hero who never quite forgot where he came from, even when the perm and the Porsche suggested otherwise.

He is survived by his family, by generations of supporters who still chant his name when the mood takes them, and by the quiet knowledge that English football, for all its money and modernity, will never quite see his like again. The little man with the big heart finally stopped running. The pitch feels larger, and somehow flatter, without him.

SIR GARFIELD SOBERS (1936 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Sir Garfield Sobers departed this mortal crease at 89, leaving behind a game that has spent the subsequent half-century pretending it has recovered. In truth, it never did. The greatest all-rounder the world has seen arrived in Barbados in 1936 like a meteorological gift from the gods who had grown bored with mere thunder. Young Garfield batted, bowled and fielded as if the rest of humanity were engaged in some charming but fundamentally amateurish preliminary.

He made his Test debut before most English public schoolboys had mastered long division, and proceeded to treat bowlers of every persuasion with the courteous disdain of a man returning a library book he had never intended to read. His left-handed strokeplay combined the elegance of a Byzantine mosaic with the destructive power of a Caribbean hurricane that had taken elocution lessons. When he drove through the covers, the ball seemed less struck than personally offended. At Melbourne in 1968 he scored 254 runs that still cause Australian selectors to wake up sweating. In a county match he struck six sixes in an over, an act of such nonchalant savagery that one almost expected the bowlers to apologise for wasting his time.

Sobers captained the West Indies in their imperial phase, a side that played cricket less as a sport than as a form of elegant retribution against history. While England fielded opening bowlers who looked as if they had been sent down from the MCC committee room on temporary release, Sobers could swing the ball, turn it, and catch it in slips with the lazy certainty of a man who had read the script in advance. He was, in short, unfair. Sport, like life, is meant to be a contest. Sobers made it look like colonisation in reverse.

Off the field he lived at the same thrilling tempo: fast cars, late nights, and the occasional financial adventure that suggested even legends are occasionally mortal in their judgment. A knighthood was eventually conferred upon him, an honour he accepted with the air of a sovereign receiving tribute from a minor duchy.

In the end, Sir Garfield Sobers did not merely play cricket; he exposed its pretensions, illuminated its possibilities, and then sauntered off, leaving the rest of us to tidy up. The game has been trying to fill the vacuum ever since, with predictably diminishing returns. He leaves a reputation that requires no runs, no wickets, and no further argument.

MAGGIE HAUNTS BURNHAM'S BACKWARDNESS

One pictures Mr Andy Burnham, freshly installed or about to be installed in the highest office, furrowing his brow in that manner of a man who has just discovered the source of all our woes and is determined not to let mere chronology get in the way. Margaret Thatcher resigned in 1990, it is now 2026. Yet here we are, being solemnly informed that the ghost of the grocer’s daughter from Grantham still haunts the council estates and former pit villages, rattling her neoliberal chains and preventing Britain from achieving its true socialist destiny. One almost admires the stamina of the grudge. Most political enmities fade after a decade or two; this one has been lovingly pickled for thirty-six years, like some particularly sour Labour heirloom.

Mr Burnham’s project, we are told, is to take Britain 'back' – a deliciously vague direction that always sounds progressive when uttered by those who have run out of forward ideas. Back, presumably, to the golden age before the woman he so dislikes dared suggest that the state was not an infinitely patient nanny and that industries might occasionally have to compete or perish. The 1970s, that decade of warm beer, cold houses, and even colder economic reality, exerts a curious magnetism on a certain stripe of Labour romantic. One is reminded of those ageing rock stars who insist their best work was done before the pesky business of commercial success interfered. 'The Winter of Discontent', when the dead went unburied and the rubbish piled up like a municipal performance art piece, is recast in the Burnham mind as a sort of egalitarian idyll rudely interrupted by efficiency.

Let us be clear about what Thatcher actually did, before the revisionists turn her into a cartoon vampire. Britain in 1979 was the sick man of Europe, a nation where the unions could bring down governments, where the top tax rate reached a confiscatory 98 per cent, and where nationalised industries operated with all the dynamism of a Soviet tractor factory. The lady was not for turning, as she famously said, and the country turned with her. She curbed the overweening power of the trade unions, not out of sadistic glee but because the alternative was national paralysis. She privatised clapped-out state monopolies, injecting competition and, more importantly, capital into creaking enterprises. She cut taxes, broadened ownership through council house sales, and helped transform a nation of renters and strikers into one where aspiration was not treated as a bourgeois vice. By the time she left office, Britain had become the most vibrant large economy in the European Community – a phrase that now sounds quaint, like referring to Concorde as modern transport.

These were not abstract ideological victories. Millions of ordinary families gained assets and agency. North Sea oil revenues were not merely squandered on benefits; they coincided with a structural shift away from the delusion that government could indefinitely prop up uncompetitive industries. Inflation was tamed. Enterprise was no longer viewed as something slightly distasteful that happened in the Home Counties. One need not admire every aspect of the Thatcher era – the social dislocations in certain regions were real and painful – to recognise that the medicine, however bitter, arrested a terminal decline. To blame the lingering problems of 2026 on a prime minister who has been out of power for more than a generation is rather like a middle-aged man attributing his expanding waistline to the dietary choices of his long-deceased grandmother.

Yet Mr Burnham appears determined to prescribe the old remedies: more public ownership, a grand return to council house building on the post-war scale, regional 'power shifts' that usually mean shifting blame northward while keeping the Treasury levers firmly in Whitehall, and a general suspicion of markets that have the cheek to demand results. It is the politics of nostalgia dressed up as compassion. One wonders whether he has noticed that the 1970s model – heavy state intervention, protected industries, muscular unionism – produced not equality but shared misery, with the poorest suffering most from shortages, blackouts, and economic stagnation. The post-Thatcher settlement, for all its imperfections, delivered growth, jobs, and rising living standards that benefited far more people than any Labour government managed before, or since.

The sardonic comedy here lies in the timing. Britain in 2026 already labours under high public debt, feeble growth, strained public services, and the familiar temptation to solve problems by spending other people’s money. Burnham’s solution is to accelerate down the very path that contributed to these difficulties: more borrowing, more regulation, more faith in the benevolence of the state. It is as if, having watched a patient recover from a serious illness thanks to rigorous treatment, the new doctor declares the cure itself was the disease and proposes a return to leeches and bloodletting. The markets, that amoral Greek chorus, will not be amused. Bond yields have a way of expressing disapproval more eloquently than any opposition speech.

One should not underestimate the seductive power of the anti-Thatcher sermon in certain constituencies. It offers a simple morality tale: virtuous workers betrayed by a heartless Iron Lady and her neoliberal spawn. It absolves subsequent Labour and Conservative administrations of their own contributions to fiscal incontinence, regulatory bloat, and energy policy follies. It flatters the audience that their struggles are someone else’s fault, preferably a dead Conservative woman. Yet premierships are not sustained by folk memory or conference hall cheers. They are tested by delivery – by whether the lights stay on, the economy grows, and people feel their children might have better prospects than they did. Reversing the Thatcherite emphasis on incentives, competition, and limited government is not bold leadership; it is a form of historical cosplay with real-world costs.

The warning to Mr Burnham is therefore blunt, if delivered in the driest of tones. Your fantasy of 1970s restoration will prove terminally fatal to your premiership before it has even begun, because Britain has already tried it and did not enjoy the experience. Voters may flirt with nostalgia at by-elections, but they tend to punish governments that deliver 1970s outcomes in the 21st century: stagnant wages, creaking infrastructure, and that special sense of national decline once memorably described as 'the British disease.' Thatcher’s lesson was that economic progress requires uncomfortable choices – letting failing enterprises fail, encouraging work over dependency, and recognising that wealth must be created before it can be distributed. Ignore it at your peril. The electorate, unlike certain Labour orators, has a long memory but a short tolerance for recycled failure.

In the end, one suspects history will be less kind to the Burnham project than his supporters hope. Thirty-six years after Thatcher’s resignation, Britain’s problems – low productivity, demographic pressures, geopolitical uncertainty – demand fresh thinking, not a reheated 1970s menu. To govern is to choose. Mr Burnham has chosen the past. The future, one fears, will return the compliment by choosing someone else.