MARTIN SAMUEL: It isn’t just the football on America's Pacific North West that is worth a second glance. In Seattle, an army is marching that may one day alter the global power-base of the game. If football takes off in the rest of America as it has here, who knows how the sport will look several decades from now. This is not about standards of play. It’s about the size of the gate and commercial potential. The Sounders are America’s retort to those who think the MLS is small-time. ...read
Martin Samuel - Sport for the Daily Mail's recent articles
Tiger Woods is fighting a losing battle - golf is finding fresh ways to humiliate this fallen giant at the US Open
MARTIN SAMUEL AT CHAMBERS BAY: The Artist Formerly Known As The World’s Greatest Golfer strode mirthlessly towards the tenth green. ‘Battle, Tiger,’ shouted a sage in the gallery. Battle, Tiger? The man does little else these days. His two rounds to miss the cut at Chambers Bay have been nothing but a battle. A war of attrition, really. One fought at massive cost, with huge casualties and little gain. Woods finished 16 over after two rounds, one of the stragglers in the field, down among the club professionals, a few old men and, bizarrely, Rickie Fowler. ...read
US Open will provide major test, but not as we know it... Chambers Bay promises to make fools of some of the world's best
MARTIN SAMUEL: It’s not just that Chambers Bay wasn’t a golf course until 2007, or that it is constructed in the manner of a British links and alien to the PGA Tour’s percentage game. By any standard it is different. This is what links golf would look like had America given it to the world. ‘A tricked-up links,’ as Henrik Stenson called it — more accurately, a links on steroids. ...read