1) England thrashed by Australia, 2015
One of few consolations England could take from their humiliation at the last Cricket World Cup after their premature exit had been confirmed by Bangladesh before the party had really got started was that, when it arrived, their embarrassment had become very much the norm rather than the exception. Ultimately this flaying at the hands of the Adelaide Oval’s supposed whipping boys was not so much an upset as an act of mercy. “England had the wrong team, the wrong style of play and everyone could see it,” tweeted Shane Warne in his withering post-match assessment. “Tonight’s result not a shock.”
Warne was not wrong – a woefully under-prepared England team had gone into the tournament on the back of more than two decades of almost relentless awfulness at the 50-over game. Despite the England and Wales Cricket Board rescheduling an Ashes series to help facilitate their side’s preparations for this one-day jamboree, only the most charitable of observers would suggest that England’s build-up to the tournament was anything other than shambolic.
With the jettisoned Kevin Pietersen cackling maniacally behind the scenes, the ousting of Alastair Cook as captain two months previously may have been the right decision but the consensus was that it was poorly timed by England’s dithering ODI overlords. Eoin Morgan, his replacement, was handed a poisoned chalice and proceeded to quaff heartily from the tainted contents as he scored 90 runs in five tournament innings at an average of 18.
None of those runs came in England’s Valentine’s Day shocker against Australia, when he was dispatched to the pavilion for a six-ball duck as England chased 342, the highest total they had ever conceded at a World Cup. No fewer than 105 of these Australia runs had been shipped in the final 10 overs, when England’s bowling attack went about its work with all the precision of an increasingly frustrated drunk trying to insert his key into the wrong front door.
In front of 84,000 crowing Aussies at the MCG England were slaughtered: dismissed for 231 to lose by 111 runs, with nobody more surprised to see how easily they wilted than Mitchell Marsh, the right-arm medium all-rounder who skittled five for 14. Some England players emerged with a modicum of dignity: James Taylor made an unbeaten 98, while England’s own semi-quick Steven Finn took five for 71. It was not one of the great five-wicket hauls – in his brutal tournament post-mortem, our own Barney Ronay would later observe that years of unnecessary interference from ECB coaches meant the Middlesex bowler had been left with a run-up that resembled that of “a sad mournful horse preparing to hurl itself under the wheels of a passing tractor”.
Following their humbling at the hands of Australia England’s coach, Peter Moores, proved why he was getting paid the big bucks with his own carefully considered assessment that his team needed “to get better”. They could scarcely get worse, going on to lose against New Zealand, beat Scotland and succumb to two more defeats against Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The rot finally stopped as they spared themselves one final indignity against Afghanistan in a match only the most romantic optimists could describe as “ending on a high”.
2) Liverpool knock Villa for six, 2016
Aston Villa won only three Premier League matches last season but it was their embarrassing mid-February slaughter at the hands of Liverpool that signalled the beginning of an 11-match tailspin in which they would concede 30 goals and fail to win a single point from 33 available. A 1-0 defeat at the hands of Manchester United deep into this appalling losing streak confirmed their relegation to the second tier for the first time in 29 years but by then all hope had long gone.
It was this abject capitulation at home to Liverpool that proved the greatest humiliation and it brought the players of Villa much thoroughly deserved obloquy in a season when on and off the field, many of them shamed themselves with monotonous regularity. Andy Hunter, the Guardian’s man on the Mersey-beat, called their performance “a surrender”, describing how their manager, Rémi Garde, “looked on helplessly as the nightmare of Villa’s heaviest home defeat since Ted Drake scored all seven of Arsenal’s goals in a 7-1 win here in 1935 unfolded”.
Worse was to come: Villa fans who had walked out of their ground en masse long before the final whistle were further enraged when the defender Joleon Lescott tweeted a photo of a top-of-the-range Mercedes S63 (value £130,680), prompting outright fury and a deluge of entirely understandable conclusions about the player’s motivation.
— Joleon Lescott (@JoleonLescott) February 14, 2016
Many saw and continue to see his social media post as a cryptic but decidedly unsubtle two-fingered response to their barracking. Lescott’s implausible explanation that the picture had been tweeted accidentally, while his phone was in his pocket when driving, quickly became the subject of much public derision and a host of amusing memes, with several featuring the Reliant Robin belonging to Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses.
3) The Bowie Race Track trifecta fix, 1975
Maryland, 1975. On the one-mile dirt oval of Bowie Race Track the 12 runners and riders for the day’s ninth and final race broke from the stalls and settled into a running order. At the race’s conclusion it did not go unnoticed that the entire field had paraded to the finish-line in exactly that order over the entire distance of the six-furlong sprint. The winner was Mr Ransom (5-1), who finished a half-length in front of Choice Rib (7-2) with the long outsider Sealand (47-1) a further nine lengths back in third. None of the three had been particularly well fancied and with the favourites having finished down the field the trifecta paid $927.30. Shortly before the race one punter had approached window No108 of the mutuel and bought 38 “box” tickets, covering the first three horses home in any order, for $684 dollars. When the horses he had picked duly obliged, his initial investment was worth $35,237.
Most of it was never collected. On a grim day for horse racing that would become known locally as the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, for no other reason than it took place on 14 February, an investigation was called and it soon emerged that six of the jockeys who had ridden in the race – and none of whose mounts achieved a higher placing than sixth – had pooled money to pay for the tickets and dispatched Ernest Davidson, the brother of jockey Jesse Davidson, who was on the eighth placed finisher CeCe Belle, to buy them. Ernest drew attention to himself by buying them all together from one window and suspicions were further aroused when stewards studied footage of the race and identified several obvious non-triers. While the first three jockeys home were not suspected of skulduggery or chicanery, six others soon found themselves in hot water.
After two of the 38 winning tickets were cashed racecourse betting tellers were warned to alert track security if anyone tried to redeem the rest of them. Two women with local racing connections approached with one each only to change their minds and flee when confronted by investigators. The remaining 34 tickets were later incinerated by jockeys Eric Walsh and Ben Feliciano, who panicked on discovering their money-making wheeze was the subject of a federal investigation. Walsh had ridden Mike O, the hot favourite to finish last of the 12 runners, almost 30 lengths behind the winner. The horse’s trainer later described his horse as “a bum” and confessed he too would have joined his jockey in betting on him running badly if he had known what was going on.
Both Walsh and Feliciano, along with their fellow jockeys Davidson and Luigi Gino were subsequently indicted, convicted and sentenced to six months each, becoming the first athletes in American history to be given a federal prison sentence for conspiring to fix a sporting event. Between them they had won over 4,000 races and $8m in prize money. Their weighing room colleagues John Babdolal and Carlos Jiminez were also named as unindicted co-conspirators but not charged after agreeing to co-operate with prosecutors. All six admitted contributing to chipping in to pay for the tickets bought by Davidson’s brother, but only Jiminez admitted to applying the brakes to his horse to prevent it securing a place in the money. Following their sentencing the four jockeys were released on their own recognizance and banned from racing. Only three of them served their time as, tragically, Walsh later took his own life rather than have a spell in prison.
Peter C Angelous was part of the defence team representing the four jockeys who denied any part in actually fixing the race, their argument being that it was shrewd judgment rather than any corruption on their part that had prompted them to bet on the outcome. “We couldn’t overcome the betting evidence, the fact that there was a large block of tickets purchased by a relative of one of the riders,” he would later tell the Washington City Paper. “But that doesn’t mean they were guilty.”
4) Lizzy Yarnold wins gold in Sochi, 2014
0.97 seconds is not too long in the cosmic scheme of things but it was the eternity-on-ice that separated Lizzy Yarnold from her nearest rival when, after four practically flawless displays of controlled careering, she obliterated the field to win the women’s skeleton at the Sochi Sanki Sliding Centre at the Winter Olympics. That was in 2014, four years after the former heptathlete from Kent was introduced to a sport that would catapult her into the limelight.
Hot-housed after being recruited through a talent search, Yarnold proved an exceptionally quick learner but had to contend with all manner of difficulties in her helter-skelter quest for gold. Skeleton racing is prohibitively expensive: her 29kg sled – named Mervyn after Mervyn Sugden, a fairy godfather and a retired insurance underwriter who contributed towards getting her started after hearing a short but eloquent pitch during an elevator ride – cost £10,000 and there are no tracks on which to ride it in the United Kingdom. Practice runs abroad, a support team, travel costs and day-to-day living expenses all cost money, which was hard to come by for a full-time student with no direct funding trying to focus on the very important business of learning how to hurtle downhill through the 17 corners of a 1500m long ice chute with only a helmet for protection at speeds of up to 80kph.
In her fledgling days Yarnold was reliant on a grant from the Talented Athlete Scholarship Scheme and money earned from a summer job as an underwriter. With the right people around her, one of them a sled designer and team technician named James Roche whom she would later marry, she subsequently scorched to victory for the fourth time in four runs to claim gold for Britain on Valentine’s Day. Coincidentally her victory came 30 years to the day after the ice-dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean had tugged at the heartstrings of a nation with some ice-capades of their own.
“It’s lovely that it’s Valentine’s Day today as well. There’s lots of romance in the air and my mum and dad coming to watch me, my sisters, my best friends, everyone’s here that I can share it with,” said Yarnold, who was not so preoccupied by the stress worrying about her overnight lead that she forgot to pack a card for her future husband in her trackside kit bag. Between that and her margin of victory, it was another one of those days when the headlines pretty much wrote themselves.
5) Wilt Chamberlain breaks NBA scoring record, 1966
OK, it could realistically be argued that we are playing fast and loose with the definition of the M-word here but, if Lizzie Yarnold winning by less than one second constitutes a bona fide massacre – and it does – only the most mean-spirited grinch would begrudge Wilt Chamberlain his place in this particular Valentine’s Day Hall of Fame for breaking the all-time NBA scoring record on 14 February in 1966.
Since his death in 1999 the man the NBA Encyclopaedia once referred to somewhat optimistically as “basketball’s unstoppable force” continues to be regarded by many as the greatest player of all time. Unsurprisingly he has good stats for a big man: at the end of his career he held no fewer than 128 league records, over half of which remain attached solely to his name today. Standing at 7ft1in, Chamberlain left college early to play for the Harlem Globetrotters before lining up for the NBA’s Philadelphia Warriors, Philadelphia 76ers and LA Lakers. The Big Dipper holds the NBA single-game scoring game record for the most points in one game with an astonishing and perfectly round 100. He remains the only player to score 4,000 points in one NBA season and his record of 55 rebounds in one game looks thoroughly unbreakable. He also shares the career record for the most consecutive regular seasons (seven) leading the NBA in scoring and holds the single-season record for most games (45) with 50 or more points.
Chamberlain finished his career with 31,419 NBA points. It was a record at the time but one that has since been surpassed by Michael Jordan (32,292), Kobe Bryant (33,643), Karl Malone (36,928) and the peerless Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (38,387). It was on 14 February in 1966 that Chamberlain originally took the crown, scoring enough to edge past the 20,880 points previously scored by Bob Pettit. Considering some of Chamberlain’s equally remarkable off-court statistics, this athlete who – conservatively, according to those who knew him – estimated he had slept with at least 20,000 different women will no doubt have been delighted to reach this remarkable milestone on an evening when love was in the air.
6) Sugar Ray Robinson batters Jake LaMotta, 1951
“Sugar Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta met so often in the ring that Jake said they almost got married,” said Ray Leonard, no mean boxer himself, as he introduced one particular edition of his ESPN Classic show Sugar Ray’s Hit Parade. It was devoted to the 1951 demolition of the Raging Bull by Sugar Ray in Chicago Stadium, on the sixth occasion the two boxers went toe-to-toe. It may not have been the most famous or brutal St Valentine’s Day massacre to take place in the city’s history but at least it was all legal and above board. Well, in so far as boxing ever is.
“This duo was boxing’s version of The Odd Couple,” explains Leonard. “Sugar Ray Robinson was classy and stylish in and out of the ring; a successful Harlem businessman. He was a dapper dresser, with a closet full of suits. LaMotta, on the other hand, was the total opposite: rough and rude. Robinson won every time except in 1943 when LaMotta ended Robinson’s streak of 40 straight wins. In 1951 they met again, this time a clash for La Motta’s middleweight title. It was their sixth and final meeting and Robinson was the 4-1 on favourite. LaMotta growled: ‘I got too much heart and stamina to be his Valentine.’”
The Guardian published as good a piece on this fight as you’re likely to read last year and we have no compunction in suggesting it is the perfect primer for the beautiful brutality below.
