The stars are in town, so roll out the red carpet
Just in case you hadn’t noticed, it’s the awards season and it’s about to get into high gear. Every year around this time, we are reminded about the best performers, productions and creatives who bring together the television and movies that we all enjoyed over the past twelve months.
The year started off with the curtain raising Golden Globes Awards ceremony which gives us an insight into the probable winners of the more illustrious Oscars coming up in March. From our observations, it’s quite clear that “12 Years a Slave” and “American Hustle” will be the main contenders fighting it out over the biggest prizes, with “Gravity” a possible dark horse amongst the outsiders.
Back here in Blighty, we just had our own soiree with the National Television Awards celebrating all that is great about British television. The usual suspects picked up the awards with Coronation Street, Doctor Who, Ant & Dec, This Morning and Strictly Come Dancing all adding to their previous years wins. With such a narrow array of new British productions this past year to choose from, it didn’t come as a surprise to see this elite group in line to grab yet more (arguably pointless) awards.
Over in the USA this past week, we just just had the 56th Annual Grammy Awards, as the music industry got together to celebrate the years best releases and artists. There’s absolutely dozens of awards categories in this highly watered down awards ceremony. The biggest winners have to be Daft Punk with two gongs awarded for “Record of the Year” and “Album of the Year”. A pretty impressive double
It’s also sporting awards time
After much speculation and debate, the FIFA Ballon D’or for the best footballer in the world was finally awarded to Christiano Ronaldo. Best Manager went to Jupp Heynckes whilst Zlatan Ibrahimovic won the 2013 FIFA Puskás Award for his audacious overhead kick against England.
The FIFA World XI was also announced with an interesting mixture of names, that raised a few eyebrows; with the winners being Manuel Neuer, Dani Alves, Thiago Silva, Sergio Ramos, Philipp Lahm, Franck Ribery, Xavi Hernandez, Andres Iniesta, Lionel Messi, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and of course the main man Cristiano Ronaldo.
In a slightly childish taunt, winner Ronaldo decided to parade the trophy before Madrid’s match with Granada, before firing a message to Messi as to who is the best around. The Portuguese forward hit the opening goal of the game, before showing a ‘number one’ with his fingers right in front of the cameras. Messi finished second in the running for the Ballon d’Or, and the pair are said to have a rather a frosty relationship.
Men’s tennis finally gets a new Grand Slam champion
If you missed it, it was one of the strangest major tennis finals in recent years. With an unenviable 12-0 defeat record against him, Stan Wawrinka went into the Aussie Open final vs Rafael Nadal as a massive underdog yet came out full of aggression and confidence and deservedly took the opening set with some great attacking play, not to mention some superb forehands and ‘that’ backhand.
Then into the second set, things went a little weird. With a break to his name, Wawrinka witnessed the disintegration of Nadal as his back went into spasm and the match at one point appeared to be all over; with the possibility of a retirement a distinct reality.
However, this is Nadal we’re talking about and the Spaniard took an injury time out and returned to the court a very much negated player. Wawrinka predictably took the second set. At the end of the second set, Nadal again went for some more treatment and returned to the court looking a little more mobile. Wawrinka looked a different player, not knowing how to deal with such an injured warrior over the other side of the net and lost concentration. Nadal miraculously took the third.
However, with a seriously restricted and sore Nadal trying to claw back a fourth set deficit, Wawrinka regained his composure and won the match. As the players met at the net, he almost seemed apologetic for winning his first major when in actual fact, he was the fitter and the sharper of the two players and deserved his maiden slam title.
Most of the post match press seemed to concentrate on Nadal’s injury which in fairness, has taken the sheen off of a great tournament win for Wawrinka that included the much acclaimed win over the three time champion Novak Djokovic on his way to the final. Anyone who takes out Nole and Rafa in the same competition deserves credit where credit is due and the title was deservedly won by the Swiss, and not by default as some writers may suggest. He fully deserves the title as a grand slam champion and men’s tennis is better off for it.
It was great to see the tournament unfold on Eurosport.
The transfer window is about to shut!
Back in the world of football, the January transfer window is about to close and as always during this time, buying and selling activity has been a little muted.
The most notable transfer has to be the sale of Chelsea’s Juan Mata to Manchester United for a club record £37.1m. With Mourinho not seeing the Spaniard in his plans, he did the decent thing and allowed him to leave to suitors United, where David Moyes is facing intense pressure to turn around a season that is threatening to end very soon if results don’t change fast.
With the defending Premier League champions already out of both domestic cup tournaments and seemingly way out of the title race, very little is left to play for, other than rescuing their chances of maintaining Champions League football next season. With United currently 14 points off top spot and 6 points off the top four, and with home form that has shocked ex-boss Sir Alex Ferguson to name a few, do they have much chance even with their latest acquisition?
We’ll just have to see how things unfold on Sky Sports over the coming weeks.