Sport Update For April

It’s a great month for sport but we better start with what’s not happening, which is two rounds of the Formula One season scheduled for the Middle East. There will be no races in April due to the ongoing war in the region and so F1 fans will have to wait until Miami on May the third for their next slice of action. Other than that we have some entertaining events coming and we’ll start with the Masters, the first golf major of the season and many fans’ favourite tournament of the entire year. Rory McIlroy is the defending champion after his dramatic win in a play-off last year to complete the grand slam and he’ll be many peoples pick to win again this year. It must be said though that neither he nor world number one Scottie Scheffler look in tip top form at the moment and there are plenty of world class players queuing up to challenge them, many of whom are in excellent form, including Jon Rahm, Cameron Young and Patrick Reed. It looks like this year’s tournament will be even more competitive than usual. Of course the betting suggests that Scheffler is a strong favourite with McIlroy in clear second place but it seems to me that neither one of them are coming into the event in the best of form and it may be a more wide open tournament than many people anticipate.

For racing fans the Grand National is running from the 9th until the Saturday of the race itself on the 11th and the entire meeting is becoming more relevant each year after losing its way some years ago. The upgrading of the entire three day card now makes this a viable alternative to Cheltenham and you can guarantee that almost every race will be contested by some top quality horses, including some that ran at Cheltenham and some who may have bypassed that meeting to come here fresh and on a more suitable track with better ground. The National itself has changed radically over the years and is now a high class race with some of the best staying chasers in the country taking part. I think we can expect the same again this year as the days of shock winners of the race seem to be behind us and the winner is usually highly rated.

The World Snooker  Championship starts on the 18th and this is another event which is a firm favourite of this column. Last year’s winner, Xhao Zintong put in a quite astonishing performance and he is currently vying for favouritism with the supremely talented Judd Trump, current world number one and the pick for most people of nearly every tournament he takes part in. This is the big one though and it could be said that with the amount of talent that he has, he should have won more than one over the course of his career, It’s not going to get any easier this year though, with a host of previous winners lined up against him plus the new superstar on the block Zintong. Whatever the outcome it’s going to be a fabulous watch on TV for snooker fans everywhere.

The quarter final Champions League line-up has been decided and it’s a proper heavyweight collection this season. The first legs kick off on the 7th and 8th of the month with the return matches a week later. The full fixtures are as follows; Sporting v Arsenal and Real Madrid v Bayern Munich ( a crackerjack of a tie) on the 7th and then we have PSG v Liverpool (again!) and Barcelona v Atletico Madrid on the 8th. Arsenal look to have the best of the draw in the quarters but I think it’s safe to say they’ll be no easy games from now on.