Rory, Duplantis and India’s women cricketers: In 2025, it was a wide world of sports |
It’s a big world. Here are my best sporting moments of 2025 that did not involve Australians.
The Ryder Cup is the best thing in sport, and the 2025 version was the most dramatic. With Donald Trump appearing on the first tee at Bethpage Black in New York and an emcee leading a chant of “F--- you, Rory”, the contest was set up as Team Europe versus the worst hubris and arrogance America could throw at them.
On the first two days, Europe established an apparently unbeatable lead in the pairs matches, with McIlroy, Jon Rahm, and Tommy Fleetwood supremely defiant against the vile abuse showered upon them from close quarters. But the Sunday singles unfolded in slow-motion horror, America inching back to a point where they were favourites to pull off the greatest comeback in the event’s history – only for Shane Lowry to drain the putt that saved Europe. A day before, Lowry had played as McIlroy’s bodyguard. Only in the movies does sport deliver the simplicity of good versus evil; this was way better than any movie.
McIlroy, golf’s polarising figurehead, had been self-combusting for a decade searching for his fifth major. Some of his biggest humiliations had been at the Masters, where he wanted so desperately to become the sixth male golfer to complete a career grand slam that his failures had developed a Shark-like odour.
Year after year, his youthful sweetness was curdling. In the fourth round at Augusta National this year, McIlroy had the green blazer in his grip time after time, only to throw it away with a blunder … only, with a stroke of genius, to seize it back again.
After Justin Rose made his........