You Cannot Be Serious!: The 101 Most Frustrating Things in Sport

You Cannot Be Serious!: The 101 Most Frustrating Things in Sport Matthew Norman This is a book for the sports lover.Some of us spend too much time in the shed listening to sport on the radio and hogging the television. The thing about sports lovers is that we hate so much about it, we shout at the radio and the television; we love sport so much that if any of it makes us cross, it makes us FURIOUS. So this is a book for us, the sports loving angry brigade.So, introducing: Frank Lampard; badge kissing (Frank Lampard); Neville Neville, for producing the Neville brothers (sparing his lovely daughter, who is a terrific hockey player); Ally McCoist; John Fashanu; Gary Player; Gavin Henson; Sebastian Coe; Lewis Hamilton (obviously); Cristiano Ronaldo; Tim Henman; 'Beefy' and 'Lamby' adverts; Tim Henman's mother; dressage; Tim Henman's father; Pro-celebrity golf (which Tim Henman plays); Will Carling; Fatima Whitbread; the truly awful Sir Clive Woodward; Torville and Dean; Joey Barton; national anthems; Peter Crouch; grunting female tennis players; Nigel Mansell; Paul Ince (Incy); ); Mark Lawrensen; the fella in the Union Jack outfit at sporting events, particularly cricket, who I think is dead now; Tony Blair for his heading thing with Kevin Keegan; SIR Nick Faldo (for goodness sake); Matthew Hayden (a self-professed devout Christian off the field, a sneering bully on it); Dwain Chambers; opening ceremonies; David O'Leary; Argentinian polo players; Ashley Cole; Sports Personality of the Year Award (used to be so fantastic, terrible now); Ron Atkinson - you know why; Prince William and Prince Harry; Cliff Richard (the reason they got the roof); the haka; Will Carling; Peter Alliss - very very bad, possibly evil, a very big contender for the number one spot; Max Moseley; certainly Bernie Ecclestone; Billy Bowden and his stupid signals ('Jesus is the third umpire in my life'); American golf fans who shout out 'in the hole'; the green jacket; the Barmy Army. You Cannot Be Serious! The 101 Most Infuriating Things in Sport MATTHEW NORMAN To Rebecca and Louis, implacable enemies of sport in all its myriad guises Contents Cover (#u993d0d7d-41bc-5916-8ee3-6884d3c1e135) Title Page (#uab1a1dac-9828-581f-9a94-9dcfbbea19e9) Introduction 101 - Roger Federer 100 - Neville Neville 99 - Adolf Hitler 98 - Simon Barnes 97 - The Argentine Polo Player 96 - Blake Aldridge 95 - Peter Fleming 94 - Tony Green 93 - Frank Warren 92 - Graeme Souness 91 - Kriss Akabusi 90 - Ronnie O’Sullivan 89 - Pel? 88 - Brian Barwick 87 - Sledging 86 - Graham Poll 85 - Pat Cash 84 - Richard Keys 83 - Harold ‘Dickie’ Bird 82 - Mervyn King 81 - Virtual Racing 80 - Alastair Campbell 79 - The Vuvuzela 78 - The Charlton Brothers 77 - The Charity Fun Runner 76 - Rhona Martin 75 - Arjen Robben 74 - David O’Leary 73 - Lleyton Hewitt 72 - Ken Bailey 71 - Alan Sugar 70 - John McEnroe 69 - David Bryant 68 - Badge-Kissing 67 - In da Hole! 66 - Sir Geoffrey Charles Hurst 65 - George Graham 64 - Eric Bristow 63 - Jonathan Pearce 62 - Sir Clive Woodward 61 - The Japanese Racing Driver 60 - Jonathan Edwards 59 - Sven-G?ran Eriksson 58 - Sir Allen Stanford 57 - The Jockey Club 56 - Daniel Levy 55 - Joe Bugner 54 - Flavio Briatore 53 - John Motson 52 - Willie Carson 51 - Mike Gatting 50 - Footballers in Gloves and Tights 49 - Paula Radcliffe 48 - Tony Blair 47 - BBC Sports Personality of the Year 46 - Colin Montgomerie 45 - Glenn Hoddle 44 - Andre Agassi 43 - Dwain Chambers 42 - Sir Ian Botham 41 - Ron Atkinson 40 - The Centre Court Crowd 39 - Will Carling 38 - Tiger Woods 37 - Sue Barker 36 - Andy Gray 35 - Mark Nicholas 34 - The Barmy Army 33 - Ashley Cole 32 - Olympic Race Walking 31 - Mick McCarthy 30 - Thierry Henry 29 - Naseem Hamed 28 - David Pleat 27 - Sepp Blatter 26 - The Bare-Chested Gargantuan Newcastle Fan 25 - Steve McClaren 24 - John Inverdale 23 - Kenneth Bates 22 - Alan Shearer 21 - Billy Bowden 20 - Derek Thompson 19 - Michael Schumacher 18 - John Terry 17 - Pete Sampras 16 - Harald ‘Toni’ Schumacher 15 - Kevin Pietersen 14 - Mark Lawrenson 13 - Audley Harrison 12 - Tim Henman 11 - Jos? Mourinho 10 - The Henman Parents 9 - Geoffrey Boycott 8 - Sir Alex Ferguson 7 - Bernie Ecclestone 6 - The Offside Rules of Rugby Union 5 - Ars?ne Wenger 4 - Alan Green 3 - Sebastian Coe 2 - The England Football Team 1 - Peter Alliss Copyright About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Introduction I love sport. I love it with a passion so obsessive that it strikes me as indistinguishable from mental illness, as my wife would be gracious enough to confirm. In May 1991, three days into the commencement of our courtship, she awoke at 6.30 a.m. to hear me announce that I was leaving the flat to tie a shoelace on the northbound Northern Line platform at Embankment underground station. Spurs were playing Nottingham Forest in that afternoon’s FA Cup final, I explained as her absolute indifference gave way to mild alarm, and because such a shoelace-tying had prefaced our victory over Manchester City in the replayed Cup final of 1981, it had to be done again. She didn’t say anything. Nor was she capable of speech four months later when, a week into our honeymoon, I checked us out of a quaint Shaker inn in rural Massachusetts and into a filthy, cockroach-infested motel room, on the grounds that the former had no cable TV and the latter did, allowing us (me) to watch the peerlessly melodramatic d?nouement to that year’s Ryder Cup. Almost two decades later, the deranged love for sport remains unabated by the ravages of middle age. I can, and do, spend untold unbroken hours not only watching sport – any sport, other perhaps than dressage, rowing and ten-pin bowling – on television, but also taking comfort from studying cricket averages, the sequence of winners in golfing majors, and the results from the early rounds of 1970s tennis Grand Slam events. When I confess that one of my more thrilling experiences in recent years was chancing upon a website that included the scores from the qualifying competitions for World Snooker Championships, which I duly attempted to memorise, you may understand why I have come to know the condition as spautism. I regard myself as a little less far along the spectrum than those who have not missed an away fixture played by their football team in forty years, or have visited all ninety-two league grounds; but not by much, and more thanks to indolence than anything else. Hand in hand with any all-consuming, sanity-threatening love, there inevitably travels a portion of its opposite. I resent sport as a whole for its imperious hold over me, as the stalker perhaps does the stalkee, or a heroin addict the weakness of which the drug use is manifestation rather than cause. And I resent those involved in playing, describing and administering it, both as agents of that time-sucking dominion, and in many cases for themselves. The frustrations, distastes, rages and loathings acquired over forty years have made the writing of this book a painful task. How does one whittle down so many thousands of irritants, dullards, hypocrites, narcissists and plain horrors to a mere 101? On what possible grounds can no space be found for Cristiano Ronaldo or Vinnie Jones, Iron Mike Tyson or Sam Allardyce? What brand of imbecile would put his name to a list devoid of such titans of administrative cluelessness as cricket’s Giles Clark, or Sir Dave Richards, who somehow vaults the towering conflictof-interest hurdle to remain a power at both the Football Association and the Premier League? Whence the sheer gall to include Colin Montgomerie, yet not Nick Faldo? How in the name of all the saints did Chas and Dave avoid an appearance for ‘Snooker Loopy’? You will each have your own fierce criticisms, as much for the inclusion of those you admire (Peter Alliss’s popularity with many sound judges must, however bemusing, be acknowledged) as for the omissions of those you detest. The ranking of the 101 will also inevitably displease. In my defence, it is among sport’s sovereign duties to provoke every emotion, and rage at the incompetence, arrogance and indeed pretension of armchair know-all writers like myself (see also Simon Barnes, no. 98) is undeniably one of those. If you believe you could do it better, you are almost certainly right. All I can say is that every word of what follows comes from the heart – not from one of that organ’s more gentle or engaging ventrical chambers, perhaps, but from the heart nonetheless. Matthew Norman September 2010 101 Roger Federer Setting aside the bleeding obvious (genius beyond compare, blah blah), it must be admitted, with reluctance and sadness, that the Fed has become something of a wanker. It isn’t easy to say, and people continue to shy away from saying it, for such is the reverence for the indecent beauty of his tennis and so capacious is the storehouse of glorious memories the Swiss has deposited in those, like me, who have followed his career obsessively for almost a decade. I can’t think of a sportsman who has given me half as much televisual joy as Federer. I’ve barely missed a match he’s played since he announced himself as a generational talent at Wimbledon in 2001 with a thrilling five-set win over the seemingly unbeatable apeman Pete Sampras (see no. 17). Even now, with his decline apparently established and picking up pace, there is no one you’d rather watch. So it is with far more regret than relish that the masturbatorial quality he increasingly exhibits must, in the interests of the rigorous honesty that defines this book, be noted. First of all, there are the gleaming white blazers – vaguely nautical, with hints of both seventies disco and something worn on the bridge of the USS Enterprise, invariably with some boastful statistic (fifteen major titles, for instance) stitched into them – he has taken to wearing. With the notable exception of the Green Jacket presented to winners of the US Masters, there are no naffer garments known to world sport. More disturbing, meanwhile, is the self-pity. The infantile crying fit that followed his defeat to Rafael Nadal in the Australian Open final of 2009, when he had to abandon his loser’s speech, although not the first of its kind, was an embarrassment to behold. For a while after that, it seemed that the birth of his twin girls and his maiden French Open win in the summer of that year had matured him. Admittedly his victory speech at Wimbledon, after edging out a heroic Andy Roddick 16–14 in the fifth, was not impressive. A man with fifteen major titles informing another with just the one, and that years ago, that he knew the agony of narrow defeat, lacked sensitivity. The relief was that Roddick was too traumatised by his loss to take in the clumpingly misplaced condescension. Worse by far would come after the following year’s shock quarter-final defeat to Tom?? Berdych, when Federer blamed everything – a back injury, a sore leg, bad bounces, Denis Compton and the alignment of Uranus in Mars’s seventh house – other than himself, and offered the faintest and most grudging of praise for the Czech. ‘I definitely gave away this match,’ he said. But he hadn’t. He’d simply been on the wrong end of the sort of hiding he has dished out a thousand times, and lacked not only the humility to accept it, but the will to simulate that humility. No one sane expects epochal titans like Roger Federer to be genuinely humble. You don’t dominate a sport for years without a rapacious ego. All we ask is that they have the wit to give the appearance of modesty on the rare occasions it’s demanded, and this now seems beyond Federer’s grasp. The emperors of Rome had slaves positioned behind them at all times with the sole purpose of reminding them of their humanity by whispering the mantra, ‘You too shall die, Lord.’ Federer could do with one of those as his career comes to what one hopes will, for all the irritation he can generate, be a very slow and gentle close. That, and a style counsellor on the lines of Reginald Jeeves, who always found a way to prevent Bertie Wooster from wearing one of those white smoking jackets he’d bought in Monte Carlo that were capable of cauterising the retina at twenty paces. 100 Neville Neville Excuse the self-indulgent lurch into personal philosophising, but I have two iron rules of human existence, and two alone. The first is that anyone who imagines that something as infinitely complex and perplexing as human existence is susceptible to an iron rule is, axiomatically, an imbecile. The second is this. Never trust anyone who has the same name twice. Humbert Humbert was Lolita’s paedo-stepfather, and Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy. Like so many iron rules, this has its one exception (Lord Chief Justice Igor Judge, or Judge Judge, seems a good judicial egg). Neville Neville, on the other hand, serves only to confirm it. Can you honestly blame a man, you might ask, for his parents’ startling lack of imagination? Of course not. What you can and must blame him for is not availing himself of the cheap and simple remedy that is deed poll. What the advantages of hanging on to both names could be, apart perhaps from halving the time required in adolescence to practise the signature, I can’t imagine. But it’s not the wilful refusal to jettison at least one of those Nevilles that earns this double namer – a football agent with just the two clients (can you guess? Go on, have a crack) – his berth in this book. That refusal did, after all, inspire what may be the second-best football chant of the last twenty years. The first is the Chelsea ditty about Gianfranco Zola, sung to the tune of the Kinks’ ‘Lola’, that went thus: If you think we’re taking the piss Just ask that cunt Julian Dicks About Zola Who-oo-oo-o Zola … The brilliance, I’ve always felt, lies in how the Sondheims of Stamford Bridge eschewed substituting that ‘piss’ with the ‘mick’ that would have made it very nearly rhyme. This deliberate avoidance of the obvious strips away any lingering threat of Hallmark-greeting-card tweeness, and imbues the song with an emotional force, even poignancy, it would otherwise have lacked. The Old Trafford chant regarding our subject, sung in the earliest days of his issue’s Manchester United careers to the tune of Bowie’s ‘Rebel Rebel’, was barely less uplifting, if bereft of the assonant genius celebrated above. This is it: Neville Neville, they’re in defence Neville Neville, their future’s immense Neville Neville, they ain’t half bad Neville Neville, the name of their dad. With one of the brothers, this was also uncannily prescient. The future of Gary ‘Our Kid’ Neville, with club and country, was indeed immense. More than that, Gary, one of the more articulate native players in the Premier League (he speaks English almost as well as the less fluent Dutchmen), would prove to be football’s most influential trade unionist in the years between Jimmy Hill masterminding the scrapping of the maximum wage in the 1960s and John Terry’s heroically flawed attempt to spear-head a mutiny against Fabio Capello during the World Cup of 2010. You may recall how Gary, the Lech Wa? sa of his generation, nobly led the England dressing room in threatening to withdraw their labour in protest over the ban imposed on his clubmate and fellow England defender Rio Ferdinand for the amnesiac skipping of a drugs test; and how he spearheaded the snubbing of the media after one international in umbrage at their criticism. Anyone on several million quid per annum who can bring the flavour of the Gdansk shipyard to the England dressing room is more than all right with me. Philip, alas, is quite another matter. More gormless and less gifted by far than his elder brother, his career has contained just the one moment of immensity: the immense act of foolishness that concluded England’s involvement, under the riotously clueless stewardship of Kevin Keegan, in Euro 2000. England, astonishingly incompetent even by their own standards in the final group game against Romania, had inexplicably recovered from conceding an early goal to lead 2–1 at half time. The plucky little Ceau escu-executors duly equalised in the second half, but with a couple of minutes remaining England had the draw they needed to make laughably ill-deserved progress to the knockout stage. And then, for no apparent reason, with Viorel Moldovan heading harmlessly towards the byline, Our Philip chose to scythe him to the turf. Short of picking the ball up and dribbling it around the box in homage to the Harlem Globetrotters’ Meadowlark Lemon, he could not have gifted Romania a more blatant penalty. An admirably distraught Phil would eventually receive full punishment (a transfer to Everton), but from Neville Neville there has been not a word of regret for his own central role – part genetic, no doubt, but surely part nurture as well – in the creation of this national humiliation. Shameless Shameless. 99 Adolf Hitler On 28 May 1940, Winston Churchill held the most important Cabinet meeting in British history. With the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax championing the majority view that the military situation was so hopeless that the only option was to sue for peace, the new Prime Minister had a desperate fight on his hands to keep buggering on against the Hun. The need to win round his ministers elicited from him what is regarded as even his greatest speech – the fight must continue even if it meant every one of them bleeding to death in the dust, he said, because a nation that is conquered can rise again, but one that surrenders is finished for ever. The memory always amuses when a peevish politician does what Hillary Clinton did in the spring of 2008, and insists that fancy oratory ain’t worth diddly. For all that, I can’t help wondering if Winston could have spared himself the rhetorical bother had he known then what we know now about Hitler and cricket. In the event, all he would have needed to do was inform the Cabinet, take a vote and go back to his bath. In fact this outrage didn’t emerge for another seven decades, when a contemporary account by a Hitler-loving Tory MP, one Oliver Locker-Lampson, was unearthed. This related how in 1923 Hitler came across some British expats enjoying a genteel game of cricket and asked if he could watch them play. Happy to oblige, these thoroughly decent coves went that extra mile for post-Versailles Treaty hatchet-burial by writing out the rules of the game for his perusal. Hitler, having duly perused, returned a few days later with his own team and took them on. The scorecard of this Anglo–German clash has never been published, but from what followed we may presume that the result pre-empted the one to follow in 1945. In an unwonted flash of intolerance, Hitler took umbrage at the rules, declaring the game ‘insufficiently violent for German fascists’ (Bodyline, which might have changed his thinking there, had yet to come). To this end, and with a novel way of training troops in mind, he suggested tweaking the rules by introducing a larger, harder ball, and abandoning pads. The absence of any masterplan to jettison the protective box may well be further evidence of that rumoured gonadic deficit. With only one to protect, imaginary Nazi cricket scholars posit, why bother? If the F?hrer had entirely misunderstood the point of the game, failing to appreciate the languor, subtlety, nuance and infinite complexities that make Test cricket the most captivating of sports, perhaps he can be forgiven. He was never a chap easily imagined daydreaming at deep fine leg, or taking four hours to score 23 on a flat wicket. Even so, and however unsuccessfully, he had blazed the trail of cheap-thrills pseudo-cricket that would find its apotheosis in Twenty20, and for that, among other things, he cannot lightly be forgiven. 98 Simon Barnes ‘I suppose the problem,’ observed the chief sportswriter of The Times once, when contemplating the crazy misconception that he merits the teasing of the inferior and the envious, ‘is that some people can’t come to terms with the idea that intelligent people like sport, and might want to read someone who tries to write about sport in an intelligent way.’ How true this is, how very, very true. I mean, it’s hardly as if there are incredibly bright and thoughtful writers like Hugh McIlvanney in the Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday’s Patrick Collins out there covering this turf, is it? It’s not as if Mike Atherton, Matthew Syed, Marina Hyde, Paul Hayward, Oliver Holt and others sate the appetite for smart and insightful sportswriting. ‘My attempts to do so have met,’ Mr Barnes went on, ‘with a bewildering hostility in some quarters.’ Bewildering indeed. To be a lone oasis of intellectualism in an arid wasteland of moronic clich? must be a grievous weight on the shoulders of this most engagingly unpompous of hacks. Yet, like Atlas, he bears his burden stoically and without complaint. ‘Occasionally I’ve come up with some high-faluting notion,’ said this Pseuds Corner fixture, ‘and somebody will say, “What if Private Eye got hold of it?” I say, “Well, fuck them. Let them get hold of it. I’m setting the bloody agenda here, not these guys.” ’ It’s that ‘occasionally’ I love. At his best, when writing about his Down’s Syndrome son and even every now and then about sport, Mr Barnes – an eerie doppelganger, with his lupine face and ponytail, for the Satanic character Bob in Twin Peaks – is very good indeed. At one iota less than his best, when presenting himself as what someone identified as a ‘posturing narcissist’ – well, suffice it to say that another hack once expressed bewilderment of his own on finding him using the words ‘unpretentious’ and ‘unselfconscious’ (of Amir Khan) with apparent admiration. From the canon of Simon Barnes, you could pluck many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of examples to illustrate the massive range and power of his mind, or indeed his commitment to wearing his learning lightly. Sometimes, for example, he will restrict the Nietzsche references to no more than one a paragraph (I’m a Heidegger man myself, with the odd Hegelian twist). But space is short, so let us leave it to this all-time personal favourite to give the flavour. Roger Federer, Mr Barnes once declared, is ‘as myriad-minded as Shakespeare ever was’. Sometimes, as the agenda-setter himself might be the very last to agree, there simply are no words. 97 The Argentine Polo Player The abundant ridiculousness of the sport itself need not detain us here. That it appeals to male members of the House of Windsor within a death or two of the throne is ample comment on its mingling of needless physical danger and grotesque unaffordability. Its appeal to the female sex is predicated on something else, of course, as close students of Jilly Cooper’s oeuvre will need little reminding. Why frustrated women d’une certaine age prefer the ogling of equestrians, and inter-chukka traipsing around fields stamping down displaced pieces of turf to work off some of that ardour, to availing themselves of the splendid pornography so freely available on cable television, I cannot say. All we know is that the Argentine polo player, that prancing ponce of the aristo sporting world, makes the polo field cougar paradise. Invariably sickeningly handsome and repulsively dashing, this archetype of gentrified machismo has correctly identified the tight-buttocked, muscle-bulging activity of riding around swinging a mallet as the speediest route to a life of idle riches. For decades, long before the trail was blazed by Sarah Ferguson’s mother, wealthy English and American women have been alighting on the pseudo-gaucho talent pool as a source of mid-life gratification. Exactly how many of the players are descended from gentlemen who hurriedly fled central Europe in the mid-1940s is unknown, though any genetic inheritance from Prussian cavalry-men would obviously be handy for horsemanship. One of the age’s finest players, meanwhile, glories in the first name of Adolfo. Yet it is not for us to visit the sins of the great-grandfathers on the great-grandsons. What it is for us to do is point out that these show ponies are essentially glamourised gigolos with nothing on their minds but the servicing of Anglo-American sugar mummies and the cushy lives their capacious purses will thenceforth provide. What polo represents to the Argentine, in other words, is a hole with a mint. 96 Blake Aldridge So much nauseating drivel is intoned by sports people about the primacy of the collective effort – the striker insisting he couldn’t care about scoring so long as the team wins, for example, when he’d massacre an orphanage for a hat-trick in a 3–9 defeat – that any expression of individuality in a group context generally acts as an anti-emetic. When, however, a member of that group, even a group as small as two, pinpoints the midst of competition as the time to slag off his partner, the antidote loses its efficacy. When that same group member chooses to do so at the side of an Olympic pool, by speaking to his mother in the crowd on his mobile phone, you know you’re dealing with a fool of the very first water. The diving prodigy Tom Daley, who represented Britain in the 2008 Olympics at an age when others are gingerly ditching the armbands, was admittedly an irritant himself, with all the robotic references to his sponsor. He paid tribute to ‘Team Visa’ with all the frequency and sincerity Barry McGuigan lavished on ‘my manager Mr Barney Eastwood’ before the two went to attritional courtroom war. But then, precocious fourteen-year-olds are irritating, as parents and Britain’s Got Talent viewers need no reminding. They also tend, inexplicably, to lack Olympic experience, which perhaps explained the sub-par performance in the Beijing synchronised diving event of a pubescent boy who would confirm his talent a year later by winning an individual world title in Rome. Aldridge, although more than a decade older, allowed him no such latitude, publicly criticising Daley during the competition despite the experts identifying Aldridge himself as the weaker performer. As for the phone call, filial piety is a wonderful thing, but there are times and places to demonstrate it. Seldom since Oedipus has a public figure found a less appropriate method of showing the world how much he loves his mummy. Aldridge’s punishment was not the putting out of his own eyes, but a lurch into a new sport also covered by live cameras. Sadly, he seems to have as much talent for shoplifting as for diving, winning his first conviction in May 2009, a few months before Daley won his gold in Rome. He was fined ?80 by police for nicking stuff from B&Q. Encouragingly, he appears to be showing more sticking power in this career. He was arrested again in February 2010 on suspicion of stealing wine from Tesco and assaulting the security guard who caught him at it. His trial awaits at the time of writing, and we wish him well. If and when it takes place – if it hasn’t already – a word of advice. Whatever the temptation, try not to call your mother in the spectator seats at the back from the dock. Judges hate that. And however badly you think your barrister is performing, Blake, on no account criticise him publicly until the verdict is in. In court, as on the diving board, it is essential to work as a team. 95 Peter Fleming John McEnroe’s old doubles partner may be the most unnervingly weird character ever to analyse any sport on television. His air of intellectual superiority may be well-founded, as it would be for anyone with an IQ over ninety sharing airtime with Barry Cowan, but it does tend to grate. Although he behaves himself during Wimbledon, when he works for the BBC, Fleming seldom hears a question on Sky that isn’t beneath his dignity. His preferred mode of expressing disdain, particularly towards presenter Marcus Buckland, a modest and charming soul, is the exaggerated pause. How, Mr Buckland once asked him, would he explain the amazing abundance of talent in the men’s game today? Eunuchs grew rabbinical beards in the time Fleming took to ponder this, before offering a desolate ‘I dunno,’ and lapsing into quietude once more. On a good day, the silence in response to a seemingly unchallenging enquiry – Does Novak Djokovic’s second serve look a bit off? Are Rafa Nadal’s knees playing up? What is the time? – puts you in mind of Pinter performed by the Theatre of the Mute. On a bad one, you could write a wistful rite-of-passage memoir in the style of Alan Bennett in the time he requires to address a wayward Andy Murray two-hander down the line. Occasionally, when Fleming feels that the foolishness of the question requires more peremptory treatment, he might wince, snort or raise his eyebrows to the crown of his head. Now and again, he will stare in disbelief, the gaze apparently in homage to Jack Nicholson in The Shining or Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men. When Mr Fleming, facially a hybrid between the Addams Family’s butler Lurch and Jay Gatsby, does deign to share an opinion, it’s invariably worth hearing. He is an extremely bright guy, and he certainly has a presence (that of a Harvard philosophy professor stunned into an existential crisis at mysteriously finding himself redeployed as a third-grade teaching assistant). Tennis, like darts and nothing else, is a sport Sky covers well, and the languid gloss Fleming lends to its broadcasts does much to explain that bucking of the form book. I wouldn’t be without him for the world. Nor, however, would I wish to get into a big-money staring contest with him, much less be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the Situation Room at the White House demanding an instant decision from a President Fleming about how to respond to worryingly raised activity levels in an Iranian nuclear silo. 94 Tony Green The most perplexing event in the sporting calendar is the BDO World Darts Championship, broadcast each New Year by the BBC. The tortured history of the great darting split, as featured in a hilarious edition of BBC2’s documentary strand Trouble at the Top, needn’t detain us long. Suffice it to say that in the 1990s a trickle of BDO stars flowed away to form the rival PDC, now run with typical commercial ?lan by Barry Hearn, and that the trickle later became a torrent. Where the PDC is dart’s equivalent of football’s Premier League – a point it subtly underscores by naming a competition ‘the Premier League of Darts’ – the BDO is, at best, its Conference. So robbed of talent has it become that the trades descriptions people risk a class action for negligence by failing to have it restyled The World Championship for People Who Try Hard, Bless ’Em But Just Aren’t Terribly Good at Darts. An averagely well coordinated male who threw the first arrow of his life on Christmas Day could expect to reach the quarter-finals, at least, a fortnight later. The timing of the BDO event, which starts immediately after Phil ‘The Power’ has retained the real world title on Sky Sports, is the equivalent of rescheduling Wimbledon as a warm-up for a satellite event in Cleethorpes, and adds an additional layer of poignancy that isn’t strictly required. That the work of lead commentator Tony Green perfectly reflects the quality of the darts completes a startlingly surreal picture. Best known to students of game show theory as Jim Bowen’s Bullseye stooge (‘And Bully’s special priiiiize … a reverse lobotomy!’), this John Prescott lookalike, and alas soundalike, must be the most clueless commentator in the history of televised sport. Like the former deputy PM he so closely resembles in girth and jowls, Mr Green boldly pioneers aphasia as a mainstream lifestyle choice. His trademarks may be boiled down to two. Whenever the director shows a cutaway shot of a palpably bored crowd sullenly watching the apology for top-flight darts on a giant screen (and isn’t that the special appeal of a live event? It’s so qualitatively different from watching at home) he will respond with an elon-gated ‘Yeeeeeessssss, there they are!’ Technically, it’s hard to pick a fight with that. There is invariably where they were. On other levels … well, it’s not Richie Benaud, is it? The other signature dish is to respond to a cosmically witless pre-prepared pun from co-commentator David Croft with the wheezy breath of an obese hyena dying from emphysema. This death rattle is then followed by ‘Dear, dear … oh dear,’ to suggest a psycho-geriatric-ward fugitive reacting with a mixture of delight and shame to a bladder accident induced by unquenchable mirth at Arthur Askey affecting, on the London Palladium stage in 1957, to be a busy, busy bee. How Mr Green has been retained by the BBC for so long, in defiance of the verbal facility of the inter-stroke victim, is less mysterious than it seems. The BDO is effectively the property of a cabal – a couple of veteran players, chairman Olly Croft, master of ceremonies Martin Fitzmaurice (the sea monster who screams ‘Are you ready? Let’s. Play. Darts’), cackling sub-Kray blingmaster Bobby George, and Mr Green himself. Between them, this bunch have transformed the BDO into a hybrid of kitschily ironic entertainment, aversion therapy for those terrified of becoming hooked on televised darts, and cr?che for those who might one day grow up to join the PDC. Mr Green himself refuses to acknowledge the existence of the rival organisation, which unusually for him makes some sense. The immortal Sid Waddell, his one-time BBC colleague, is of course the PDC’s main commentator, and even Mr Green can see the danger of drawing attention to the contrast. Even when the BDO version was won by a disabled man unable to extend his arm fully when throwing, the Australian haemophiliac Tony David in 2001, Mr Green’s confidence in its supremacy remained unshaken. ‘Yeeeessssss,’ is how he greeted the winning double that day, ‘it’s Tony Davis!’ After two weeks of the tournament and two hours of final action, how cruel to come within a single space on the middle line of the Qwerty keyboard of calling the new champion’s name right. For once, Mr Green had stumbled on a certain eloquence. Albeit unwittingly, and with unwonted succinctness, he had told his audience all it needed to know, if only about himself, in a syllable. 93 Frank Warren How a man of such exquisite sensitivity has survived and made money in the rough and Runyonesque world of boxing is one of the miracles of the age. Mr Warren’s vulnerability to criticism does him nothing but credit. Where others become hardened by long careers in the big-fight game, he has been softened remarkably. Other than offering sincere admiration, what can you say about the adorably florid-faced boxing promoter and gunshot survivor? Not a dickie bird. While Frank lives up to his own belief that when people have an opinion, ‘they are entitled to express it’ – for example, he repeatedly expressed his opinion of me (‘moron’, for example) in his News of the World column – experience teaches that this passion for freedom of speech is a one-way street. Even the most affectionate of teasing will provoke from Frank the threat of an action for libel. In fact, he’ll more than likely sue over this. ‘If it pleases your lordship, my client Mr Frank Warren, a man of the most blameless character, a pillar of his local community, a tireless worker for many deserving charities, is profoundly distressed by the implication that he may tend toward the mildly litigious, and seeks substantial damages for the injury to his feelings and reputation …’ Somewhere in such an action we might sniff out the stirrings of a defence, should it come to that. And it’s even money that it will. 92 Graeme Souness Even in the legalised GBH halcyon era of the 1970s and early eighties, English football knew no more vicious a would-be maimer than Graeme Souness. With the thick moustache and bubble perm regarded as mandatory at Liverpool at the time, he may have joined team-mate Mark Lawrenson (see no. 14) as a prototype for the Village People’s construction worker. But had you found yourself sharing a YMCA dormitory or navy bunk with Souness, you’d soon enough have swapped the warmth for a street doorway or Davy Jones’s locker, for fear of being on the wrong end of a studs-up leg-breaker in the middle of the night. No one ever took such unsmiling satisfaction from endangering careers. His most infamous assault, late in his career for Glasgow Rangers against Steaua Bucharest, crystallised the purity of his malevolence. About the raising and spiteful stamping of his right boot onto the thigh of one Dmitri Rotario there was nothing unusual. What was so refreshingly novel was that Souness, whose reaction to this arrestable offence was to clutch his own leg in mock agony, was in possession of the ball at the time. The best to be said of Souness’s commitment to violence is that it never lacked integrity. Just as with Roy Keane, who is excused an entry thanks to the accurate character reading he offered Mick McCarthy (see no. 31), he was too magnificent a player to need the brutality. There was no design or purpose to it whatever. This was the Edmund Hillary of football hatchet men: he sought to rupture cruciate ligaments because they were there. Souness went on to earn his berth on Sky Sports, where despite the hot competition he shines out as a beacon of charisma-free witlessness, in the traditional manner. Only having repeatedly proved his uselessness as a manager, with Liverpool, Blackburn Rovers and Newcastle among others, was he deemed fit to point out their inadequacies to coaches in current employment. Despite the rich catalogue of failures, his self-confidence remains as strident as it is misplaced. A few years ago I came across him in a bar during one of Tottenham’s then perpetual managerial crises, and asked if he fancied himself the guy to turn Spurs around. ‘Son,’ he said, leaning magisterially back on his stool, ‘the club I couldnae turn round has yet to be built.’ Inexplicably, this remains a judgement shared by no one else. Indeed, in a nice instance of life imitating art imitating life, Souness has come to emulate Yosser Hughes, with whom he famously appeared in a Boys From the Black Stuff cameo (excellent he was, too). Time and time again he has invited chairmen to ‘Gizza job,’ and been answered with a sarcastic chuckle. Although not, one suspects, to his face. 91 Kriss Akabusi It pays testament to his enduring genius to irritate that even today, years after last setting eyes and (worse) ears on the man, it remains impossible to do the late-night channel-flick of the insomniac philistine without a frisson of terror that Kriss Akabusi might crop up in an ancient repeat of A Question of Sport. As a useful 400-metre runner over hurdles and on the flat, specialising in stirring last legs of the relay, Akabusi seemed a harmless enough soul. Yet even then the exaggerated can-do enthusiasm of his post-race interviews – for all that they often came moments after he had proved that he couldn’t do, and indeed hadn’t done – hinted at the horrors to come. Television executives evidently noticed them, and concluded that what the viewing public needed in the deep recession of the early 1990s was the human equivalent of one of those executive toys which, at the faintest touch, produce an extended burst of deranged giggling. If laughter is indeed the best medicine, Akabusi will live to be 140. The problem for the rest of us is that while he was getting all the health benefits, we were stuck in the placebo group. Worse than that, the insane chortling that was doing him such a power of good had the disturbing side effect of raising the blood pressure in the rest of us. If there is an unflatteringly jealous tone in the above, the reason for that is simply put. Of all the human traits, the one I envy most is the Akabusian gift of being easily amused. In a dark and gruesome world, what ineffable bliss it must be to laugh uncontrollably at nothing until the ribcage creaks and the bladder screams for mercy. In what passed for his televisual heyday, when he was a presenter on Record Breakers and a guest on just about everything else, nothing – not one thing – Akabusi could hear would fail to strike him as outlandishly amusing. If the Shipping Forecast on Radio 4 revealed a high ridge of pressure moving towards South Utsira, he’d squeal with mirth. If the Hang Seng index in Hong Kong had been marked sharply up in brisk early trading, he would yelp and shake with merriment. If his GP had told him that he’d developed gangrene in both legs, and required an immediate double amputation, he’d have collapsed with mirth and crawled around on the floor until the limbs detached themselves of their own accord. In his commitment to laughing uncontrollably at the studiedly unfunny, he was a one-man Michael McIntyre audience long before that alleged comedian emerged to raise fresh doubts about the taste and even the sanity of his compatriots. Whether the unceasing screeching was genuine, possibly due to an undiagnosed neurological condition, or the stand-out feature of a construction designed to get him media work, it is impossible to be sure. I don’t remember his eyes laughing in tune with his mouth, but it was all a blessedly long time ago. Today, Mr Akabusi does what retired sportsmen with a TV future buried in the past tend to do. He is a motivational speaker, using silly voices, demented changes of decibel level (whispering one moment, yelling the next, neither volume remotely explained by the text), anecdotes and archive footage of relay triumphs to give new meaning and direction to the lives of those unable to find a televangelist at the right price. No doubt he makes a decent living from reliving the highlights of a decent career, and explaining to those unable to better the late King of Tonga’s personal best for the 60-metre dash how to adapt his athletic experiences to become better, happier and richer people. I hope so. There is no obvious malice in the man, and I wish him well. For all that, I can’t help thinking that that the only people for whom a talk from Kriss Akabusi would constitute an effective motivational force are members of the voluntary euthanasia society Exit. 90 Ronnie O’Sullivan For this possessor of the purest natural talent ever known to British sport – or games, for those who believe that a sine qua non of any authentic sport is that it leaves the player needing a shower – lavish allowances must be made. He is the scion of a family next to which the kith and kin of John Terry, engagingly Runyonesque though they are, look like the Waltons. Rocket Ronnie’s father remains a house guest of Her Majesty for murdering an alleged Kray associate in a restaurant in 1982, although he is up for parole, while the mother did a bit of bird herself for tax evasion. You needn’t have a doctorate in clinical psychology, or be a close student of the parental poetry of Philip Larkin, to appreciate the effects on a formative mind. The extent of Ronnie’s confusion and vulnerability was spotlighted a few years ago when, flailing about to make sense of his life, a little (a very little, perhaps) like Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters, he turned for a spiritual guide to the boxer Naseem Hamed. Mr Hamed narrowly failed to shepherd Ronnie into the Muslim faith. He never did become Rahquet Rhani al Sull’ivan, but it was apparently a close call. However unlikely the image of this tortured, saturnine figure being called to prayer by the muezzin, the external discipline might have helped a man who conceded a best-of-seventeen-frame match to Stephen Hendry when 0–4 behind with a terse ‘I’ve had enough mate’, and whose notion of good grace in defeat, at the China Open of 2008, extended to bragging about the girth of his penis at the press conference, and inviting a female reporter to fellate him, before giving her a helpful demonstration by mistaking the head of his microphone for a lollipop. In the absence of that religious discipline, it becomes ever harder to overlook the contempt with which he treats his genius. At times, in fact, genius has seemed an inadequate word. Roger Federer is a genius, but always had to work devilishly hard to cope with the raging Mallorcan bull Rafael Nadal (and usually failed), and even the likes of Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray. At his best, O’Sullivan appears not to be working at all, potting balls at ridiculous speed and with absurd ease with either hand. Perhaps this explains why he seems not to value his gift at all. Often, in fact, he seems to resent it, and to wish it dead. As a fabled wit once observed – Oscar Wilde, perhaps, or possibly John Virgo – each man kills the thing he loves. Ronnie hasn’t killed it yet, but it seldom blossoms as gorgeously as it did, or as it should. Still harder to excuse is the contempt he shows his public. Whether or not his lip-curling disdain for snooker is sourced in insecurity he tries to cloak in contrived diffidence, his concession of frames when he needs a single snooker to win them has been getting on the top ones for too long. The disrespect he shows almost every rival other than John Higgins is more a comment on him, needless to say, than on them. Whenever the likable Mark Selby, who has the nickname ‘Jester’ for the compelling comedic rationale that he hails from Leicester, wins the last four frames to beat him, Ronnie makes it crystal clear that he doesn’t rate him, and hints at having thrown the match away because scrapping against so palpable an inferior is beneath his dignity. As for the continual threats to quit, no public figure in history has announced their retirement so often – yes, Streisand, that includes you – and reneged. He knows he can behave as boorishly, lewdly and disrespectfully as he wishes without that retirement being forced on him because he remains the biggest draw, if not the only one, in snooker, and that without him the dangerous decline of the game (a world championship sponsored by Pukka Pies, forsooth) might well become terminal. But the little-boy-lost act ran out of whatever minimal charm it had long ago. There comes a time in every wounded lamb’s life when, however much they fucked him up, his mum and dad, the leonine thing to do is not to roar but stoically to hide the misery and behave. At thirty-five, that time is now. If not, the next time he announces his retirement, he might find that the majority reaction isn’t a plea to reconsider, or even a weary shrug, but a sigh of relief. 89 Pel? If Pel? had shown the same talent with his feet as he has exhibited since retiring with his mouth, he would have been, at best, Emile Heskey. Never has the old saw that former sportsmen should be neither seen nor heard been more perfectly illustrated – and that includes such fellow entrants in this work as Mark Lawrenson, Sue Barker, Sebastian Coe and even Kriss Akabusi. Genius that he was on the pitch, off it he struggles to make the cut as a half-wit. You can barely wade through five pages of his autobiography without encountering a variant of ‘Once again, my business judgement sadly betrayed me.’ So it was that money troubles obliged him to advertise Viagra, thereby betraying our memories of the wonderfully lithe, natural seventeen-year-old striking talent who devastated Sweden in the 1958 World Cup final, and later electrified the 1970 tournament. The last thing you want from a sporting god is the image of him struggling with flaccidity. The same talent for misjudgement that caused his frequent flirtations with bankruptcy (you could sell him a batch of $103 bills for twice their face value) extends to his reading of the one thing he might be expected to know a little about. As a football pundit, Pel? is barely less mythical a figure than he once was in the yellow and blue of Brazil. Romario, a successor as leader of the Brazilian attack, once said, ‘Pel? is a poet when he keeps his mouth shut,’ while the World Cup-winning coach and briefly manager of Chelsea Luiz Felipe Scolari chipped in with this little gem: ‘I believe Pel? knows nothing about football. His analysis always turns out to be wrong. If you want to win a title, you have to listen to Pel? and then do the opposite.’ The Sadim of football punditry (like Midas in reverse, everything he touches turns to lead) has made too many sensationlly daft predictions for them all to be catalogued here, so we must confine ourselves to a few favourites. Pel?’s pick for the 1994 World Cup was Colombia. Suffice it to say that the Colombian defender Andr?s Escobar had been shot dead in a Medellin car park before the final was played. In 1998 he went for Norway. Norway. Four years later, the scorer of more than 1,000 career goals studied the World Cup field, and plumped – I’m not making this up – for England. To repeat, that’s England. E.N.G.L.A.N.D. Over his insistence, long ago, that Nicky Barmby would become a player of unarguably world class, and his categorical statement that an African nation would win the World Cup before the year 2000, let us lightly pass. Perhaps the highlight of highlights from the mouth of this soothsayer of soothsayers was his contemptuous dismissal of his own country’s chances in 2002 (the year, you may recall, he predicted an England victory). Brazil, insisted Pel?, would not survive the group stage. How tantalisingly close the team came to fulfilling his expectation, as they became the first country ever to win all seven games in normal time en route to lifting the Jules Rimet Trophy. Whoever would have believed back in 1986 that of the two players universally acknowledged, then as now, as the greatest of all time, it would be Diego Maradona – much too adorably deranged nowadays to warrant an entry of his own in this volume – who went on to become the more beloved, and Pel? who would establish himself, even in football, as the imbecile’s imbecile? If only there were a Viagran equivalent for a limp and lifeless brain. 88 Brian Barwick When Caligula set the template for hilarious over-promotion, who would have thought that the day would dawn when the Football Association of England would make the creation of a horse as Consul of Rome seem a tediously conventional employment decision? In fact, giving his horse Incitatus that much-prized post was the sanest thing (not the highest of bars to clear, in truth) Caligula ever did. Its purpose was purely ironic. He intended to satirise the cravenness of his Senators by obliging them to celebrate the appointment as a masterstroke. As, to a Senator, what with being in terror of their lives, they did. What Brian Barwick’s ironic intent in hiring Steve McClaren as England football coach might have been, on the other hand, I’ve no idea, because the only thing satirised there was the luminescent idiocy of Barwick himself and the FA of which he was chief executive. However, since the only other possible explanation is that he regarded Mr McClaren (see no. 25) as a gifted international coach, there is no option but to hail him as the world’s first, and doubtless last, kamikaze satirist. Truth be told, this erstwhile TV sports executive looks nothing like an anarcho-comic genius. With the wide, bald dome and bristly little moustache, he more closely resembles Mr Grimsdale, the 1950s middle-management archetype in all those side-splitting Norman Wisdom flicks that still have them queuing round the block in downtown Tirana. Mr Grimsdale can be excused for repeatedly hiring Norman, having noted the calamitous results of doing so in thirty-three previous films, on the grounds that he was a fictional character conforming to somebody else’s script. Mr Barwick wrote his own, yet no one but he was vaguely surprised that McClaren’s England stint concluded beneath a deluge of farce (brolly and all) of which a coalition of the Keystone Kops, Laurel and Hardy, Jim Carrey and our own Chuckle Brothers could barely have dreamed. McClaren’s inadequacies were so evident to all but Mr Barwick that the first obituary to his England career was published the day after his appointment was announced. This was at least a day late. Still more humiliating than the act of panic itself (in such a state was Barwick after his fiascoid failure to hire the Brazilian Luiz Felipe Scolari that he’d have given the job to a hat stand with the requisite coaching badge) was the way in which he chose to present it. Fans of Gordon Brown’s blanket denial in the summer of 2009 that he had intended to fire Alistair Darling as Chancellor should note that Brian Barwick had blazed that trail. He donned his straightest face to inform us that Mr McClaren had been his ‘first-choice candidate’ all along, within days of allowing himself to be filmed at Heathrow en route to talk to Scolari in Lisbon – the very act of amateur-hour incompetence which provoked the media frenzy that in turn frightened Scolari into telling Mr Barwick to stuff the job up his jacksie. And in the sense that Mr McClaren dwelt in a holiday cottage a few inches to the south of Mr Barwick’s upper colon at the time, this is precisely what he did. Two years later, soon after McClaren had masterminded the epochal disaster at Wembley that saw England lose to Croatia and fail to qualify for Euro 2008, old Grimsdale followed him out of the FA. His involvement in football now rests with his place on the board of Hampton & Richmond Borough FC. So let us end this appreciation on an uplifting and life-enhancing note by congratulating Brian Barwick on finding his level at last. Long may he enjoy it. 87 Sledging All that strictly needs to be said of the relationship between this cricketing branch of low-level bullying and genuine wit is this: of all the cricket-playing nations, sledging is beloved solely by the Australians. There was a time, long ago, when it may have had some appeal. When W.G. Grace reacted to having his stumps clattered by informing the bowler, ‘’Twas the wind which took the bail orf, good sir,’ and the umpire chipped in, ‘Indeed, doctor, and let us hope the wind helps thee on thy journey back to the pavilion,’ the coalescence of mannerliness and the lingo of the Amish barn-builder lent the exchange some charm. Nothing there to induce the enquiry, ‘Where is thy ribcage repair kit, good doctor, when thou most sorely requireth it?’ perhaps, but rather sweet for all that. By the time, some half a century later, that F.S. Trueman was advising an incoming Aussie batsman who shut the gate to the pavilion behind him, ‘Don’t bother, son, you won’t be out there long enough,’ the art of sledging may already have been in decline. Another half a century on, and it is virtually impossible to find any sledge that is not predicated on either the batsman’s girth or the conceit that his wife has a sexual appetite so rapacious that her reflex observation, having serviced the entire Household Cavalry, is to ask after the whereabouts of the Scots Dragoons. Perhaps this is too harsh. It could be that Shane Warne was indeed a larrikin Mark Twain, and Adam Gilchrist an ocker Tallulah Bankhead. We’ll never know for sure, because seldom do the stump microphones capture the inter-ball hilarity. However, now and again a sledge is picked up. It may give a flavour of this nourishing comedic form to quote this citation, offered by New Zealand blogger Michael Ellis as his candidate for history’s greatest sledge: ‘And of course you can’t forget Ian Healy’s legendary comment that was picked up by the Channel 9 microphones when Arjuna Ranatunga called for a runner on a particularly hot night during a one-dayer in Sydney. “You don’t get a runner for being an overweight, unfit, fat cunt.” ’ It is not known whether the Sri Lankan felt it beneath him to offer the mandatory reply to a portliness-related sledge (‘Yeah, mate. Well, it’s yer missus’s fault for giving me a biscuit every time I fuck her’). The oppressively limited range of subject matter qualifies the sledge as sport’s closest equivalent to the haiku. If the batsman isn’t fat or a cuckold in the imagination of the Oscar Wildes of the slips, he must be gay. ‘So,’ Glenn McGrath once enquired of Ramnaresh Sarwan, ‘what does Brian Lara’s dick taste like?’ ‘I don’t know,’ responded the West Indian, preparing a foray into virgin sledging territory. ‘Ask your wife.’ If anything encapsulates the exquisite subtlety of the two-way sledge, it is McGrath’s counterstrike to that. ‘If you ever mention my wife again,’ he said, expecting a degree of sensitivity (his wife, now deceased, had been diagnosed with cancer) his reference to the fellating of Mr Lara might be seen to have sacrificed, ‘I’ll fucking rip your fucking throat out.’ Whether or not Mr Sarwan is indeed a friend of Dorothy, who would deny that Mr McGrath, in common with all the legends of Australian sledging, is a spiritual friend of Dorothy Parker? 86 Graham Poll The public laundering of dirty washing is never a savoury sight. Every family has its private embarrassments, and the sane ones do what they can to keep them private. None of us wants the neighbours to learn our grubby little secrets. The same goes for companies, in which a specially acute strain of loathing is reserved for the whistle-blower. So too it is with countries. You and I know that secondary education in Britain is a disaster, that scandalous numbers leave school barely literate, and that the innumeracy statistics are equally shameful. We know that the developed world’s educative dunce’s cap rests upon the British head, and it anguishes us. Government after government tries, or pretends to try, to sort it out, and through the lack of funds, will and courage, fails. These things we know, and these things we naturally prefer to keep to ourselves. Yet in every family there appears to be someone who can’t avoid spilling the beans, and in the case of our national family the blabbermouth is Graham Poll. In front of the several hundred millions watching Croatia play Australia in the 2006 World Cup, our leading referee revealed that the British education system produces adults who, let alone struggling with their twelve-times table, cannot count to two. Late in a game of mesmerising fractiousness, Mr Poll had sent off a brace of players when he showed Croatia’s Josip ?imuni? a second yellow card. The ensuing calculation was not, on the prima facie evidence, a demanding one. This was not an equation to have the average ref whispering, ‘Get me Vorderman on the phone NOW’ at the Fifa fourth official through his little microphone. Put simply, the equation was as follows: 1 yellow + 1 yellow = 2 yellows = 1 red. On Sesame Street, Big Bird would have cracked it like a nut with a diseased and brittle shell. Yet it tantalisingly eluded Mr Poll. He allowed ?imuni? to remain on the field for several minutes before ploughing virgin territory by making the Croat football history’s first recipient of a third yellow card. Then, and only then, possibly concluding he’d gone as far along Revolution Road as seemed decent in one night, did Mr Poll fish into his back pocket for the red card. Along with the mischievous pleasure at the pricking of a bumptiously over-inflated ego went a dash of sympathy. A reputation built over many years had been obliterated by one moment of inexplicable daftness, and that, as Gerald Ratner would confirm, is nothing to be relished. Mr Poll retired from international football the next day, in the manner of the cabinet minister who elects to resign to spend more time with his family the night before he appears on the front page of the Sun. The damage had already been done, of course. The dirty secret about British education had been broadcast to the planet. The subtle irony that this unwitting act of whistle-blowing ensured Mr Poll would never blow a whistle again on the international stage may have been little consolation to the man who cannot count to two. 85 Pat Cash How fitting that Cash recently became tennis’s youngest grandfather. The whiny tone to his tennis punditry, the classical ocker sexism and the sub-Blairite attempts to cling to his youth by playing electric guitar suggest a man at least three decades older than his forty-five years. Plagued by the confusions that causing mild offence is a substitute for wit and grinning cockiness is indiscernible from winsome charm, Cash’s specialist impertinence is ignorantly dismissing tennis players of infinitely greater talent and spirit than he ever showed. Allied to this is a rare talent for being wrong. To take one memorable example, early in 2007 Cash wrote a piece, headlined ‘Serena is Lost Cause’, in The Times, attempting to nudge the younger Williams sister towards retirement and describing her as ‘deluded’ for imagining she had a future at the top of the game. ‘When Serena Williams arrives in Australia on her first foreign playing trip in a year,’ began the world-weary elder statesman, ‘and announces that it is only a matter of time before she is again dominating the sport, it’s time to tell her to get real.’ Two weeks later, as you will already perhaps have guessed, Serena annihilated Maria Sharapova 6–1 6–2 in the Australian Open final Getting real seems a habitual problem for Cash. His own journey into retirement was not the gracious swansong he advocated for Serena. Far from it, the embittered grouch on annual display in the BBC’s wretched Wimbledon coverage had an early run-out. He took deep umbrage at the failure of tournament directors and the ATP to give him wild cards late in his career, when the rigor mortis had set into his game. The therapy that followed did little to improve him. There have been sporting pundits who endeared themselves by forever complaining that things ain’t what they were (Freddie Trueman comes to mind) and scratching their heads until the scalp bled in mystification at modern ways. Cash is not among them. While he may choose to regard his vinegary carping about the venality and amorality of current tennis as the refreshing bluntness of a straight-shooter, it is in fact purely the self-pitying rancour of the nasty old geezer in the nursing home wash-clean plastic chair, muttering ‘Dunno they’re born’ at anyone under sixty who appears on the telly. ‘Nobody wanted anything to do with me,’ he sniffled once of the indifference shown to him in the dog days of his playing career. You know just how they felt. 84 Richard Keys Strictly speaking, this emblem of blazer-clad corporate loyalty – a man who would lay down his life, you suspect, in the cause of Sky Sports – should be of more interest to anthropologists than anyone else. Now that the advent of high-definition television has obliged him to shave his hands to spare the feelings of more squeamish viewers, this is no longer as obvious as it once was. But there was a time when his fronting of broadcasts raised grave doubts about the professionalism of the Ape Recovery Squad at London Zoo. His own professionalism has seldom been in doubt. He anchors Premier League transmissions with a seldom-wavering dull competence unleavened by his slavish commitment to talking up what he routinely refers to, despite its transparent recent decline, as ‘the best league in the world’. This rare example of a clich? without a shred of truth (Spain’s La Liga has always had the edge in everything but the capacity to induce preposterous hype) is not, of course, his alone. The BBC propagates it with barely less fervour. The difference is that, where Gary Lineker is capable of admitting that a Premier League game was less than scintillating, Mr Keys is not. Supported by whichever permutation of pinhead pundits the afternoon or evening spews up, his devotion to his employer and the domestic competition that is its cash cow compels him to talk up every match as if it were a classic. Being easily entertained is an enviable gift, but there comes a point at which it becomes hard to distinguish from an illness. The reassuring news for fans of Mr Keys is that he is in fact perfectly well, and finds much of the football as soporific as the rest of us, as a rare cock-up established in 2007. ‘Daft little ground, silly game, fuck off,’ was his verdict, unwittingly broadcast, on a Scottish trip to the Faroe Islands, lending a piquancy to the many times he has prissily apologised, as Sky presenters must, for profanities uttered by interviewees or bolshy tennis players. If he could dredge up the same candour when aware that the microphone is live, and show some respect for an audience that may be marginally less thick and pliable than he imagines, it would improve him no end. But then, honestly appraising football matches is not his function. Sky Sports is the public relations arm of the Premier League, and Richard Keys its regrettably missing link between a PG Tips primate and Max Clifford. 83 Harold ‘Dickie’ Bird In the absence of an ‘uncle’ or schoolmaster showing undue interest in his development, the cricket-fixated boy of the 1970s knew no more unwanted an authority figure than the then doyen of Test match umpires. It would be an exaggeration to claim that Dickie ruined my childhood and early adolescence, but his heightened fears about the weather condemned me to countless summer days of needless boredom. If he had an inkling in his bones that a raincloud drizzling over central Turkmenistan was contemplating a move in a westerly direction that might take it over Headingley by mid-November, he’d take them off. If the light dipped by one iota below the level required to read the bottom line of the optician’s wall chart from forty paces, off he would take them. Sweet-hearted as this eternal schoolboy seemed to be (even at seventy-seven years old you imagine him curling up under the bedclothes with his torch and a copy of Wisden), a searing pain in the bum he undeniably was. His morbid terror of making mistakes led to him routinely rejecting LBW shouts which Hawkeye today would show travelling like guided missiles towards the middle of middle stump. The surest method of avoiding mistakes, of course, was to avoid the playing of any cricket, which may explain why reports of a small shadow at deep fine leg at Sabina Park or the ’Gabba would have him taking them off at Edgbaston. In retirement, alas, the endearing fussbucket nerviness of old mutated into something less lovable. Dickie Bird the umpire became Dickie Bird the National Character, and this dubious role he embraced without a shred of the neurosis he had lavished on unconfirmed reports of cloud movement in Chad. The success of his autobiography, imaginitively entitled My Autobiography, went to his head. The sweetness was replaced by a mild strain of egomania that persuaded him to keep raiding the same tiny storeroom of tales for the joy of a listening public that had perhaps been sated by hearing them the first time. The Peter Ustinov of the bails appeared to have precisely three hilarious stories from his decades behind the stumps, which he recycled with identical stresses, timing and breathless delight in their drollness. There was the one, from his late career, when Alan Lamb (‘Lamby’) handed him a mobile phone to look after while he stood at square leg, and he was then side-splittingly rung mid-over by Ian Botham (‘Beefy’). There was the one about turning up at the Palace to collect his MBE fourteen hours before the ceremony. And there was the one about being invited for lunch at Geoffrey Boycott’s house, no one answering when he rang the bell by the gate, having to climb a wall to gain admittance, and then being palmed off with cheese on toast. Perhaps there were others the mind has blanked out, much as it supposedly does the pain of childbirth. But it is Dickie Bird’s most remarkable achievement that in his anecdotage he came to make you wistful for the days when he used his mouth for no other purpose than to mutter ‘Not out’ as a ball that pitched on middle stayed on middle, and to engage his fellow umpire in urgent consultations about the threat posed to the continuation of play by a sandstorm in the northern Sahara. 82 Mervyn King If Mr King is the raging Caliban of darts, perhaps he has sound cause for his fury. The prospect of a footnote appearance in darting history as only the second-best arrowsman to come out of Ipswich can’t be easy for so resentful and paranoid a man to bear. In truth, that Suffolk town’s finest chucker is no easy act to follow. No leisure pursuitist has had as powerful an impact on national life, cultural and political, as Keith Deller. His surge in 1983 from unknown qualifier to world champion not only inspired Martin Amis to write London Fields, the lairy yet engaging anti-hero of which, Keith Talent, was modelled directly on Mr Deller, but also shaped British politics. According to the Channel 4 docu-drama When Boris Met Dave, watching Deller beat Bristow by taking out a legendary 138 inspired the undergraduate David Cameron. Apparently this shock victory taught him never to give up in the face of daunting odds – a lesson from which he profited twenty-two years later when coming from nowhere to steal the Tory leadership from the prohibitive favourite David Davis. Who is to deny that but for Deller there would be no coalition today, and that a right-wing Tory Party led by Mr Davis would be languishing on the opposition benches? Here, as the likes of Vernon Bogdanor and Anthony Howard would agree, is one of the great what-ifs of post-war British history. Set against all that, Mr King’s claims to immortality rest precariously on three achievements. He has the worst nickname even in darts, in which the myopic former Kwik-Fit fitter James Wade flirted with ‘Specstacular’ before settling on ‘The Machine’. If, like Mr King, you share your name with the man in charge of the Bank of England, on what conceivable grounds would you not choose for your sobriquet ‘The Governor’? Or even, going that extra mile down the Kray-esque path trampled half to death by Bobby George, ‘The Guv’nor’? By way of a dramatic lurch into lateral thinking, Mervyn King prefers Mervyn ‘The King’ King, a nickname as stultifyingly obvious as it is, with Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor showing no ambition to abdicate this side of Doomsday, impertinently preumptious. Secondly, this bristling ball of East Anglian resentment has forged such a close bond with darts crowds that he now wears earplugs on the oche to cocoon himself from their appreciation. They loathe him, and without the panto-villain tone to the barracking that attended ‘One Dart’ Peter Manley before he flipped his reputation by cunningly adopting ‘Is This the Way to Amarillo?’ as his walk-on tune. When Mr King strides to the stage to Mot?rhead’s metallic dirge ‘Bow Down to the King’, his attempts to feign unconcern serve only to highlight his discomfort. And thirdly, he has a stylistic affectation even more irksome than Eric Bristow’s raising of the little finger (see no. 64). Mr King’s trademark is a pre-throw twiddle of the dart between thumb and index finger seemingly designed to suggest D’Artagnan nonchalantly caressing his sword before leaping to the defence of Porthos and Aramis. To his credit, it cannot be denied that Mr King is a man of principle. Livid at suggestions in January 2007 that he was poised to forsake one of darts’ two sanctioning bodies for the other (see Tony Green, no. 94, for a brief account of the split), he threatened to quit the BDO world championships in their midst if the rumours persisted. It speaks to his integrity that he waited a full month before duly announcing his defection to the PDC. Long after that is forgotten, perhaps, the thing for which this nightclub bouncer manqu? will be remembered is an excuse plucked elegantly from the Spassky–Fischer era of insane chess paranoia. After losing a 2003 world semi-final to Raymond van Barneveld, Mr King showed customary grace in defeat by insisting that the air conditioning unit had blown his darts off-course. Every sport, game or leisure pursuit requires its hate figures. Darts is regally blessed to have Mervyn ‘the King’ King. 81 Virtual Racing Few entries in this book pain me more than this one, because for twenty-five years the high street bookie was a second home. At times, not least when supposedly revising (more correctly vising) for law exams failed by record margins, it was in fact my first, and in daylight hours only, home. I adored everything about these shabby, seedy, grubby, putrid rooms: the sullen, speechless camaraderie with fellow losers, the fug of fag smoke mingled with clothes that long ago yielded their Lenor freshness, the proximity to other lives being lived in quiet despair, the thrill of occasional victory (no money tastes half as good as that unearned), and the addictive anguish of near-perpetual defeat. Real gamblers, as Dostoevsky knew, gamble not to win but to lose. It’s a whipless form of sadomasochism, with its cathartic cocktail of pain and self-disgust, and the bookie’s in the old days was as skilled a dominatrix as you could desire. Elegance was always in short supply. Until very recently, a local William Hill in west London retained an ancient blue sign asking customers to avoid urinating in the street on the way out. The bookmaking firms treated us as scum, denying us access to toilets until not long ago, the staff seldom bothering to disguise their contempt; and as scum is precisely how we wanted to be treated. It started going wrong some twenty years ago, with the introduction of banks of TV screens churning out live satellite feeds (so much less atmospheric and tension-inducing than garbled commentaries over the blower, when a half-length win required a nerve-shredding five-minute study of the photo-finish print to confirm). Then they started cleaning the places, a gross breach of etiquette, and installing such ponceries as vending machines and even, God help us, loos. The public smoking ban was another blow, although not their fault. Gradually, these shops became sanitised, and their peculiar charm vanished. Nothing was as brutal a turn-off, however, as the advent of virtual racing – appallingly unconvincing computerised horse and dog races presumably created by the dunce-cap wearer at the back of the remedial class at Pixar College. It was hardly as if Ladbrokes, Hills and the rest needed something with which to fill the vast temporal chasm between actual races. The real ones come along every few minutes, and for those who can’t hold on there are ‘fixed odds’ slot machines offering roulette, blackjack, poker and other games to plug the gap. We were never short of things to bet on in a betting shop. Yet the rapacity of the high street chains knows no bounds. So it was that a few years ago, the screens began to feature these simulations – their results pre-determined by random-number generators in the three- or four-minute gaps between the real versions. What is particularly tragic about virtual races is that they are enlivened by in-house commentaries identically as involved, dramatic and hysterical as those that attend the Derby and Grand National. Somewhere in a London office, in other words, an employee of William Hill is sitting at a screen watching the virtual race unfold and becoming unhinged by simulated action involving animated animals at an imaginary racetrack. ‘Going behind Elysian Fields, going behind. Hare’s running at Elysian Fields,’ it begins. ‘And they’re away. Trap 2 Fellatio Flyer gets out best, ahead of Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis in 4. There’s trouble behind, with 1 baulking 5, and off the first bend it’s 2 leading 4 and 6. Down the back straight, and 6, John McCririck’s Codpiece, takes it up just ahead of 4, 2 and 3. Round the second-last bend, and 5, Aortic Aneurysm, joins 6. Off the final bend, and there’s nothing to choose. It’s 5 and 6, 6 and 5 [screaming now], 5 and 6, and here’s 3 finishing like a train up the outside to join them. Coming to the line and it’s 6, 5 and 3 in a line, they’ve gone past together. Very close, Elysian Fields.’ A short, tension-heightening hiatus. ‘Result, Elysian Fields. Trap 5, Aortic Aneurysm, has beaten 6, John McCririck’s Codpiece.’ For the committed gambler such as myself, telling fantasy from reality is hard enough. Virtual racing is an animated hoof or paw step too far. Every sensible dealer knows that when you have an addict in your power, you don’t actively encourage the overdose that will either kill him or persuade him to seek professional help. That, in a sensationally loose manner of speaking, is what virtual racing forced me to do. After that quarter of a century of dismal love, it proved the tipping point, and I turned to internet poker instead. There was a time, truth be told, when that threatened to turn nasty too. But I’m pleased to report that I have learned to control the appetite, and have it down to no more than fourteen hours a day. 80 Alastair Campbell The possibility must be acknowledged, before we go on, that whatever this psychotic dry drunk is remembered for when tomorrow’s historians do their work, it won’t be his contribution to British sport. They may prefer to focus on his role in preparing the ‘intelligence’ dossiers that helped take us to war in Iraq; his mutually destructive persecution of the BBC for reporting that role in a way that seemed entirely accurate to all but himself, the judicial buffoon Lord Hutton and a few Blairite ultras; and his part in the exposure of Dr David Kelly as the source for that report which led directly to the weapons inspector’s death in the woods. Next to all that, the degradation of the civil service’s integrity and independence and so much else besides, Mr Campbell’s sporting persona is a purely humorous one. The one-time writer of soft pornography and devoted fan of Burnley FC became the Comical Ali of British sport in 2005, when for reasons that pay credit to the eccentricity not just of himself but also of Sir Clive Woodward (see no. 62), he became ‘media manager’ on the calamitous British Lions tour to New Zealand. As so often in this book, the questions raised – by both the offer of the job and its acceptance – seem better suited to a month-long annual convention of psychoanalysts in Z?rich than to a sports hack. Who, without relevant professional qualifications, would feel confident in positing a theory as to why Woodward thought it wise to place media relations in the grubby hands of a character with half the credibility of Pinocchio’s longer-nosed brother Whopperio? Why Campbell agreed to this lunacy is slightly easier to guess. Sitting in the kitchen of his Tufnell Park home staring longingly at the dormant red phone directly connected to Downing Street cannot have been much fun. Even so, boredom alone hardly explains in full why this delicate flower was blithely prepared to expose himself to the ridicule that must, it seemed at the time, ensue. So it did. Not since his namesake role model in Baghdad looked out of his ministry window at the American tanks rolling into town, and rushed to a press conference to inform the world that the Republican Guard was doing a bang-up job in driving the infidels into chaotic retreat, had anything rivalled what followed. The Lions were thrashed in all three Tests, and as the on-field d?b?cle unfolded the media’s attention was diverted to a spat between Woodward and Gavin Henson, whom the coach had curiously omitted from the squad for the first match against the All Blacks. It was at this point that Campbell’s gift for managing the media was unshackled. In order to persuade a British public bemused and livid at Mr Henson’s exclusion that reports of a bust-up were nonsense, he staged a photograph of Woodward and the father-to-be of Charlotte Church’s children walking together after a training session. It was taken by an agency photographer from a hidden position, with a long lens and possibly without Mr Henson’s knowledge, and Mr Campbell then distributed it to national newspapers in Britain. Mr Henson’s subsequent amnesia, as expressed in a book, led him to forget the agreement between them about this picture to which Mr Campbell has always laid claim. Not content with that morale-repairing masterstroke, Mr Campbell then underlined the humility for which he is loved by taking it upon himself to give a pre-match team talk. Why several members of the side, most vocally Ben Kay, were astonished by this, what with Mr Campbell placing rugby union as high as fourth in his list of sporting preferences (after football, athletics and cricket), who can say? As to the notion that he dipped a toe into the foetid pond of bad taste by invoking the exploits of the SAS in Bosnia to stir their blood, well, some people just live to take offence. Personally, I’d have been even happier had he referred to the work of British troops in Basra, in the war he played a small but crucial part in facilitating, but perhaps that’s just me. And to think Martin Johnson had contented himself with Agincourt before some of those same players beat Australia to win the World Cup for England two years earlier. Sir Clive, quite a spinner himself, declared himself delighted with Mr Campbell when the tour was over, explaining that the fault lay entirely with the media, and not one iota with its manager. ‘The media has missed an opportunity,’ he said. ‘If they had spoken to Alastair, he would have given them ideas on how they could have written more creative stuff.’ Indeed he would. He’d have persuaded them that the trio of savage Test defeats were thumping wins, the confusion emanating from a series of faulty electronic scoreboards. ‘That’s why I brought him along,’ Woodward went on, ‘to try to move everything with the media on to a whole new level, but unfortunately the media have not taken up the challenge.’ Idiot media. Sir Clive concluded by describing Mr Campbell’s contribution as ‘outstanding’. So it was. It stood out then, as it stands out now, as the most breathtakingly cack-handed display of media mismanagement in the annals of even British sport. 79 The Vuvuzela The one-note plastic horn that played its selfless part in producing the worst World Cup thus far was, so Fifa assured us when the global outrage was at its zenith in the tournament’s early days, too deeply embedded in South African football culture to be banished. Once, you could hardly help reflect, pissing in the pocket of the person in front of you was deeply embedded in England’s football culture, but if the tournament had come here in the early 1980s, would Fifa prissily have refused to discourage that for fear of treading on effete cultural feet? I don’t believe so. Before we go on, let me say this. I love South Africa and its people. One of the happier weeks of my life was spent there covering the story of the Lemba, a tribe who believe themselves to be Jewish, insist that the Ark of the Covenant (Ngundry Llogoma in their language) was once in their possession, and have the coolest flag known to humanity (an elephant inside a Star of David). Another was passed in a Johannesburg hospital attached to a weird, bubbling machine re-inflating the lung punctured by a burglar, in the home of old family friends, who had the impertinence to stick a bread knife into my chest. It’s an incident about which I never speak, though I will show the chest X-rays to anyone to whom I’m refusing to speak about it, pointing out the 1/12th-inch gap between the blade and the heart and the 1/18th-inch cordon sanitaire between steel and aorta. For all the literal and psychic scar tissue the incident left behind, hand on nearly-pierced heart, I’d rather relive that lively dawn encounter than listen again to that drone of basso profundo killer bees trapped in a drum. If what my wife, whose finishing school was bombed in the war, refers to as the ‘vulva labia’ is indeed a central panel in the tapestry of South African national life, so too are Aids and carjacking, and you don’t hear anyone slapping metaphorical preservation orders on them. 78 The Charlton Brothers Are Jackie and Bobby Charlton Jewish? I wouldn’t normally ask, because the fact that they were respectively decent and exceptional at football would seem to offer a definitive answer to that question. And even if it doesn’t, the existence of coalminers among their north-east forebears surely settles the point. However, there is something so immutably Jewish about their decades-long feud that you have to wonder. From Cain and Abel to Mike and Bernie Winters, and possibly (at the time of writing it remains too soon to be sure) David and Ed Miliband, the fraternal fallout has been a defining sub-strand in my people’s troubled history. Whatever their genetic roots, the Charltons have been pests for almost as long as they have been broigus, to use that Yiddish term for non-speakers. One intriguing thing about them … but no, that’s too fanciful a thought even for this book. One mildly interesting thing they represent is an apparent paradox that is in fact no such thing. It is often commented, in mystification, that the greatest players tend to make the lousiest managers, and vice versa. The truth is that gifted individuals fixate on themselves, which is not a recipe for successful leadership, while the more mediocre need to think more about the team and their role within it to survive, which clearly is. So it has been with the Charltons. Bobby, a magnificent midfielder for Manchester United and England, had one foray into management, wasting no time in easing Preston North End to relegation. Jackie, an effective clumper of a centre half for Leeds United and England, took both Middlesbrough and Sheffield Wednesday in the other direction before leading the Republic of Ireland to an unlikely World Cup quarter-final in 1990. Forced to choose the Charlton with whom to be trapped in a lift, it would probably come down to the toss of a coin. Jackie has a slightly cruel, laconic wit, putting you in mind of the Duke of Edinburgh he facially resembles, but might drive you mad with the didacticism and unpalatability of his opinions about the state of the world and who is to blame for it (see Prince Philip, above). His inability in press conferences to remember the names of players he selected for Ireland minutes earlier further suggests a man who might, in that faulty elevator, thrice entertain you with the same anecdote within the same quarter-hour. Bobby, on the other hand, would bore you close to a coma far quicker than the lack of oxygen. A drearier old fart English sport has never known. His monotone could be used by riot police who left their CS gas back at the station, while added to the stubbornness that saw him retain the combover for thirty years is a sullen taciturnity to chill the blood. There is an excuse for Bobby’s failure to scintillate off the pitch as he once did on it, of course, and it pays credit to his elder brother’s fraternal sensibilities that despite acknowledging how the Munich air crash of 1958 affected the younger’s personality, Jackie disdains the making of any allowances. The precise cause of the feud has fascinated scholars for decades, yet despite tireless research and the publication of both men’s autobiographies, it remains a source of mystery. All that is known beyond doubt is that it centred around their mother Cissie, an apparently domineering matriarchal figure whom Bobby resented for disrespecting his wife, Jackie in turn resenting Bobby for ignoring Cissie as a result. Jackie also resented Cissie, in his case for favouring the more talented Bobby when they were children, but expressed that by showering money and time upon her. Oddly for an older brother of such seemingly limitless self-confidence, he seems much the more sensitive of the two. The most admirable thing about both, meanwhile, and the one and only thing that binds them, is their adamant refusal to acknowledge the other. Here they show unwonted good taste, and set an example the rest of us will, in the absence of a broken lift, be happy to follow. 77 The Charity Fun Runner Were the pen truly mightier than the sword, the penchant for marathon runners wearing fancy dress in the alleged interests of charity would not have survived that glorious scene in The Office in which, on Comic Relief day, David Brent is sacked while dressed as a comedy ostrich. Scything though it was, Ricky Gervais’s satire of the exhibitionist dullard claiming to be motivated by the plight of starving Africans when driven solely by the craving for attention had no effect. Every year several thousand people continue to run the London Marathon dressed as superheroes, cuddly animals, ballerinas, vampires, and in one memorable instance a Rubik’s Cube. This is by no means an event screaming out for additional reasons to ignore it. As one of Gervais’s own comedy heroes, Jerry Seinfeld, put it in his eponymous sitcom about nothing, when invited to a friend’s friend’s apartment to watch the New York version, ‘What’s to see? A woman from Norway, a guy from Kenya, and 20,000 losers.’ The particularly pernicious thing about fun runners, more even than how they plunder the event of its inherent nobility, is the hint their costumes offer about the callousness of their sponsors – the implicit suggestion that had they asked for donations to run in shorts and a vest, they would have been brusquely dismissed. Can it really be that, as the determinedly zany do the rounds of their locals, they often hear the words ‘I’ll give you 50p per mile, and gladly so, but only if you dress as Virgil Tracy. If you won’t do it dressed as the pilot of Thunderbird 2, the local hospice can go hang’? 76 Rhona Martin The Mrs Mop of the Winter Olympics (it’s being so cheerful as keeps her going) is honoured with an entry very little for herself, and even less as a representative of a peculiarly nonsensical ‘sport’. Primarily Rhona is honoured here as the catalyst for despair and self-disgust induced by her finest hour. She seems a dour sort, to be truthful, does the captain of the Great Britain squad that won gold in Utah in 2002, and the doleful sheepdog haircut has its part to play there. But wouldn’t you be miserable if you devoted your waking life to such a vocation? Many Olympic minority events are lent charm by their nihilistic pointlessness, and those of us afflicted with the obsessive interest in numbers and rankings that almost defines the Aspergers end of the spautistic spectrum can pass untold hours fascinated by the scoring systems of diving, archery, showjumping and even weightlifting. Curling, on the other hand, is what that late and deeply lamented comic giantess Linda Smith wisely identified as ‘housework on ice’. What it says about this country that millions of us were driven to emotional involvement in Martin’s triumph is too obvious to say at all. But we’ll say it anyway. What a preposterous sporting land this must be when the endeavours of four slow-skating charladies buffing up a sheet of ice for no apparent purpose is the cause of feverish national excitement. This outbreak of proxy Henmania – the succumbing of otherwise normal people to patriotic impulses that overwhelm all rationale to cause more revulsion than pleasure – was as fierce as any in modern history. To care desperately, even for a few hours, about which stone has been ice-buffed to which part of ‘the house’ (the scoring section) was a shaming experience, and hers as depressing a gold medal as was ever placed around the neck of a Scottish housekeeper misrouted from overseeing the polishing of baronial floors to standing on a podium, moist-eyed, making a choral request to the Lord for the survival of our Queen. Shame on you, Rhona Martin, and infinitely more shame on us for watching you. 75 Arjen Robben It pays rich testament to this gifted Dutchman that the fans of Chelsea FC, seldom saluted as the least partisan of supporters, cannot stand the man who contributed so much to the winning of their first Premier League title in 2005–06. It was Robben’s miraculous achievement to relegate Didier Drogba, sublime as he was at the reverse triple somersault with tuck, to the team’s silver medallist for high-board diving. The Ivorian ?ber-narcissist is a perhaps surprising omission from this book, due to a fondness I cannot quite explain other than to say that his histrionics are much reduced now, and that what remains has become endearing. The sight of him being hauled to his feet by John Terry with a brusque ‘Come on, love, up you get, you’ll live,’ is one of the league’s more touching rituals. There is nothing engaging about the precociously bald Netherlander, however, and there never will be. A narky, arrogant, unceasingly petulant little bleeder, Robben may or may not be world football’s most talented winger, but there’s no doubting his status as its pre-eminent whinger. Any uncertainty concerning his status was removed by his spiteful moaning about Howard Webb’s refereeing of the 2010 World Cup final. The Dutch performance, which raised the image of the infamous Uruguayan scythers of 1986 as coached by Bruce Lee, was, it goes without saying, an utter disgrace. As a betrayal of Holland’s football tradition, the premeditated attempt to kick Spain out of their rhythm in a first half of unmitigated cynical violence will sooner be forgotten than Mr Webb’s leniency towards the Dutch. One appreciated the Yorkshire copper’s aversion to showing a red card in this particular game, yet in a different context the match would have ended before half time, with Holland forfeiting a technical 3–0 victory to Spain due to having fewer than seven men on the pitch. As Johan Cruyff succinctly put it, his successors in the orange shirts were ‘anti-football’ in Soccer City that night. And yet, when it was over Robben somehow found the chutzpah to accuse Mr Webb of favouring the Spanish, his bleatings centring on one incident of sledgehammer irony. Having spent his entire career falling melodramatically and rolling for twenty yards in feigned excruciation for no physically explicable reason, he broke the habit of a lifetime by staying on his feet when clearly tugged back late in the game by the ageing carthorse Carlos Puyol. If he had gone down then, being through on goal, even Mr Webb might have shown Puyol a straight red, although that’s far from certain, given that Mark van Bommel might have removed a scimitar from his sock and sliced Andr?s Iniesta’s head off without being offered first bash at the soap by Mr Webb. Whatever, the lure of scoring the goal that won the World Cup kept Robben from the traditional collapse. Once Iker Casillas had safely collected the ball, Robben raced towards Mr Webb in the traditional moansome-aggressive style, screaming like the face in Edvard Munch’s painting at the injustice. The outrage was rooted in his belief that he should have been rewarded for staying upright for the first time in his career. The rules of advantage, as correctly applied by Mr Webb, were an irrelevance. He had eaten his cake, and now he wanted to have it. It was a wretched vignette of a wretched man, and caught the essence of the unlovely Arjen Robben to gruesome perfection. 74 David O’Leary No entry in this book has caused me as much grief as that for this oiliest of rags on the managerial bonfire. Acknowledging that Mr O’Leary evokes fierce distaste is the easy bit. Pinning down precisely why has proved the problem. A portion of it, having said that, is easily explained. The former Ireland and Arsenal central defender memorably disgraced himself as manager of Leeds United. I refer here not to the grandiose ?100 million transfer-market splurge that contributed to the club’s flirtation with bankruptcy a few short years after it had come within a game of the Champions League final. As detached analysts of Leeds United will agree, that was greatly to the credit of O’Leary and his anagrammatic chairman Peter Ridsdale (dire Leeds prat), the sadness being that they so narrowly failed to pull it off. The incident that best illuminates Mr O’Leary’s odiousness was the publication of his book Leeds United: A Season on Trial within days of an assault case involving two of his players, Jonathan Woodgate (convicted) and Lee Bowyer (acquitted), being concluded. When he denied intending to profit from the beating up of an Asian man by insisting that the book’s title was a hapless coincidence, he mixed the defining twin traits of arch hypocrisy and rampant self-righteousness into a lethal cocktail. Blithely continuing to select Mr Woodgate added a needlessly bitter twist. More than anything, however, I suspect that the violent reaction to O’Leary is visceral. The sight of that overly smooth face and those shifty cow eyes, and the sound of that creepy, unctuous voice rouse subliminal memories of Jungle Book python Kaa, or possibly early-era Celebrity Squares Bob Monkhouse, and the guts respond by piping acid up towards the oesophagus. You don’t see or hear much of him any more. Either he weaned himself off the addiction to linking his name with managerial vacancies he had less chance of being invited to fill than the late Professor Stanley Unwin, or football hacks finally tired of giving credence to these fantasies. But it pays tribute to the enduring influence of David O’Leary, from whom insincerity oozes like toxic treacle, that the thought of him retains the power to send you scurrying for the anti-emetics to this day. 73 Lleyton Hewitt When it comes to mellowing arguably the least charming sportsman even Australia has yet produced, nothing has succeeded like failure. Now that he has been reduced to a journeyman, tinkering about in the lower reaches of the world’s top thirty, and occasionally making a Grand Slam quarter-final, Lleyton Hewitt is little more than a minor irritant, where once he was a pustulating, septic boil on the buttock of professional tennis. It seems almost surreal today that this cocky ball of ocker bumptiousness was the tour’s leading player in the early nough-ties. Yet, inexplicable as it now appears, in the thankfully brief interregnum between Pete Sampras and Roger Federer he twice ended the year as world number one, and snaffled two Grand Slam titles (Wimbledon in 2002, and the US Open the following year). The mortifying prospect then was that he would dominate for years, and perhaps he might have done so, but for one poignantly minuscule slice of bad luck. He had exceedingly little talent, judged by the standards of those who so quickly supplanted him, for playing tennis. What he did have in spades was speed, footwork, energy and reliable passing shots off both wings, and for a little while that amalgam of the lower-range attributes was enough to take out less dependable baseliners, and serve-volleyers such as Tim Henman (whom he ritually slaughtered whenever they met) and Sampras, whom he dismantled in that US Open final. And then, the Lord be praised, the quality of men’s tennis surged with such startling rapidity that Hewitt went swiftly from number one to also-ran. It was no longer enough to be a latterday Jimmy Connors, all effort and sweat and what George Galloway knows as indefatigability. To have a prayer of coping with the Fed, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray, you needed variety, cleverness and a nuclear weapon – an A-bomb serve like Andy Roddick’s, for example, or an intercontinental ballistic missile of a flat forehand in the style of Juan Mart?n del Potro. Hewitt had nothing of the sort. What he had, and has still, is what I would call typically self-conscious Aussie cussedness, but he would boastfully identify as ‘heart’. Hence that endlessly repeated gesture of the fist banging his chest, en route to losing another love or ‘bagel’ set to the Fed, as he looks up to his box screeching ‘Come awn!’ Heart’s fine, if that’s what it is, but brain is better, and a combination of both best of all. Cerebrally, alas, Hewitt is the amoeba of the tennis world, the personification of the classically Australian conviction that it doesn’t matter a jot if a nine-year-old can’t tell the time so long as he shows promise at Aussie Rules football or she is in the right swimming team. Thus it was, during the US Open of 2001, that he told a press conference that there wasn’t a soup?on of racist intent in the incident for which he will be remembered. He was playing James Blake, the Harlem-born black American, when a black line judge had the impudence to foot-fault him twice at important moments in the third set. Hewitt approached the umpire’s chair, and the microphone captured the following remark: ‘Look at him,’ said Hewitt, gesturing towards the line judge, ‘and tell me what the similarity is [gesturing now towards Mr Blake]. I want him [line judge again] off the court.’ The umpire, the Swiss Andreas Egli, didn’t oblige Hewitt there, but nor did he announce: ‘Code violation, paranoiac racist idiocy, warning Mr Hewitt.’ Perhaps Mr Egli figured that, what with coming from a land down under where Abo babies were plundered, to borrow from Men at Work, allowances must be made. In the pool halls of the outback, after all, Hewitt’s remark would have struck the regulars as restrained and studiously polite, if not political correctness gone mad. So it says something important about Hewitt’s personality that even in Australia he was loathed and regarded as an embarrassment by the media and a fair chunk of the population long before he disgraced himself in New York. Still, to his lasting credit, let no one claim that the fury of the US Open crowd, which booed him off court, and the condemnation of the wider world didn’t teach him a lesson. Not only did he come to see how repugnant the accusation of racially-motivated collusion between a player and an official might appear, he made dramatic strides in mastering the wider lexicon of non-offence. At the following year’s French Open in Paris, he addressed that same Mr Egli as a ‘spastic’. His apology the following day to the Spastics Society of Australia, which curiously took umbrage, showed yet again that, while he had very little else to offer, there was never any doubting Lleyton Hewitt’s heart. 72 Ken Bailey Even during the glory days of football hooliganism, the reliably miserable experience of following England’s progress offered no more depressing sight than this unnervingly strange old boy. For decades Ken Bailey’s presence in his John Bull uniform – red militia tailcoat, blue top hat with Union Jack front centre – was a fixture at just about every international sporting event, broadcasting a stale aroma of Empire and long-anachronistic presumptions about English superiority across the planet. Wherever and whatever a national team played, the TV cameras would pick him out in the crowd. Eventually he bacame such a familiar character that Subbuteo honoured him not only by putting his image on the exterior of a five-a-side box, but including a Bailey figurine in its 1974 Munich World Series set. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/matthew-norman/you-cannot-be-serious-the-101-most-frustrating-things-in-sp/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.