It keeps on happening, the passing of sporting titans. First Garfield Sobers and now Kevin Keegan, a couple of the best, who charmed everyone on and off the pitch. Enough has been said about Keegan, his skill as a footballer, his drive, his hard work, his easy kindness to his countless fans. Not forgetting his perm, his Brut and his permanent presence on TV. He wrote a column for the Liverpool Echo when I was a trainee there in the 1970s. KK – then the sporting superstar at Bill Shankly’s Liverpool – would often come into the office to work on his piece with the sports editor, Vincent Kelly. He wasn’t happy to let it be ghosted while he did something else. He cared. And to us young whippersnappers, gawping at our hero, he was always polite and funny.
They were a horrible, savage bunch, the Argies, though they did play with an extraordinary will to win
Returning from three years at Hamburg, where he picked up the European Footballer of the Year not once but twice, he called Vin to say, ‘I think I owe you a column.’ (He had been paid for a piece he hadn’t had time to write when he left for Germany.) Anyone who still doesn’t quite understand why we all love KK should read Tony Quinn’s beautiful little homage to him, The Man Who Was King. Sobers was the greatest cricketer of all – he could do anything better than anyone else. Sometimes not necessarily the right thing. I only managed to see him bat once, in 1973, at Lord’s on the second day of the third Test against England, where he scored a magisterial 150 despite having spent the night on an Olympic-scale bender in London’s clubs. What a player!
Now sadly there’s no proper Test cricket until England, currently without a coach or a captain, play Pakistan in a match which starts two days before the Premier League kicks off. Until then there’s The Hundred, wall-to-wall silly cricket that will mainly serve to make Indian cricket even richer: Manchester Super Giants, MI London and SunRisers Leeds. I enjoy it, though, and I have a funny feeling that Sobers would have leapt at it, and certainly at the salaries it paid.
Anyone who felt a twinge of sympathy for Argentina’s lachrymose manager Lionel Scaloni boohooing away at his post-final press conference should forget it. National football teams are created in the image of their managers, who should be held responsible for the way they play and behave. They were a horrible, savage bunch, the Argies, though they did play with an extraordinary will to win, which isn’t necessarily something you could say about England. Maybe Argentina, who are loathed all over South America too, have decided that football is a means of asserting national identity, however crudely. Whereas for England, as for most countries in the world, it is a game.
One final thought: I do believe all those traditionalists who sneered at the sight of Brazilian legends Ronaldinho and Ronaldo (who has clearly let his gym membership lapse) driving Madonna in a Mad Max-style dune buggy into the stadium at half-time should get out more. It was fabulous: more please next time.
As Tadej Pogacar powers his way to a record-equalling fifth Tour de France win, spare a thought for these riders being woken up at some unearthly hour for random drugs testing. Pogacar was remarkably equable about being tested at 5 a.m., and his main rival Jonas Vingegaard, who crashed a few hours after his 2 a.m. test and was so severely injured he abandoned the Tour, generously said he wasn’t sure the loss of sleep had anything to do with his accident. ‘It’s a bicycle race and crashes happen in bicycle races,’ he said. He wasn’t going to win but he was the only person who could have given Pogacar half a run for his money. Such a shame for the race to lose him.
Surely waking riders up is wrong. It puts them in danger in a high-speed sport – though there’s a view that the riders are paying the price for their doped-up predecessors. The all-night testing is to eliminate microdosing – where the rider takes a small amount of EPO at 10 p.m. and it’s out of their system by 6 a.m. But can you imagine it happening to an Olympic athlete?
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