Sport

The last Wednesday in May will never be the same. What always used to be an annual highlight, the European Cup, now Champions League Final, has been brought forward to the weekend before — on the say-so of ever-tinkering Uefa chief Michel Platini so that more children, who won’t have to go to school the next day, can watch it. Whoever said sports bureaucrats didn’t have a heart? So at the end of next week (22 May) we can feast on a match of stupendous European pedigree, Louis van Gaal’s Bayern Munich against Jose Mourinho’s Inter Milan in Madrid.

What have Alan Sillitoe, novelist and gritty chronicler of working-class life, who died at the weekend, and Michael Mann, big-screen film-maker and gritty chronicler of Americana on the edge, got in common? Each have been responsible for a great movie about running. Sillitoe’s short story ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’ (1959) was made into a pioneering piece of British new-wave cinema three years later by Tony Richardson, and Michael Mann’s made-for-TV Jericho Mile is still a fantastic piece of sporting drama. What is it about running that captures artists, especially film-makers, and why — since Loneliness and This Sporting Life in 1963 — have we made only one other decent movie about sport in this country (the mighty Chariots of Fire)?

J.L. Carr, that fine English writer, teacher, sports-lover and eccentric, once wrote a book called How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup. It was about a village team which eventually got through to the Cup Final, beating Glasgow Rangers at Wembley. It sold a couple of thousand copies and was eventually remaindered, though Carr later republished it under his own imprint, the pleasingly named Quince Tree Press. It’s a pity Carr’s not still around to do justice to beleaguered, bankrupt, wrecked Portsmouth’s improbable march to Wembley.  I was very struck by a remark of Pompey’s much-maligned coach Avram Grant after the semi-final last weekend against Spurs.

Sooner or later, and certainly before the end of the current F1 season, you hope that the men behind Mercedes Sport, techno-whizz Ross Brawn and cigar-chomping Norbert Haug, will take Michael Schumacher to one side and say: ‘You know Michael, it’s been great having you here, but Corinna’s not such a bad old stick to spend time with, is she? Why not go back to Lake Geneva and take things easy with the missus? We’ll see you at the track next season — but not in a car.’ Because, make no mistake, after the synapse-stunning tedium of the opening Bahrain Grand Prix, the second race last weekend showed that this could be an electrifying year of motor-racing. In Melbourne there was a host of tangy pleasures.

It’s a sad old story when the most enjoyable moments of last weekend’s Calcutta Cup battle at Murrayfield were the frequent TV cutaways to Scotland coach Andy Robinson giving an Oscar-winning performance as the world’s angriest man. In his playing days he was known as ‘Growler’ but there wasn’t much growling here: near demented hysteria, flailing arms, and lip-readable damnation of the referee and all his works. He was one step away from banging his head on his desk. And you couldn’t really have blamed him. The referee allowed England to get away with a whole heap of skulduggery at the breakdown, Dan Parks hit the post twice and a Scottish victory would have had a poetic justice.

Should Britain be setting out to ‘own the podium’ at the London Olympics in two years’ time? I mean — we can’t own it every single event, can we? The last time I looked we weren’t exactly overblessed with weightlifters, and we might have to question our chances in Greco-Roman wrestling. I wouldn’t back us to do too well at water-polo, and as for handball, well… The ‘own the podium’ concept was what brought Canada a record 14 gold medals at the Winter Games that have just ended in Vancouver. If you want a successful Games, went the logic, you have to have the locals behind it, and what the locals want is home success. So you spend what it takes to make sure that happens.

If the impresario, former Corrie and Carry On actor, Everton owner and all-round good-guy Bill Kenwright never does anything else, the nation owes a big debt of gratitude to this last of the old-style football club chairmen for hanging on to his manager David Moyes like a limpet. Moyes is a shining light in the increasingly tawdry saga of English football. He’s been Manager of the Year three times, is almost permanently Manager of the Month, and is the longest-serving British manager in the Premiership by a mile, apart of course from Sir Alex Ferguson. There are two big tests this week, Sporting Lisbon in the Europa League and at the weekend, the Big One, Manchester United at home.

When you sit down next weekend (13 February) to watch the first competitors blast through the starting gate of the men’s downhill, the blue riband event of this year’s Winter Olympics in Whistler, I hope you will spare a moment to think back to a clear but windy day in Switzerland more than 80 years ago. It was in the early morning of 29 January 1928 that a group of passionate British skiers, 13 men and four women, and all members of the illustrious ski racing club, the Kandahar, set out from the village of Murren in the Bernese Oberland. Their target was the 10,000 foot summit of the Schilthorn, well over 5,000 feet above them.

If shrinks don’t have a term like disproportionate response — you know, getting jailed for clearing the snow off your path or some such madness — then they certainly should have. We need it to do justice to the lunatic levels of hoo-ha, from players, commentators and fans, over Graeme Smith’s referral and phantom snick in the third Test at Johannesburg. As Michael Vaughan, bless, had to point out, it was only a cricket match; nobody had died. It’s pointless bitching that Smith should have walked: I mean, does he look the kind of guy who walks? Mark you, some might think Hashim Amla doesn’t look like the kind of guy who walks, but he absolutely is, every time.

New Year starter for ten: who said this? ‘When you hear people on TV talking about you in the same breath as people like Steven Gerrard or Freddie Flintoff, you look at it as if they’re talking about someone else. It’s weird. It’s very humbling and gives you a lump in your throat.’ No, not some brand new novice champion, but the great and charmingly self-effacing Phil Taylor, after winning his 15th World Darts Championship in breathtaking style. Someone should give The Power a deal puffing ludicrously expensive watches, or standing in for Thierry or Tiger as one of Gillette’s poster boys, earning squillions.

Forget the Spectator Parliamentarian Awards, or the Oscars for that matter, it’s the annual Spectator Sports Awards that count. Indeed in Hollywood, the Oscars are known as the Spectator Sports Awards of the film industry. Our judges have been busier than Rachel Uchitel’s lawyers sorting out our shortlists, and now finally a roster of winners has emerged, representing the best and the brightest of this remarkable sporting year. First up is a new category, the Plaxico Burress Award for Shooting Yourself in the Foot, named after the New York Giants wide receiver who took a gun into a Manhattan nightclub and accidentally put a bullet into his own leg: there were two hugely deserving candidates here.

Sprawling, cheesy, gimmicky, full of toe-curlingly embarrassing interviews — but still the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award, dammit, lifts the spirits in a way few other events in the sporting calendar manage. Sunday night. Pull up a chair. Grab a drink. It only needs that theme tune to strike up for me to break out in goosebumps. What is it about the old SPOTY? Well, there’s the dramatically lit auditorium full to bursting with the sporting great and good, all in their finery, this time up in Sheffield.

Of all the many incidental pleasures of the Spectator Editors’ Dinner last week, one of the most enjoyable was sharing a main course with Coleraine businessman Ken Belshaw and his wife Iris. Ken, a passionate rugby man, was filling me in on the glories of Irish sport, ironically at exactly the same time as, unknown to us all, Thierry Henry was manhandling Ireland’s football team right out of the World Cup. But Irish friends who were in Paris that night broadly take the Roy Keane line: time to move on. It was clearly a brilliant evening: I watched the game after the dinner and the Irish played out of their skins. Robbie Keane’s goal was beautiful, almost Brazilian, and he and Duff had good-as-gold chances, which they fluffed. But the Irish should have won, no question.

Amid the great and the glamorous sipping champagne at Sotheby’s recently when Sebastian Faulks launched his new novel, A Week in December, one diminutive figure caught the eye as he moved effortlessly among the mini-burgers and drizzled tuna, exchanging a pleasantry here, a smile there, chatting to teenage boys, rock stars, highbrow literary types and even the odd politician. It was Fulham boss Roy Hodgson, well-known book-lover, friend of Faulks and arguably a man who should be football’s manager of the month in perpetuity. As my friend Mike points out, ‘These are the good old days at Craven Cottage.

Consider this: barring the intervention of an usually malevolent deity, Bath’s Matt Banahan should be playing on the wing for England during the autumn rugby internationals. Banahan is 22 years old, 6ft 7in tall, and weighs in at 253lbs, or a shade over 18st. Go back 30-odd years and there on the wing for England was Liverpool’s Mike Slemen — this was in the days when Fylde vs Preston Grasshoppers was first up on Rugby Special. Slemen then was 6ft 1in and weighed 12st 4lbs, or pretty much like a reasonably fit bloke you might see on the street today. (If all you met on the street were a race of Matt Banahans, you’d be in Gulliver’s Travels.) There’s an instructive comparison here with American Football.

Africa’s time has come You couldn’t ask for a more devoted fan of Fabio Capello than me, but thank the Lord for that over-excitable defeat in the Ukraine last weekend. While the brow-furrowed Italian has turned an underachieving bunch of good players into a remarkably high-performance Roller of an outfit, something of a Lehman-style bubble had started to grow around England. It was that much-loved canyon between expectation and achievement: England only had to set foot in the land of the khaki shorts next year and the World Cup was coming home right where it belonged.

All good things must come to an end and so, sadly, do the mind-bogglingly scandalous things. Go on, admit it. We lapped up every twist and turn of Briatore’s turbo-charged chicanery. We marvelled at the sheer ridiculousness of the day-glo ‘blood’ spouting from Tom Williams’s mouth. We hissed at football’s foul play — from diving to stamping to sprinting-the-whole-length-of-a-pitch-to-gloat-at-the-racist-gooners-gate. What a humdinger. Lob in a cameo from Ponts to get the audience booing and you’ve got the must-see panto of 2009. But scandal seems to be deserting us and filling the void come some terrific episodes of sporting virtue. You know, derring do, victory against the odds — all the stuff sport’s meant to be good at.

In a recent issue of the brilliant weekly glossy magazine produced by the French sports paper L’Equipe, there is a picture that tells you all you need to know about modern football. It shows the owner of Manchester City, Sheikh Kaldoon al-Mubarak, leaving the stadium after the home game against Wolves. He is being driven away in his Bentley; all around are the black-suited muscle. To the left are a few fans, pale, slightly plump men and women in light blue replica shirts. They are on the same page, in the same place, but light years apart. And it’s only in the context of this absurd, corrupt, narcissistic world of extremes that you can begin to understand the behaviour of City’s excitable new star Emmanuel Adebayor in their enthralling 4-2 victory last weekend.

Amid all the fake blood and thunder, car-crashing, bashing and diving that has scarred the games we love in recent days, it is time for those few of us still deluded enough to believe that sport represents the very best that life can offer to reflect on a very happy man. Well, you assume he’s happy, though it’s hard to tell. His reassuring, be-scarfed, bespectacled and unmistakeably Italian visage has already graced several Premier League grounds this season, sitting self-contained in his own sea of tranquillity and confidence. Life is currently fab for Fab, and why not? Who can’t love Fabio Capello? He’s got what for years has seemed the most difficult job in football, England team manager, and turned it into what looks like the easiest.

Well, that wasn’t too bad then. The nameless sense of dread that seizes you at the start of each football season — you know, too many overtattooed men chanting En-ger-land, too many managers bitching at refs and each other, too many twerps earning too much money — all dissipated in a few minutes of sublime passing by Arsenal. And Wayne Rooney’s start promised so much for the rest of the season, as he sets out his stall as a true World Cup winner for England. This helped to make up for Rafa Benitez’s return to form, moaning as usual, and seemingly stuck in denial of the real problem — that he’ll miss the brilliance of Xabi Alonso. It was a weekend of staggering sporting revelations.