Sport

How went our ‘Last Smoke’ dinner on Thursday, hosted by the Spec’s Andrew Neil at London’s swish Four Seasons Hotel? If not so grand, there were doubtless other such tobacco requiems all around the country. Nicely apt, somehow, that Nanny Blair’s smoking ban coincides with her own cursing, unlamented departure from the nursery. All ‘final gasp’ mourners should have raised a timely toast for happily, poignantly, sport itself handsomely helped celebrate last rites only a week ago when the convivial chain-smoking Argentine, Angel Cabrera, won the US Open championship, leaving Tiger Woods and all the cold-eyed, humourless gym-junkies of professional golf in fretful conclave with their tight-lipped fitness trainers and ‘performance’ shrinks.

BBC radio’s Test Match Special will deservedly be celebrating particularly special champagne moments in a couple of weeks when their tardis settles on Edgbaston for the one-day international; for  it was at Birmingham’s pleasant ground they began their ball-by-ball odyssey of jabber and jape 50 summers ago. In its turn, tennis next week nods to a cluster of even more  venerable broadcasting jubilees.

Here’s a singular cricket team, well  balanced, hard to beat: Dick Spooner, Geoff Cook, Colin Milburn, Tom Graveney, David Townsend, Peter Willey, Alan Hodgson, George Sharp, Alex Coxon, Jim McConnon, Bob Willis. No-nonsense openers, some glistening strokeplayers, a mean and hostile pace attack,  two Test match off-spinners, and Spooner and Sharp can share the gauntlets. A clue to provenance: at Chester-le-Street’s Test match this weekend I’ll be reverently downing a stiff one in the Milburn Lounge in fond memory of that bonny Falstaffian which the bar honours — good Colin, 17 years dead this year, still grievously mourned.

I was sorry to miss last week’s ghostbusting gig at the Hay-on-Wye festival when David Beckham’s surrogate-scribbler, actor-writer Tom Watt, joined two mates of mine, Paul Hayward (Sir Bobby Robson, Michael Owen) and Peter Burden (novelist-amanuensis of horseracing’s Francome and Pitman, and vet-thesps Hemmings and Phillips). Ghostwriting has a long literary history, but suddenly there’s a superabundant blight of it on the back pages; in my days on the desk at least we employed the strapline courtesy that the star performer ‘was talking to’ such and such a hack. No longer. Added insult to the reader these days is an uncertainty about who actually writes their own stuff.

Is any new sporting arena fit for purpose without a statue to adorn it? Critics of the apparently workaday new Wembley Stadium reckon the most striking thing about it is the towering bronze at its entrance by sculptor Philip Jackson of the straightbacked, relaxed good fellow, lamented Bobby Moore. Statues of sporting figures are suddenly all the rage.

Fasten your ear-muffs for a deafening weekend — din and dissonance, vrooms and fumes. Around Silverstone, lock up your dogs and daughters while the leaning, leather-clad boy racers sort out the British leg of the world motorcycling championship. Down on the Riviera, the straw-bales and (what we used to call) the starlets are in place for Monaco’s round-the-houses Grand Prix on Sunday, while across the pond in Indiana the world’s largest annual sporting throng has gathered for the always hairy-scary Indianapolis 500.

With no international competition this summer, football’s curtain comes down with a clamorous abruptness in Athens on Wednesday, when Liverpool meet AC Milan in the final of the European Cup. By way of domestic overture, Chelsea play Manchester United this Saturday in the FA Cup final, and it would be fitting if a compelling show marked the return of the ancient fixture to its traditional home. Certainly each team has it in them to produce a memorable Wembley premiere. The vicissitudes of Wembley’s construction and appalling overspend have provided a sorry saga; today’s relief at business resumed merges with a keen curiosity about the aura and ambience of English football’s reclaimed amphitheatre.

It seems barmy that the first cricket Test match of the summer begins as early as next Thursday. The madcap trawl for profits obliterates all the old established rhythms. The Lord’s Test was traditionally high summer harbinger of the London ‘season’ at once followed by Wimbledon and Henley. You can bet, anyway, that a Lord’s Test in mid-May will ensure any sparkling springtime weather is ended forthwith and that the rains will be bucketing down as they toss for innings on Thursday morning. The Test players of England and the West Indies have hardly laid bat on ball since the drearily pointless hotch-potch of the Caribbean’s World Cup. Not that either side did so to any remotely hooraying effect during the course of that tedious tournament.

In those fresh, expectant springtimes of long ago, the last week of April was the very quintessence of the changeover — the week he would have bid adieu to the raucous wintery fever-pitch of Highbury and its stately marble halls, sling his football boots into his London landlady’s cupboard, and whistle chirpily down to Paddington and the train back to Temple Meads, home, and the mellow warm westerlies of a pastoral Gloucestershire summer. Although the news was a dreadful shock, it was touchingly apt, somehow, that it was in the telling last week of April in which good Arthur Milton died. Next birthday would have been his 80th. He embodied that ritual of the seasons.

A vibrantly challenging final in Barbados today (Saturday) might at least — and at last — put a smile on the face of cricket’s dismally tedious World Cup. The England team will doubtless be watching at home, behind closed curtains. Let’s hope their new coach has more oomph and isn’t such a stubborn sourpuss as his predecessor who allowed the rot to set in on top of that Trafalgar Square bus 19 months ago. Enough said; except don’t say you hadn’t been warned in this corner even before the gruesome Ashes winter began.

Chelsea vs Manchester United: the long-running grudge which has defined English football’s Premiership for most of the winter (and last) could yet be extended to a fevered and passionate play-off decider in Athens on 23 May in the European Cup final itself. Travel agents are rubbing their hands and, doubtless, Greek policemen are anxiously fondling their truncheons and assessing the overtime rates. Mind you, the swish, steamy Athenian arena that night could just as edgily be staging a less insular feud, but one which could well have a sharper, more international focus: Liverpool vs Milan. Whatever, we shall see what we shall see: avert your eyes now or, at least, hang on to your hats.

I daresay bonny Barbados and some blazing cricket in its final fortnight might retrieve disenchantment with the 2007 World Cup. But I doubt it. Bob Woolmer’s calamity still beggars belief but, that apparent outrage aside, the event as a whole has been one of drawn-out, sanitised tedium. The manner in which the colourfully spontaneous joie de vivre of Caribbean cricket and its crowds has been drained from the whole occasion has made old hands weep for what was and what might have been. On television, the group matches have been played out, mute and inglorious, to tier upon tier of empty seats — scarce a trumpet blast heard, nor joyous rhythm of drum.

Eight teams, and scarcely 10 points between them for months. While the Premiership title has long been an unchallenging two-horse race between Manchester United and Chelsea, the top of English league football’s second tier, the Championship, remains thrillingly, feverishly congested. The frantic, concertina’d eightsome are (alphabetically is safer, so regularly do the leaders change) Birmingham City, Derby County, Cardiff City, Preston North End, Southampton, Sunderland, West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers. One or two others jostle close behind, eager to join a late convulsion for the line. Just three promotion places: automatic for the leading two; the next four play-off to be the one to join them.

The appalling crime in Jamaica still has the cricket world in shock, and it was harrowingly eerie this week to be coldly attempting to relish Wisden’s latest arrival, hot off the press. In it, of course, Bob Woolmer features prominently. The new almanack includes a poignant full-page close-up picture of a desperate Bob brandishing (in vain) The Laws of Cricket on the Oval balcony on that cataclysmic afternoon last August. For cricket’s own official version of how the laws of life were so greviously smithereened this March, as well as the game’s intimate farewell hosannas to trailblazer Woolmer, we shall have to wait the 12 months till Wisden 2008.

Once more unto the breach! Harfleur, Dunkirk and all that guff is being desperately evoked by the public prints and broadcasters. Goodwill may be suffering from donor fatigue but for one more time the nation entreats the England football team to get a grip. Victory in Tel Aviv against Israel today (Saturday) is crucial to qualification for next year’s European championship finals, to be jointly hosted by Switzerland and Austria. Another tediously limp and drooping disaster by England in the Ramat Gan stadium today would stir supporters to demand immediate and unamicable divorce proceedings between the Football Association and Steve McClaren, even though the poor put-upon manager himself would claim to be still in honeymoon mode. Israel are no mugs on their home patch.

Cricket’s World Cup will be an interminable slog in every sense. It began on Tuesday, 13 March; the final is still six weeks away (28 April). With only a month to sort out 32 bristlingly competitive teams, football’s World Cup is comfortably more user-friendly, while rugby’s version already has plans in hand to compress itself severely for the 2011 finals and so eradicate such laughable mismatches as 1995’s New Zealand 145 – Japan 17 or 2003’s Australia 145 – Namibia 0. Might there be some similarly jokey walkovers in cricket’s Caribbean marathon? Are Scotland’s supporters bracing themselves for  headlines such as ‘Calypso-Collapsos’?

Six Nations rugby musters for its last convulsive heaves this weekend and next. Today (10 March) in Edinburgh, the appealing Irish XV should confirm their latest Triple Crown, while victory at Twickenham tomorrow will, to all intents, settle yet another championship for France. Both their matches next Saturday, respectively against Italy and Scotland, should each assume the nature of an emperor’s victory parade.

By next Wednesday evening, uniquely, five British clubs could be in the last eight of the European Champions’ Cup. There is still, as they say, a lot of football to be played, but I suppose even the possibility remains testament to the strength at the top of the British club game. Mind you, only a small handful of native British footballers will be marking the occasion by actually participating. In these second-leg ties, important home advantage lies with four of the Brit five.

Football’s relishable League Cup final at Cardiff tomorrow has Arsenal and Chelsea, the big guns from London, intriguingly squaring up for what is, officially, the last time English clubs play a showpiece event in a ‘foreign’ country. Well, that’s the plan anyway. Personally, I wouldn’t bet on it. I fancy it is still anyone’s guess whether the rebuilt Wembley will host either 2007’s FA Cup final on 19 May or the league’s play-off finals the following week. I’m told Cardiff’s Millennium stadium continues to tell other promoters enquiring about possible bookings that English football remains ‘pencilled in’ at the top of the queue for those two early summer weekends.

There was generally bonny acclamation as the French rugby team ran out to play Ireland at Dublin’s Croke Park stadium last Sunday. I forecast a significantly tauter edge to proceedings next Saturday when the English XV takes to the Republic’s hallowed sports field and lines up in front of the Irish Army Band to belt out ‘God Save the Queen’. For the French match on Sunday, you imagined a few daydreamy old-hand historians indulging in a smug two-centuries-old reverie concerning that untimely storm off Bantry Bay which scuppered the chances over Christmas 1796 of Wolfe Tone’s planned and bloody clear-out of the English from Ireland with the help of the French fleet of 43-sail and 2,500 men at arms.