Rugby

The return heavyweight bout between England and Wales lived up to its billing as the most thumping rugby match of the Six Nations. It was also the perfect result for both sides. England’s win brings the Grand Slam in sight, but Wales get to feel smug that they could have won if they had played on for a couple more minutes against an England team clutching at air with the bench emptied and the two leaders, Dylan Hartley and Chris Robshaw, withdrawn. There’s nothing the Welsh like more in the absence of a win than claiming the moral high ground. In a masterstroke of man-management, the England coach Eddie Jones — who will presumably soon be walking to work on water — singled out Robshaw as his player of the season.

In the north of Antigua, just by the medical school, is a neat little cricket ground. It was a bit overgrown and bedraggled when I drove past the other day, but the small stand was still there, the changing rooms, the peeling scoreboard, and the sails of the kite-surfers dancing skittishly out on the Caribbean. It was all different in 2013 when a team of us from the UK played in a T20 match against a student side. The mid-afternoon start was breezy, the outfield rugged, but the ground was quite full of youngsters who had come to watch their friends give a pasting to a bunch of ageing overweight English guys. They weren’t disappointed. We knew we were in trouble when their opening bowler’s run-up went back to the boundary.

Not since Walter Palmer, a cudddly Minnesota dentist, put down his drill and vanished off the face of the earth having made sure that Cecil the Lion took a crossbow bolt for the team, has there been a disappearance quite like it. I refer of course to Craig Joubert, the hapless Durban-born referee last seen leaving scorch marks in the Twickenham turf as he sprinted for safety after mistakenly (as it turns out) awarding the Australians a penalty in the last minute of the Rugby World Cup quarter-final against Scotland. Now Joubert has been chucked under the bus by World Rugby, the governing body, who agree that he shouldn’t have given the penalty. But poor guy: who hasn’t made a mistake? Just ask Franz Beckenbauer.

The Scots do not know what to do. For once, they have a justified grievance. In recent years, this once-proud nation has been bawling and belly-aching and girning over fictitious complaints to such an extent that Wodehouse’s crack about the ray of sunshine and the Scotsman with a grievance was out of date. It seemed as if all Scotsmen had a grievance at all times. Tam o’ Shanter’s beldame nursed her wrath to keep it warm. But poor Kate could be forgiven, knowing that her blethering, blustering, drunken blellum of a husband would be getting fou with Souter Johnny. The Scottish Nationalists have neither the justification nor the fun. Now, everything is different, thanks to Craig Joubert. The match was all but won.

Sebastian Coe’s new job as head of world athletics will be a heck of a lot easier thanks to the outstanding World Championships that just finished in Beijing. He has a chance to push athletics back to the forefront of world sport — after all, what is more thrilling than one human being trying to outrun another? The star was Usain Bolt, but even that unassuming giant of a man cannot go on for ever. Athletics needs characters, champions that people can identify with, preferably in the blue--riband events. And Beijing showed there are outstanding athletes waiting to step forward. Julius Yego took gold in the javelin with a throw of 92.72 metres — just over 100 yards. For those of us who did the 100 yards at school, the finishing line seemed a long way away.

I have never met an Aussie I didn’t like, but, crikey, their sporting indefatigability is exhausting. Don’t they ever give up? In the past few days, they have pulled one out of the bag against the Springboks in the southern hemisphere Rugby Championship when they looked buried; trailing 20—17 with time up, they turned down a penalty kick and went for the win with an 82nd-minute try. Their Davis Cup tennis boys came from 2—0 down to beat Kazakhstan, with Lleyton Hewitt hauling his weary muscles through the motions once more. Afterwards Hewitt said, ‘I love the back-against-the-wall situation. This is what dreams are made of.’ Now they face Britain, that is the Murrays, not least Judy, in the semis.

For anyone who knows or cares about rock climbing — a minority sport if ever there was one, albeit pretty extreme — the turn of the year was heaven. Newspapers, magazines and TV bulletins were full of one specific, highly photogenic though very technical event: the first free ascent of a climb on Yosemite’s mighty El Capitan face called Dawn Wall. It was 3,000 ft and 32 pitches long, and rated the hardest pure rock climb in the world. The two climbers, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson, spent 19 days on the face, but years preparing and training for it. This is, for the time being, the ultimate climb, very difficult but also very safe, with ropes and other gear used to protect the climbers, and entirely free in that they never used any artificial aids.