Sport

Looking forward to the World Cup? I do hope so. You can complain and say that a gargantuan tournament without Italy but with Cape Verde isn’t really worth bothering with. But Italy have been rubbish for years and it’s no bad thing when establishment sides get a good kicking (yes West Ham, we’re looking at you). And dear old volcanic Cape Verde, bless it, is in a group with Spain (shorn of any Real Madrid players), Saudi Arabia and Uruguay. I would love to see any of those games. And England manager Thomas Tuchel has played a blinder. But goodness, he was blessed with options. Take a look at this team: Nick Pope; Lewis Hall, Harry Maguire, Levi Colwill, Trent Alexander-Arnold; Morgan Gibbs-White, Cole Palmer, Adam Wharton; Phil Foden, Jarrod Bowen, Dominic Calvert-Lewin.

As all but the most tribal fruitcases would agree, Arsenal’s Declan Rice is an island of decency in the rather foetid river that is modern football. But even he seemed to be performing the Heimlich manoeuvre on a West Ham forward in the grapple-fest that was the epic 95th-minute corner last weekend. Like everyone else, Rice joined the all-in wrestling, bullying, grabbing, judo throw-downs and fouling that have disfigured so many of the corners we have seen this season and made these moments such a dreadful spectacle. As at an orgy, it is hard to see who is doing what to whom. After an eternity, the referee judged that West Ham’s Pedro had his arm across the Arsenal goalkeeper David Raya’s throat and disallowed the West Ham equaliser. Should the goal have stood?

Suddenly last Sunday in London nearly 60,000 amateur runners were able to say they had competed in a race in which one of the world’s greatest athletic achievements of all time was finally accomplished. Sabastian Sawe’s demolition of the two-hour barrier for the marathon ranks with Roger Bannister’s cracking the four-minute mile in 1954, or Hillary and Tenzing conquering Everest, the world’s highest point, the previous year. These epics test human performance to its very limit and are moments that should be celebrated for as long as human greatness is acknowledged. He revealed that before the race he had breakfasted on bread and honey, with a mug of tea.

It’s easy to be sceptical about top sportsmen turning to psychologists for help. A bit precious, no? After all, what’s wrong with the good old Fergie hairdryer treatment to unmuddle the thinking of some bewildered player? But when you hear Rory McIlroy extolling the virtues of the man who gets inside his cranium you start to think a little differently. Dr Bob Rotella, a craggy sports shrink from Vermont, is, it turns out, one of the key members of McIlroy’s team and they have been working together for years. McIlroy paid a very handsome tribute to Rotella after his second successive Masters victory.

It’s not the newest joke in the world, but worth a quick rerun right now after the latest in a stream of near-fatal road accidents. What’s the difference between a Range Rover and a golf ball? Tiger Woods can drive a golf ball straight for 300 yards. The extraordinary story of Woods’s decline is written in his face: how the lean, mean athlete of the 1990s has developed into a puffy-faced drug user and sometime drunk is something we once associated with former footballers and boxers. Woods is evidence that no one, not even the prodigiously rich and talented, is immune to the destructive power of addiction.

It certainly never happened to me when I was a lad – even after a particularly insightful essay on the causes of the English Civil War – but there’s a remarkable TikTok film purportedly showing Max Dowman, the Arsenal boy wonder, arriving at school on Monday (don’t forget he’s still only 16), and being applauded to the rafters by pupils and staff. It might of course be AI nonsense, but if it’s not true, it should be. Dowman has long been talked about for his extraordinary ability, and he finally burst into the public’s mind on Saturday with 23 minutes as a substitute in Arsenal’s nervy 2-0 win over Everton. Nervy, that is, until Dowman came on. His balance is sublime, he seems to glide over the pitch and he has a staggering footballing brain.

There’s something ineffably endearing about Harry Kane (though I am sure plenty of Bundesliga defenders would disagree), a sort of old-fashioned Englishness that was apparent in Captain Mainwaring. But unlike Mainwaring, he clearly gets on well with Germans. Even more important, he combines an apparent guilelessness with a canny understanding of how to do his job with distinction, which has made him the second most famous old boy of Chingford Foundation School after David Beckham.

If you can remember Pink ’Un newspapers and the days when FA Cup shocks really were shocks, then God bless you, you’ve got a few miles on the clock. Pink ’Uns (occasionally Green ’Uns, as in Sheffield and Bristol) were Saturday evening regional newspapers carrying results and reports of Football League matches that, in a miracle of newspaper production, mesmerising to behold, were on sale on the streets while spectators were still leaving the grounds after the final whistle. All closed now of course, along with the demise of the Saturday 3 p.m. kick-off. Who needs papers anyway when football fans can discover the state of play in matches at any time, anywhere?

So what was the best bit of this dispiriting Ashes series? Lucky you if you’ve found one, but for me – at the time of writing, before Jacob Bethell was belatedly allowed to unfurl his brilliance – it was the moving homage to the heroes of the Bondi massacre at the start of the Sydney Test. It was flawlessly executed, unlike a great deal of the cricket: a group of first responders, including paramedics, lifeguards, police and Ahmed al-Ahmed, the shopkeeper who disarmed one of the terrorists, were given a guard of honour as applause and cheers flooded the ground. If it didn’t bring a tear to the eye, check your pulse. Otherwise, what have we learned?