Sport

Mr S attended the international rugby union 7s tournament at Twickenham on Saturday, which was graced by some 76,000 people – mostly yuppies on the razzle by the look of things. I regret to report that this crowd of genteel, if beery, English people loudly and roundly booed the Scottish team. The Scots ran in several tries against the hapless Portuguese, and each score was met with open resentment, while every Scottish handling error, missed tackle or infringement was cheered with glee. The noise was shattering, the atmosphere hostile. No other team received a barracking (as is right: booing is abhorrent). Even the Australians, who are the default villains at Twickenham, were given a measure of respect.

It’s hard to love Saracens rugby club — their centre is called Bosch, a word that also describes their bulldozing style of play — but you have to admire the demolition job they did on Clermont Auvergne in the semi-finals of the Heineken Cup. The flamboyant French side, free-runners to a man, had 68 per cent of possession, 64 per cent of territory and yet were tackled into impotence. Clermont limped off the Twickenham turf, stuffed 46–6. The English club play Toulon, the defending champions, in the final in Cardiff on 24 May and again I will be supporting the French team, not just  because this will be the last match of Jonny Wilkinson’s career.

Osborne protégé Matt Hancock has climbed rapidly up the government ranks; leaving plenty of enemies in his wake. The ruthlessly ambitious Education and BIS minister is always in a hurry; but that does not look like it has done him much good for an actual race: ‘When Haverhill decided to host its first ever half marathon I thought it only right, as the local MP, to sign up to it myself. Now only 4 weeks away it’s certainly crept up on me. I am running for St. Nicholas’ hospice in Bury – a fantastic hospice that helps so many families in Suffolk.’ Jokes aside, you can sponsor Hancock here.

And so the axe fell and the crowd cheered for they loved nothing more than a good beheading. They had been waiting for this execution for some time and would have grown restless if they had been denied their head very much longer. Now the deed is done and they are booting David Moyes's napper up and down the Stretford Road. We all knew it was coming and Moyes, being an intelligent man, must have known it too. His ten month reign at Manchester United has been perhaps the greatest - and also grimmest - drama since Brian Clough's ill-fated 44 days in charge of Leeds United. Hello David Peace, you have your subject now. Paradoxically, one of the few souls to emerge from this Tragedy in the Theatre of Dreams with their dignity intact is Moyes himself.

It’s Boat Race time again and as soon as the BBC starts its broadcast on Sunday there will be those who invade Twitter and such places, having a moan faster than the Bullingdon Club can trash an Oxford curry house. Why’s it always the same two teams in the final? The more strident will demand why licence fee payers’ money is being spent on a private race that’s of no interest to anyone who wasn’t educated under one set of dreaming spires or the other. It’s amazing how many people went to Oxbridge, in that case. Why do more than seven million viewers tune in each year, and why has the BBC just renewed its contract for another six years? Why are the riverbanks rammed solid with spectators for four miles?

When the idea of a modern Olympic Games began to be discussed, Spectator writers couldn’t really see the point. ‘Beyond a certain waste of money, there will be no harm in the new whim,’ the magazine ruled in 1894, but the notion that the competition would bind nations together didn’t seem very convincing: Why? Is it because they will all for a few days be recalling the Greeks and their achievements, and their short-lived superiority in all the arts? They cultivated of all Europe once studied Latin; but they cut one anothers' throats for all that with a singular unanimity of brutality.

You can trust the BBC to behave like a leaf blown by any breeze, but even that spineless leviathan (if such a beast could exist) might have tried to grow a pair and stick up for its admirably manic commentators at the Sochi Winter Olympics. It was Ed Leigh, Aimee Fuller and Tim Warwood on the opening weekend’s snowboarding contest that really got people going. There were a few hundred complaints, and one or two media observers who really should have known better got very snooty. Frankly anybody who can get worked up about some slightly over-the-top commentary on a sport no one has ever seen before should really get out more. However, the BBC, bless it, did promise a ‘review of its procedures’ or some such drivel.

Englishmen used to be deported to Australia as a punishment. Now they get sent back to England as an act of mercy. There was not much of a campaign to ‘free the press box three’ after Australia’s immigration services ordered the eviction of the men from the Sun, Mirror and Daily Mail before the winter’s wretched Ashes tour was over. Having arrived with the players for the warm-up matches and watched as defeat followed humiliating defeat, they were the last men standing when the one-day series got under way. Other papers had kindly brought home their ‘dukes’ after the Test series and sent the ‘butlers’, as cricket reporters call each other, to cover the hit and giggle.

James Cook’s third voyage as an English captain ended in disaster, stabbed to death and disembowelled by a pack of angry Hawaiians in 1779. The latest Captain Cook’s third tour since taking charge of the national cricket team has been just as successful, with Alastair’s England given the Hawaiian treatment by Australia. But don’t despair: for the British sports fan there are plenty of reasons to be cheerful. Try these: 1. Our women cricketers are thumping the Aussies, and it’s the women’s Ashes that matters, right? Just remind any passing Australian of that, and last summer’s Lions tour too, if you’ve got the time.

By god, you know matters have come to a wretched pass when you feel inclined to defend and protect the International Cricket Council. And yet, remarkably, such a moment is upon us. Like the old Roman republic, the ICC is threatened by a triumvirate. In this instance, Crassus is represented three times as India, England and Australia bid to carve up cricket's empire between themselves. Few people doubt change is needed. The ICC has been broken for ages. It is easy to conclude that it has outlived its usefulness. Nevertheless, that does not mean any proposed alternative is going to produce better outcomes for cricket. The proposals for reforming cricket's governance and, more pressingly, its finances are mooted in a 21 page paper that, usefully, has been leaked. You can read it here.

All winning cricket teams are alike; each losing cricket team loses in its own way. It doesn't matter, right now, that Shane Watson and Michael Clarke will never be chums just as it did not matter very much, back in the day, that Shane Warne and Adam Gilchrist couldn't stand one another. Victory spawns solidarity. Happiness too. We are wired to over-react to defeat and under-react to victory. England have been trounced in Australia. Battered in Brisbane, assaulted in Adelaide and pummelled in Perth. The tour has become a travelling horror show and, god help us, there are still two tests left. A 5-0 whitewash is a distinct possibility. Don't believe anyone who suggests the Aussies might ease up now the little urn is back in their possession.

Here we go again. Time for another round of that perennial game so wearily familiar to England cricket supporters: Hunt the Positives. It is a mean game because, most of the time, there aren't any. Certainly not today. England were abject in Adelaide. Scarcely any better than they had been in Brisbane. If, borrowing from Evelyn Waugh, we classify sides as Leading team, First-Rate team, Good Team and Team we must acknowledge that England, at present, rank as Team. And as Mr Waugh would have put it, Frankly, Team is pretty bad. Less a team, in fact, and more a rabble. With the exception of Joe Root's second-innings knock England can take nothing but misery with them as they cross the Nullarbor Plain to Perth.

Green shoots were visible in Newbury on Saturday for the 57th Hennessy Gold Cup. While brandy cocktails warmed the punters in the Fred Winter Suite, Rob Brydon and Martin Clunes chatted up Joan Collins, who, despite being the most famous person in the room, was wearing a name badge. Myleene Klass displayed a lack of class when posing for a photograph with Princess Anne. And Tinie Tempah might want to have a word with his tailor: the rapper’s trousers were cut off half way up his shin and he must have been freezing without any socks on. Mr Steerpike feared that he might have had one too many nips of the Paradis Imperial when he saw the diarist from the Times singing a duet of Memory with Elaine Paige. But I’m reliably informed that this actually happened.

Don't say you weren't warned. You were. "Australia will win at least one test this winter...England will have a bad test or Australia an extremely good one...This is an Australian side learning who it is. There are signs of improvement, signs that on their day they could be formidable. (The question being, as before, how many of those days there will be). Meanwhile, England are solid but not perhaps quite as good as they think they are. Brilliant individual performances saved the English collective in this series. They are not a team in transition but nor are they quite a team going anywhere." That was this blog's verdict on the last Ashes series. England's 3-0 victory was both clear-cut and less than it seemed.

It was the sort of summer’s day that makes you glad to be alive; but we were watching the telly. We would not normally do this. If the weather was fine, we would play games of catch on the lawn: my 4-year-old self hurling any object that came to hand at my 78-year-old grandfather. The old man would leap about for my amusement, often careering into my parents’ sacred flower beds. He would pooh-pooh my father’s concerns about the wisdom of these exertions, and ignore my grandmother’s distress over the ruin of ‘yet another pair of trousers’. My delight would urge him to even greater theatrics when their backs were turned.

As you know, only seven batsmen have scored more than 50,000 first-class runs. Hobbs, Woolley, Hendren, Mead, Grace, Sutcliffe and Hammond are untouchable. We shall not see their like again. The game changes and old records written on parchment are left unmolested, gathering dust. Comparisons between the great players of a single era are troublesome enough; fashioning them between the cricketers of the prelapsarian past and those of today is an exercise easily considered futile. And yet the hunger to do so is a craving that can never be wholly pacified. The 50,000 run mark is an arbitrary figure, for sure, but if you add-up all the runs scored in all accredited forms of senior cricket you find only another eight batsmen have plundered bowlers for more than half a hundred thousand runs.

On waking up (at noon) on Thursday morning, I found I had a text from one of my fellow History freshers. Sent at 6am and accompanied by a screenshot of a half-finished essay: ‘WHY am I still up?!’ The all-nighter is a notorious Oxford experience, and not one I thought I would ever have to sample. ‘I’ll be fine getting the work done at university,’ I blithely assured those warning me of how unstructured a History student’s life is, ‘I like to keep busy.’ What I failed to appreciate is that it’s impossible not to be busy at university. School without lessons was dire — by Tuesday afternoon of the pre-Christmas week of ‘fun’ I had lost the will to live, let alone make Chemistry-themed paper-chains.

Andy Murray may have crashed out of the US Open; but last time I checked he was still a hero in this land after 12 months of triumph. All of which makes the recent travails of Conservative MP David Amess rather odd. A complaint to the PPC shows that his local paper, The Southend Echo, made an erroneous claim about him wanting Murray to be knighted, after he was subjected to public abuse. The paper has since grovelled and apologised; but at least it exposed its patch as being the most anti-Murray part of the country.