Frank Keating

Ignore an atoning little flurry at the death, England’s cricket winter has been a ghastly shambles. Embarked upon with such overweening bumptiousness — an arrogance admonished by this corner in the autumn, I might add — the expedition has long been a wrecked write-off all round. The Ashes urn was spinelessly surrendered — against admittedly a mighty fine team — by five-nil. In the follow-up one-day tournament England have been almost as pitiful. That has not quite finished as I write, but should they fluke a second place in the three-horse race, such a travesty should not remotely be allowed to camouflage the excruciating campaign.

Predicting last week’s raging gales would subside in time for the Saturday football programme, a BBC weatherman forecast, nicely I thought, ‘a weather-free sports weekend’. Sixty years ago this week it was by no means that as an unrelenting 48-hour Arctic blizzard on Thursday and Friday, 23 and 24 January 1947, entombed  Britain in a monochrome inertia. It froze solid, and for the next 40 days and nights, only twice and by a fraction — on 11 and 23 February — did the temperature on the Air Ministry roof edge above freezing. Skaters waltzed on the Tyne, the Trent and the Thames; above the latter, wartime totem Big Ben couldn’t even ‘bong’, its hammer ice-glued to the bell for a month.

Day and night, night and day ...relentlessly the football season slurps on through the January mud — mud and money, slurp, slurp — transfer ‘windows’, raucous headlines, phoney passions torn to tatters, ‘hot’ news stories cold and discarded in a blink. British professional football preens itself as pre-eminent in the culture, and broadcasting and the public prints clamorously whoop up the presumption, but I fancy most of us who happily call ourselves ‘fans’ are only ‘quite interested’ as opposed to being obsessed by the passing show.

Ruminating here a couple of weeks ago on those whom the wretched reaper had gaily swiped down last year, Christmas deadlines had a trio of significant hall-of-famers missing: both the Oz horseman Scobie Breasley and the British runner Sydney Wooderson died on 21 December, and a week later the oldest surviving English Test cricketer, Norman Mitchell-Innes, unbuckled his pads for the last time. By coincidence, each of them was aged 92, born in the 1914 summer (of dreaded portent) and therefore members of just about a final generation oblivious of a boyhood surrounded by the incessant jabber and rabbit of round-the-clock sports broadcasting.

If you thought you’d got away with one ruddy World Cup in 2006, then brace yourself: there are two of them in 2007, so obviously a double helping of the baloney which accompanies them. Cricket’s World Cup is staged in the Caribbean through March and April; rugby’s in France in September and October. Anniversaries to celebrate, too, and with a nice aptness.

Requiems for heavyweights: sporting history’s seven super-dupers who died in 2006 were, at 79, football’s Ferenc Puskas, cricket’s Fred Trueman (75) and Sir Clyde Walcott (80), US boxer Willie Pep (84) and his compatriot, double Olympian Bob Mathias (75), rugby’s sprinter Ken Jones (84), and Dr Kevin O’Flanagan (86), who played international tennis and golf for Ireland and also, uniquely, both rugby and soccer (for Arsenal, no less), as well as holding the national record at the 100 yards and long jump. An old year bites the dust-to-dust and as ever, with it, so does the roll-call of those whose final Christmas was last year’s.

Ashes to ashes. Oh, England our England! First the football, then the rugby ...and now the prettiest balloon of them all has been well and truly pricked so soon after its jingo-jangled and so jauntily buoyant launch. I sense blame about to be heaped on the wives and girlfriends, the dreaded Wags. Cricket’s lot have been landing in Australia all month. Comfort and compassion are suddenly the priority, not, as they’d thought, the top-up of their tans. At least cricket’s Wags seem less brazen and more softly simpatico than football’s slebby femmes fatales in Germany last summer.

This year’s Sportsbook of the Year is Unforgivable Blackness (Pimlico) This year’s Sportsbook of the Year is Unforgivable Blackness (Pimlico), a vividly enlightening new biog of Jack Johnson, the first black American boxing champion, by Geoffrey C. Ward, the US hist-orian who pockets the £18,000 prize plus a £2,000 free bet with the award’s loyal sponsor, bookmaker William Hill. White society was outraged at the boxer’s insolence, skill and, in particular, his success with white women. Closer to home, for a festive read inducing a more cuddly reverie, can I recommend British provincial nostalgia with less of a bitter edge?

Football’s European Champions’ League awaits the serious new year stuff once a few loose ends are tied on Wednesday. Football’s European Champions’ League awaits the serious new year stuff once a few loose ends are tied on Wednesday. Arsenal and Manchester United each need only to draw, respectively against Porto and Benfica, and only abject pessimists in red shirts need fret — Arsenal beat Porto well enough at home in the qualifying game and although missing their totem, Henry, through suspension next week they have been showing an increasing zest in Europe; and United, of course, have not lost a Champions’ League group game at Old Trafford since 2001.

How goes it at the Gabba? We shall know by now how the first Ashes Test is panning out. Have radio’s pre-dawn choruses from Brisbane already been ruining your days? Or making them brighter? Was it a dramatic start on Thursday? Who leapt headlong from the traps? Have England kept their nerve? Are the Aussies showing their age? Or their innate, dismissive swagger? Down the years, England have made a habit of messing up in the opening Ashes Test down under; surely they haven’t done it again, have they? I winced at Mike Atherton’s ruefully sarky reply early this week when he was asked what he would do if he won the toss on Thursday morning, ‘I’d look at the pitch, call over Nasser Hussain and ask him what he would do — then do the opposite.

A perennial sucker for feature films with sporting references, I suppose I’ll drag myself to Sixty Six, in spite of the verdict by the Spec’s Deborah Ross that, for all its occasional charm, it is ‘a comedy without any good jokes which takes itself too seriously’. It concerns a Jewish family’s dilemma, particularly 12-year-old Bernie’s, when the date of his bar mitzvah coincides with the England football team winning through to the 1966 World Cup final. The reasonable idea has Ross longingly sighing, ‘Where is Jack Rosenthal when you really need him?’ The late Rosenthal, of course, was a luminously original television (etcetera) playwright in the vanished, lamented days of grandeur for the single play.

At Shrewsbury School a couple of weeks ago, with nice ceremony, they opened a swish new indoor cricket centre alongside what Neville Cardus once called ‘the most beautiful playing fields in England’. At Shrewsbury School a couple of weeks ago, with nice ceremony, they opened a swish new indoor cricket centre alongside what Neville Cardus once called ‘the most beautiful playing fields in England’. All I could think of was Private Eye — for this was where the magazine’s founders learnt their cricket. I wondered what they’d have thought of four floodlit indoor nets, bowling machines, and banks of television screens to examine the crookedness of your cover-drive.

Beginning this weekend, we are lumbered with the close combat of international rugby union just about all the way to next October and the World Cup final in Paris. Today Wales play Australia in Cardiff; tomorrow at Twickenham the lately pallid English lillywhites steel themselves to take on the sombre might of New Zealand’s All Blacks. This November series of opening European salvoes also includes visits from Argentina and South Africa. For a long-shot bet make haste to slap down a pony on Argentina making the final, at least next autumn. It is the only worthwhile shout, but odds will shorten considerably once the bookies hear of the bullying the South Americans inflict on the English a week today.

Football’s European club matches, which continue next week, have so far tiptoed around in such predictable outline that only the obsessed have been bothered — leaving the headline writers to continue their lather over recriminations about the serious head injury to Chelsea’s goalkeeper Petr Cech, when he dived to save from an onrushing opponent in a mundane Premiership match at Reading. Keen to wade in with my two-penn'orth here, I was about to telephone an old Manchester acquaintance, long retired to Spain, when a bright young sports reporter from the Times saved me the trouble and the money.

No end of hot air already surrounds next month’s rugby internationals in which each of the ‘home’ countries look to repel boarders from the southern hemisphere. Those contests round off a long tough season for all the visiting teams; for us in the north I suppose these autumn openers will establish an early pecking order for the betting on next year’s World Cup in France — as well as, doubtless, heap more insecurities on the holders of that trophy, England. More generally, the most serious purpose of the November Test matches will be to swell the profits of the corporate hospitality concerns to whose day-out alcoholic tea-parties international rugby boards seem ever more in thrall.

Football is intrusive, all right; but mightily persuasive as well. It is impossible to steer clear of football, but at the same time — I speak for myself — it is hard not to be fondly enamoured of it. For sure, there is no remote escape from both the obviously besotted obsessives who ration tightly every other game to dole out oceans of space for footy in the public prints, or the soccer-mad broadcast chiefs who schedule the airwaves. Commercial radio’s dedicated channel TalkSport does what it says on the tin — take it or leave it. Its BBC counterpart Five Live is meant to cover all news and current affairs, but the football bafflegab continues pitilessly to muscle in.

Football’s overblown autumn overtures have been interesting enough, I suppose; and the rugger buggers have been lining up their wicked big hits for the upcoming long stretch of mud and gloom and gloaming. The domestic cricket season was not done and dusted till the final match and at once, next day, publication of the first-class averages officially pronounced finis to a mediocre summer. Five overseas batsmen — Jaques, Yousuf, Lehmann, Ackerman and Flower — came between the two forgotten English veterans who stood in the list at first (Ramprakash, 2,278 runs at 103.54) and seventh (Crawley, 1,737 at 66.80).

The last telephone call from Michael Marshall was in midsummer. Should we sit together at the half-century dinner of the cricket-writers’ club at Lord’s? Sorry, I hadn’t booked. I wish I had. Sir Michael died this month at 76. For a devout Yorkshireman, I suppose having to be Conservative MP for Arundel for 32 years had compensations for pastoral cricketing even if the castle’s fabled private ground was a world away from Sheffield’s Bramall Lane where Marshall, as he said, ‘learned the lore of the game’ long before his father sent him south to Bradfield.

Golf’s Ryder Cup is uniquely irresistible. Like most show-stopping spectaculars, the biennial challenge boasts ‘a full supporting cast’, in this case the two distinctive dolled-up distaff teams — a shapely sorority of Stepford Sindies vs a bevy of Barbies — devoted cheerleaders geeing up their frowning fellows as they go about the sombrely obsessive business with mashie and putter. The phenomenon is a new one to international football, as the English learnt in the World Cup this summer when the late-night antics of the Wags — the players’ wives and girlfriends — were wincingly, shamelessly documented each morning by the London tabloids.

This week they named the men to defend the Ashes. The trumpets of 12 months ago are muted, the martial drumbeats muffled. It has not been a good year. I fear the worst. England’s batting now looks fitful, the bowling feckless. Of the three champions, the flighty daredevil Pietersen might win you a Test match, but not a whole series; ditto the moody fast bowler Harmison; and the dynamic Flintoff’s fitness will be a worry all winter. After a few one-dayer warm-ups in India, the first Test match begins in Brisbane on 23 November. We shall see what we shall see, but I fancy the Australians are feeling more smug than usual. Meanwhile, here’s a pub quiz XI for you, off the top of my head, not even bothering Wisden. What has this team in common?