Frank Keating

There occurs next week (8–12 September) a sobering little anniversary. Remember 12 months ago and that heady aura of innocent joy and optimism all around? At the end of an enthralling Ashes cricket series through the summer of 2005, England and Australia were locked in a riveting decider in south London. A celebration of cut-and-thrust endeavour and good fellowship ended with a tumult of national mafeking in Trafalgar Square, the second one in the three months since London won the bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games. Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end ...and at least sport had shown itself a cause for good, and good cheer. For shame, it was all an illusion, a passing fantasy. Just a summer on, the cover has been blown.

While Sunday’s Test farce reverberated far beyond Surrey’s Oval, that county’s favourite son, veteran Mark Ramprakash, was serenely toasting his achievement in becoming the first English batsman to score 2,000 first-class runs in a summer since he did the very same 11 years ago. Good show. It used to be a routine mark for leading county batsmen. Hobbs did it on 17 occasions, Sutcliffe and Hendren 15. In my boyhood, 2,000 was almost commonplace. Sixty summers ago, for instance, the two grand was posted by Laurie Fishlock, Vijay Merchant, Jack Robertson, Tom Barling, Dennis Brookes and Walter Keeton, with the two Test players back from the war, Denis Compton (2,403) and Cyril Washbrook (2,400) topping the list.

Why does this cricket team select itself? In batting order: George Emmett (capt.), Peter Bowler, Ian Ward, Roger Twose, David Shepherd, Roger Tolchard, Jeff Tolchard, Chris Read (w.k.), John Childs, Jack Davey, Len Coldwell. Seven of them played Test cricket. A serious clue to the county they represent is that guest 12th man is recent tearaway English fast bowler whom the then chairman of selectors Ted Dexter once addressed as Malcolm Devon. In celebration of young Monty Panesar’s resplendent bowling for England this summer, I had thought of ruminating on an all-time team of Sikh cricketers, but I found I didn’t have too many research engines after I’d come up with Bishan Bedi and Douglas Jardine’s pal, the Yuvraj of Patiala.

Football’s got a nerve: the Premiership resumes business next week and is already blaringly full of itself, its conceited luminaries strutting about as if England’s abject World Cup show was nothing to do with them. Sanest way to continue enjoying the summer is to ignore anything that concerns football till the clocks go back in October, which is about the same time as the England cricket team set off for Australia in defence of the Ashes. Beset with injuries, at least the cricketers have knuckled down to turn out a new team by introducing some warmingly bright sparks.

It may be fast and noisy still, but it has become drearily predictable, uncompetitive and even, you might say, totally un-hairy. Even obsessive vroom-vroomers, I fancy, are completely cheesed off with their sport. Certainly to the casual follower, Formula 1 Grand Prix motor racing has just about vanished from the radar. Yet on it drones in the background, pitching its same candy-striped executive marquees in various of the world’s seemingly romantic spots a couple of times a month. Britain, once so fascinated, is now oblivious — except for the corporate fat-cat sponsors and, I suppose, ITV, which covers the ersatz, so-called races. Schumacher or Alonso? Ferrari or Renault? Who cares?

Barbados promises a hectic carnival jump-up this weekend in celebration of Sir Gary Sobers’s 70th birthday. I trust the island takes it easy on the literal backslapping of their favourite son. When the Queen knighted him at Bridgetown racecourse that heady day in 1975, the jubilations became too hearty even for the convivial new knight himself, so with the fireworks popping and the calypsos hammering on, the good fellow himself had to steal away unnoticed and duck for sanctuary into a dingy sidestreet bar. Outside, the celebrating son et lumière still raged but inside, nursing a beer, was just one Brit codger, alone on his winter break. Adjusting his eyes to the light, Gary recognised him. It was gnarled old trouper and English county umpire Tom Spencer.

Ninety years ago this weekend the battle of the Somme had settled into its ghastly inexorability. The excruciating debacle of its opening offensive on 1 July — 19,240 killed, 35,493 wounded, 2,152 missing, the British army’s highest casualty rate in a single day’s fighting — was already logged as a grievous scar on future generations as well as history. The guns continued until muffled by the snows of November when the scoreboard of losses read: Germany 650,000, Britain 418,000, France 194,000. Back home in Blighty, shining idealism long replaced by a bitter and cynical despair meant that only a pursuit of mundane ‘normality’ kept spirits up and home fires burning.

Yorkshire buried their Fred in his beloved Dales last week. Umpire Dickie Bird gave the main moist-eyed address. Brian Close remembered their debutants’ county curtsey in 1949, both just 18, against Cambridge at Fenners. At the snooty University Arms, the dinner menu was in French. The haughty waiter hovered. Bewildered Brian, the Guiseley mill-worker’s son, passed it blankly to the Maltby miner’s son Fred, already unblinkingly brimful of bluster. ‘Right, sunshine, I’ll begin w’a large plateful o’that,’ he demanded, jabbing his finger at the menu’s top line. It read: Mercredi le deuxième mai. The tales of Trueman were up and running. The fables of Fred. To Fleet Street and the nation he was ‘Fiery Freddie’.

Forget the football, a bizarrely exotic touch of history reverberates around the World Cup final in Berlin’s Olympiastadion tomorrow evening. Listen to this: ‘Berlin was crowded with foreigners and the streets beflagged. Went for a walk down the Unter den Linden, an avenue of banners blowing in the breeze, and everywhere the radio booming achtung and giving the latest result....’ That was British Tory MP ‘Chips’ Channon’s diary entry for 5 August 1936, the fourth day of competition at the notorious Berlin Olympics 70 summers ago.

The prediction racket is a sportswriting staple. When the World Cup kicked off three weekends ago this corner boldly blogged the prophecies for The Speccie’s website: that is, the England team would be home for the first week of Wimbledon; the Berlin final on 9 July would finish Argentina 2, Czech Republic 2 (the latter winning on penalties); and the likeliest lottery longshots to reach the semi-finals would be one of Switzerland, United States, Ivory Coast or Australia. Hey-nonny-no, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Just meaningless fun and, at about the same level, I suppose, as the barmy vote-catching gimmick which had grave tartan Chancellor Brown cooing undying support for England and First Minister McConnell ferociously rooting for each and every England opponent.

The Wimbledon tennis begins sharp at 2 p.m. Monday and, as has often been the case, competes with a haughtily oblivious lack of concern against the football World Cup in Germany. The tennis will make for far better telly, and see if I’m not right a fortnight today when what Wimbers still refers to as ‘the gentlemen’s singles final’ will serve as afternoon overture to the evening’s clamorous soccer climax in Berlin. I find it hard to believe now that some years ago when the two championships coincided I had to fly back and forth to cover the pick of the matches in the so incongruently different games.

Last Saturday afternoon in Frankfurt’s tent-like Waldstadion, British football writing’s dumpling eminence Malcolm Brodie, 80 next birthday, laid out his pad and his pencils at his pressbox desk. ‘What’s new?’ he could have been excused for muttering in that tinny Ulster snort of his, but the rheumy eyes, deep set in his weathered, walnutty old face, were bright with anticipation for the start of the Belfast Telegraph man’s 14th World Cup. It was all of 52 summers ago that Malcolm first picked up his telephone to dictate a report of a World Cup match — Scotland’s narrow 0–1 defeat by Austria in Zurich in 1954’s fifth World Cup in Switzerland.

In the euphorically barmy delusions of upcoming World Cup invincibility — the English never used to be so insanely carried away when their teams even had a real chance of winning the ruddy thing — I was taken by one nicely observant line on how manager Sven-Goran Eriksson’s qualifying syntax invariably hedges the bets with his almost permanent employment of the same three words in the middle of every sentence: ‘...of course, but...’ As in, ‘We shall win the tournament, of course, but you never know because this is football’; or ‘I am perfectly prepared to drop David Beckham, of course, but he is the captain’.

Hosepipe bans? Standpipes in the streets? Ah, yes, I remember them well. Prepare for a host of anniversary paeans from us old sweats of 30 summers ago. ‘Sweat’ being the word, or ‘Phew!’ as the headlines had it all through that heatwave summer of 1976, the most relentlessly parched since records began in 1727. By all accounts, an official drought was announced as early as 15 May and (with the help of Wisden) I see that was the very day I  was dispatched to the County Ground, Southampton, to write up a newcomer of promise, an appealing, callow West Indian batsman called Vivian Richards.

For football’s partisans, a string of cup finals have been fraying nerves, stirring spirits, salting wounds and jerking tear ducts. For football’s partisans, a string of cup finals have been fraying nerves, stirring spirits, salting wounds and jerking tear ducts. Now it is rugby’s turn. This afternoon’s European club final — the Heineken — delivers a relishable match-up in Cardiff: France vs Ireland and Basque vs Celt in the he-man collision of Biarritz and Munster. It will be a white-knuckle ride; fast, fraught, furious; bone on bone, hit for hit — not remotely a pretty sight. But, olé and bejaysus, the commitment, the passion, the theatre!

Romantics as well as purists will be lucky if today’s FA Cup final in Cardiff riddles the cockles and stirs the spirits. Romantics as well as purists will be lucky if today’s FA Cup final in Cardiff riddles the cockles and stirs the spirits. The knockout rounds might have been compelling enough, but for some time now succeeding finals have been limpidly predictable. Perhaps the event itself yearns too longingly for a return to its natural home at Wembley. That chaotic building site in London must surely be up and running by next May (precisely the forecast of 12 months ago).

Blossom by blossom, the season changes. So should the headlines. Fat chance. Weird times: roll up, roll up for a Lord’s cricket Test even before the mudlarks of winter have picked the teams for their end-of-term deciders. The hanging-baskets and bunting (and the boaters and blazers) might be in colourful place for the opening overs at Lord’s on Thursday morning, but both soccer and rugby still have an awesome amount of unfinished business. There has not been an earlier Lord’s Test in my lifetime. More than likely, alas, all will be grey and monochrome as an ‘unsettled’ weather system lumpenly sits over Marylebone to make the poor, palely shivering Sri Lankan cricketers unidentifiable under their four-sweater swaths of cream cable-stitch.

Any day now, soccer’s World Cup will obliteratingly dominate every back page Any day now, soccer’s World Cup will obliteratingly dominate every back page (although this one, it goes without saying, shall be soberly discriminating). On Monday week (7 May) Sven, Sweden’s sexpot sphinx who coaches England, nominates his first batch of players, to be whittled down further before the tournament begins on 9 June. Might it be the last England side ever to consider it has a half decent chance of actually winning a World Cup?

Last two standing. For the muddied oafs of winter, this is the cruellest week. So near, yet.... Defeat in a semifinal, they say, is the hardest to bear. There are a lot of them about. Today soccer stages its two FA Cup semis. In the European Champions’ League, Arsenal played the first-leg semifinal this week, the second next; ditto Middlesbrough in the Uefa Cup. And at rugby union, the European club game’s defining Heineken Cup also stages two momentous semis this weekend. Death or glory, relief or jubilation — and cruelty.

Two white-coated codgers bent over some sticks in north London yesterday morning. One cleared his throat and, in ritual tone of relief and contentment refound, undramatically announced, ‘Play!’ Considering everything, all was well with the world, and the 2006 first-class cricket season was officially under way at Lord’s — MCC v. Nottinghamshire; today begin six more three-sweater jobs when the gates are opened to the summer at the antique shrines of Hove and Chelmsford, Headingley and the Oval, Fenners and the Parks. Custom unstale, as ever, first toasts to the new season had been drunk in central London on Tuesday 11 April at the convivial black-tie dinner to launch the 143rd edition of the game’s illustriously perennial mustardy almanack.