Frank Keating

You will know by now whether Arsenal in Italy on Wednesday carried on from their racily appealing first-leg home victory over Juventus and are now in the semi-finals of the European Champions Cup. Whatever, last week’s emphatic, even euphoric, Highbury show remains one to bottle up and savour as a memento of north London’s old marble palace before the bulldozers crawl in. Arsenal begin next season at a swish new home down the road. It is 93 years since their first game at Highbury — Leicester Fosse defeated 2–1 in September 1913 — after they leased for 20 years the cricket fields of St John’s College of Divinity (promising not to play matches on Christmas Day or Good Friday; nor did they till 1925). April, and most League matters seem settled.

‘Are you ready ...’ The winds skim and frisk like a well-thrown flat pebble across the chop and chill of the mucky water. So do two slim, sleek boats carrying 16 broad and beefy men. Ships, towers, domes rip by ...temples, wharves, jetties, tower blocks, bandstands, gullies; the Middlesex wall, the Surrey station, Harrods depository, Craven Cottage, the Riverside theatre; bikes on the towpath, daffs on the banks, pubs to the left of you, pubs to the right ...and ‘hurrah! hurrah!’ from Hammersmith Bridge. Boat Race day tomorrow, so truly spring has sprung at last. Did I say 16 hulking he-man hearties, each in a boat for eight? Each man heaving, hurting, symmetrically straining to turn perfect harmony into uncatchable speed?

Anthem is as anthem does. What with the rugby internationals last weekend and the ongoing Commonwealth Games, a mad medley of various national anthems has been grating around the airwaves. Some find them uplifting. For me, the jingoistic jingles jar, particularly as extended overture to the rugby when the camera, with ingratiating reverence, pans along the line of cauliflower-eared shaven heads which resembles a Dickensian identity parade at Tilbury and a last call for Magwitches bound for the colonies. Some players weep, others prefer the trance-like glare. What, or which, is a national anthem these days? At Melbourne it’s been ‘Scotland the Brave’; at the rugby ‘Flower of Scotland’, a bland country-and-western-isles-type trill.

I daresay the only point of the Commonwealth Games is that they provide the sole raison d’.

Pitched suddenly into England’s cricket captaincy, it has been a delight to see Andrew Flintoff going about the job with a smile on his face. However the series ultimately pans out, wholehearted Flintoff’s ursine charms made for a winning start all right. Traditionally, of course, established England captains steered clear of India. The anointed monarchs of my boyhood (Hammond, Yardley, Brown, Hutton and May) never once led a tour to the sub-continent, hiving off the captaincy to such greenhorn amateur apprentices as Nigel Howard and Donald Carr. Later, stalwart county captains like Tony Lewis and Keith Fletcher were given one-tour commands. I was on the latter’s trip in 1981–82.

Treats all round next week if the second-leg matches in football’s Champions League are as compelling as the first. Chelsea and Rangers, each playing in Spain, are at serious risk of elimination, but Liverpool and Arsenal should be in the hat for the quarterfinals. Liverpool, a goal down, may lack a front-line scorer but a coherent, fluent midfield and the importance of being earnest should ensure another heady night at Anfield and satisfactory progress in defence of the title they won so seismically last summer. Arsenal’s glistening win against pallid Real in Madrid might well have revived their entire winter. They simply can’t blow it now, surely. Chelsea and Rangers are in desperate need of more than press-conference optimism next week.

Six Nations’ rugby resumes this weekend. Still all to play for. The first two rounds of the tournament, which ends on 18 March, produced a generally grey show of unforced errors and a glum lack of daring. Only the briefest shaft of sunlight has penetrated. BBC television’s overly enthusiastic blanket coverage, welcome in some ways, has been too desperately schizoid in its execution; the live play’s coherence interrupted by so many muttering ex-player experts dotted around all over, alongside comely, bland-questioning blondes. The refereeing has been as blinkered as much of the play. England have won both their matches, yet with neither flair nor all-court conviction. The outstanding team performance to raise rafters and cheer spirits was Scotland’s against France.

On the face of it, Manchester United at Liverpool is the irresistible FA Cup tie of the weekend, with needle all the sharper for the rancorous matches the two clubs have played of late. But don’t bank on it, for the contest could be muted this time as each club knows it has far bigger fish to fry next week when the European Champions’ League resumes intensely serious business. In that, Liverpool are defending champions, of course, while United are in fierce need of continental money-spinning progress not only to decorate their season but to relieve some debts of their American owners. Two other British sides in Europe, Arsenal and Rangers, benefit by having no domestic diversions left.

A seasonal competition: which phrase will BBC commentators utter most over the next fortnight: a) ‘winter wonderland’; b) ‘mountain magic’; c) ‘oh, bad luck, Great Britain’? The Winter Olympics have begun: bobble hats, fur-collared greatcoats, frostbitten noses and hour upon hour of various forms of sliding. The media battalions easily outnumber the 2,500 competitors; the security army outnumbers both put together. Turin’s sublime pelmet of Alpine spires will be crawling with security snipers and sharpshooters as if it was a film-set for the latest 007 blockbuster. I know the hardy Scots love their skiing, but I’m a soft southerner (or rather, a wet westerner) and I am mighty relieved not to be there for once.

The basso thump of Six Nations’ rugby begins this weekend — today Wales are at Twickenham and Italy in Dublin, and tomorrow the French collide with the Scots at Murrayfield. The reverberating crash-bang-wallop continues till the Ides of March. Turn the BBC’s sound down; rugby is now as gruntingly noisy as women’s tennis. Oh for our old springheeled game of evasion, dodging and darting. Lately, it has become one unending wince as one man-mountain simply charges pell-mell at another: Pow! Pam! Ugh! — and pot luck on murder or suicide. England and France annually start as favourites; well, they each have by far the biggest supply of the biggest heavyweights. Nicely, however, it is Wales who come to Twickenham today as the champions.

The club records of a couple of soccer’s fabled old goal-scorers were levelled this month. Two nice round numbers, too, as the silky and sometimes sulky Frenchman, Thierry Henry, matched the 150 league goals banged in for Arsenal in the 1930s by the then boy wonder from Devon, Cliff Bastin; and aging thoroughbred Alan Shearer briefly perked up Newcastle United’s generally crestfallen supporters by reaching the 200 of Jackie Milburn, his predecessor as Tyneside’s dearly beloved totem in the No. 9 shirt. Of course, each of them has potted around half as many again outside league competition and for other teams, but neither has a realistic chance of threatening history’s all-time net-billowers.

Fifa has tossed back the sponsored ball which was expensively designed for June’s World Cup: it was too inclined to wobble in flight. Also last week, the on-going fuss over the size and aerodynamics of the golf ball came to an interim conclusion when both the Royal & Ancient and the US Golf Association admitted secret research into the manufacture of a larger, lighter ball which can be propelled less far. Modern clubs and a stronger generation have been pinging the thing such distances that many of the game’s fabled courses are becoming obsolete. The ball is kernel, core and be-all of so many games that such news items make you realise how sparse is the homage that history has paid to it. The unsung, innocent ball, simply, makes sport’s whole world go round.

After the Lord Mayor’s show.... It is back to the humdrum for football today following last week’s all-embracing showstoppers in the FA Cup. Two or three years ago, we know-alls were writing off the world’s most antique annual tournament (est. 1872) as a geriatric diversion far past its sell-by date. Winning it offered no access to that licence to print money, the European Champions’ League, so once the strutters of Manchester United didn’t even bother entering. The supposed pre-eminence of the Premiership had moved things on, so the very idea of ‘dragon-slaying minnows’ was as preposterous in possibility as it was convoluted in metaphor. But Manchester United are desperate now for the FA Cup.

I stoked up some good log fires over the holiday, and with a box or two of Thornton’s Continental Selection was snug at the hearth with two British histories on the go, thoroughly enjoying them both: The Victorians by A.N. Wilson and Dominic Sandbrook’s Never Had It So Good (1956–1963). Scholarship and readability in flawless harmony, each relishingly, relishably bringing vividly alive their seminal eras to a semi-dunce who is at long last better versed on such as the Chartists, Irish Home Rule, Gladstone, Marie Lloyd, Gilbert and Sullivan, and CND, Supermac, Angry Young Men, Mods, Rockers and the life and works of Cliff Richard and good ol’ Gamal Abd al-Nasser. Neither acclaimed social history, however, offers a sniff to that opium of the people: Sport.

No mistaking the centre of sport’s universe in 2006. Found the flags of St George in the loft? Ordered the white van on which to display them? Ingerland! Ingerland! Ingerland! ’Ere-we-go! ’Ere-we-go! ’Ere-we-go! June will be busting out all over with World Cup football. Forty years on, England genuinely fancy their chances of regaining the trophy and the relentless national optimism will have reached bursting point by kick-off night against Paraguay in Frankfurt on 10 June. When the final in Berlin on 9 July does not involve England, the wailing post-mortem grief will fill the second half of the year.

England’s cricketers came rudely down to earth in the rose-red sandstone of Lahore, and they remain in the old Punjab for another week as they endeavour to pick up the pieces in the one-day rubber which begins today. Less than three months after the heady Ashes parades they began the Test series as warm favourites, but after their batsmen wantonly surrendered a winning position in the first match at Multan they were seldom in the ball park as a suddenly vibrant young Pakistan team, under the shrewd guidance of English coach Bob Woolmer and serenely avuncular captain Inzamam-ul-Haq, grew into men in front of our very eyes.

Before both codes of rugby muscled in briefly with a flurry of Test matches, a month or so ago who’d have imagined the two most compelling contests at the top of soccer’s Premiership this first Saturday of December would be Bolton Wanderers against Arsenal and Wigan Athletic’s neighbourly barney at Liverpool. Olde-tyme top-of-the-table ‘six pointers’. While Bolton’s reclaiming of the heights has been worthily achieved of late, their name has an antique resonance as founders of the League in 1888; Wigan’s dramatic rise would be even more spectacularly heady if they were to beat Liverpool today and then stop in their tracks the strutting leaders, Chelsea, next weekend at Stamford Bridge.

A confrère faced a daunting task last week. As golfing correspondent of the Times, it fell to John Hopkins to do the honours with the speech of acclaim at the induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame in Florida of his fabled predecessor Bernard Darwin (1876–1961), whom many consider the father of sportswriting. In view of the prim pretensions of US sport when on its best starched-bib parade, the occasion was aeons away from the British Lions’ tours John and I covered in rugby’s relishable old amateur days. In his address, Hoppy quoted the antique aphorism that the quality of writing about games improves as the size of the ball used becomes smaller. Thus those best served by Eng-Lit were cricket and golf, which leaves Darwin the first monarch.

From the 1870s, soccer’s insular ‘home’ unions had simply played among each other. Incredibly, England did not invite a foreign nation over here for a game for fully 50 years after they’d first played Scotland in 1871. Even after beating plucky little Belgium by 6–1 at Highbury in March 1923, the haughty English were not enamoured — over the next 22 years half-heartedly hosting only nine further games against various Continental neighbours while disdainfully totting up a total of 46 goals to 14. Of a sudden, the peace — and the bleak, monochrome, war-weary autumn of 1945’s bombed-out London — was lit up by the arrival at Croydon airport on Guy Fawkes’ eve of a club team from Moscow, the Dynamos. They were a sensation.

The one-off splendours of Pakistan’s captain Inzamam-ul-Haq offer a spicy tang to England’s first post-Ashes Test match which begins today in his hometown of Multan. The contrast with that soft-showered, gold-leaved autumn evening of hurrahs at the Oval seven weeks ago will be immense. Ancient Multan pitches its wicket on the very edge of the Punjab desert where sands storm, a battering heat pervades every pore, and spiritual mysticism permeates every sense. The Haqs have long been landowners of style and importance there; the batsman’s rich deeds make him the venerable city’s undisputed monarch, the nawab; Inzy is, if you like, Sultan of Multan.