Frank Keating

Having cruelly blackwashed the combined British Isles Lions tourists just four months ago, New Zealand’s athletic young rugby sadists are back in the old country intent on inflicting further pain with a Grand Slam against the four ‘home’ nations on successive weekends, beginning today in a defiantly hyped-up Cardiff. It is a centenary show: on almost the same Taff patch in December 1905 Wales famously, disputedly, inflicted the solitary defeat on the fabled first All Black ‘Originals’ — a 3–0 whisker of a victory which has lodged enduringly in Welsh legend because in the following 100 years, club and country, New Zealand and Welsh XVs have played each other 73 times — and the Welsh have won on a paltry seven occasions.

There is a poignant sale next Wednesday at Bonhams auction house in Chester. Under the hammer is due a skip of spiritually priceless mementoes — shirts, boots, medals — belonging to the Hungarian Ferenc Puskas, one of soccer’s immortals. His family need the money to help pay the 78-year-old’s round-the-clock medical care in his Budapest nursing home. On sale will doubtless be quite a few faded shirts numbered ‘10’ in either the soft plum-red of Hungary or the all-white of his club Real Madrid. Nearer home, another imperishable No. 10, England’s Johnny Haynes, died at 72 after a road accident last week in Edinburgh. A dozen or so years ago I wrote a book on rugby’s pivots and playmakers at fly-half, The Great Number Tens.

If the English Premiership’s round-ball autumn has been imbued with a generally browned-off languor, it has at least been far more civil than the bad-blooded rancour of their ‘oval’ cousins. The Rugby Football Union spits more viperishly by the week at what it perceives as the derisive impertinence of the leading clubs. This month marks 10 years of professional rugby union, although in most of its world the bigtime game had been furtively (or not so furtively) shamateur long before 1995. That year itself was a nicely apt anniversary, falling a century after the northern clubs had broken away to play a 13-a-side game which allowed payment to players.

Quaintly, you could say that what the BBC in its heyday used to call ‘this great summer of sport’ finally ends this weekend in Shanghai. It may be two weeks until we adjust the clocks to signal the closing-in of winter, but 2005’s summer calendar snaps shut tomorrow with the running of the final round in China of the Formula 1 motor-racing season. Or nearer home, if you prefer — and even more cockeyed for old timers, seeing as it was traditionally the most mud-slurped and frost-bitten of wintery games — with the final whistle of today’s rugby league Grand Final at Old Trafford. The air-raid siren squeal of Formula 1 raucously, fortnightly, punctuates the soft sotto soundtrack of summer.

A revitalised Scottish team will cause a heck of a bonny din at splintery auld Hampden this afternoon — olde tyme optimism. Ditto Northern Ireland at venerable Windsor Park. Neither are likely to qualify for next year’s World Cup finals, but England are, yet the preliminaries to their match at Old Trafford against Austria have been imbued with jaundiced, fatalistic vapours. Should England come a cropper today the fuss will be fulminating and the fallout grievous as Sven-Goran Eriksson’s team attempt to salvage something from the wreckage in their last-chance qualifier against Poland on Wednesday.

English soccer is in a tizz of self-recrimination. Not before time. This new autumn season has seen attendances drop alarmingly in the Premiership. Goals have dried up and so, correspondingly, has the excitement. Two–nil is now a goal glut. The mercenary players are overpaid, over-praised and over here, and the fans, we are told, are fed up with them for, you might say, taking the money and not running. Those die-hard supporters themselves are now generally considered by much of the country as way out of the loop, not just touching weekend hobby-obsessives in striped scarves any more, but simply mad, sad nutters being taken for a ride while ashen-faced supremos of their squads debate whether entertainment and enjoyment, fun and laughter, are anything to do with them at all.

‘Judo Al’ Hayes has died in Dallas, aged 76. My hearing the sad news coincided with a tumble of forgotten yesterdays as I watched last week, as part of ITV’s 50th birthday party, some evocatively grainy snatches of the all-in wrestling which used to clock up more than 10 million viewers on a midweek winter evening and every Saturday teatime. Each of the channel’s regional companies took turns to record the fun. Four decades ago I was a callow, clueless ITV outside broadcasts producer for Rediffusion’s London channel sometimes charged with covering these grunt-and-groan passion plays from a series of suburban small halls.

The Ashes cricket series was unimaginably compelling from first day to last. At Lord’s on 21 July England began their challenge by bowling out the world champion Australians for just 190 to kick-start the turbulent rollercoaster, and in the following 54 days of beguiling intensity and speculation the whole cricket world — and far beyond it — became engulfed in the flamboyant ride right up to the barmy damp-squib ‘bad-light’ ending. The best team deservedly won. The losers, surprised by such a sustained challenge, fought like cornered cats, then gave generous best.

Only twice in history — in 1926 and 1953 — have England regained the Ashes in the final Test match at the Oval. No knowing, of course, if 2005 will be the third time, for this is being written on the eve of this weekend’s nerve-racking conclusion to our heady cricketing summer. In 1893, Dr Grace’s men won back the Ashes by playing out a canny draw in the last Test at Old Trafford, and nine years later the fabled denouement at Kennington in 1902 — Jessop’s match when Hirst and Rhodes got ’em in singles — was, in fact, only a consoling victory because Australia had already retained the urn with victories at Sheffield and Manchester.

Never bet against world champions is the sage ringsider’s timeless rubric. Certainly not when they look to be cornered and groggy. In what is already the most imperishably thrilling cricket series staged in this country since the whole motley began 123 years ago, to regain the Ashes England need only to draw the final match, which begins at the Oval on Thursday, while Australia, strutting world champs for the past dozen years, must win it. Having humiliatingly lost the first of the five Tests at Lord’s in July, the intense euphoria of outrageous subsequent victories (by just two runs at Birmingham and three wickets at Nottingham) has had Englishmen forgetting how whisker-close on each occasion they were to losing.

Cricket’s ongoing red-hot Ashes opera has had the soccer season deferentially tiptoeing into its autumn overtures, but a backlash will be rude and raucous all right, should the England soccer team play as gormlessly in their two forthcoming World Cup qualifiers as they did in the practice match last week, when Denmark disdainfully won by 4–1. Similar slovenly ineptitude against Wales a week today, or four days later against Northern Ireland, and the scorn and ridicule heaped by the London media on soccer’s zillionaires will overwhelm any new tricks even the cricketers can conjure up for its grand finale under the Oval’s gasometers. Easily England’s best player in the Denmark debacle was the gifted, quarrelsome man-child Rooney at centre-forward.

The Ashes are burning bright all right. A lot of cricket still to play. Two Tests remaining — the fourth begins at Nottingham on Thursday, and how might things stand as they go for the grandest of finales at Kennington on 8 September? The series has easily outstripped its ballyhoo billing, every dramatic switch and swash pinning back the ears of the nation. ‘What’s the score?’ is the ubiquitous question. In every high street you see huddles of the citizenry pausing on pavements, fretfully to peer through the plateglass shopfronts of premises which sell television sets.

Premiership soccer begins today. The poor prancing zillionaires do not get much respite from it, do they? Nor, alas, do we. Newcastle United at Arsenal for starters is a result to watch out for, ditto when Wayne Rooney’s Manchester United make the short journey to Wayne Rooney’s former Everton. Also on day one, folks, the first of the relegation heartstoppers already — Albion at Man. City and Brum at Fulham. I’m afraid the Premiership these days must be regarded as a four-division league in itself — those clubs seethingly fighting relegation, those in relieved but meaningless limbo, the handful scrapping for a minnow’s place in Europe, and that elite, permanent moneybags trio vying for the championship. The top and bottom of the whole story, alas.

Some of the Australian cricketers, it seems, are cagey about sport’s time-honoured hobby of autograph collecting. At Highbury stadium new signs order you never to approach Arsenal players for autographs. There was a minor fuss at the Open golf when Tiger Woods’s men announced the champ would sign his name for fans only ‘in pre-announced and strictly regulated circumstances’. Sports celebs reckon the too liberal scrawl of their name in a schoolboy’s autograph book endangers their precious ‘image rights’ and they fear recipients will at once flog it to the highest bidder on an internet auction site. So what am I bid for the first in my tattered old book?

Hooray, at least, for hubris. After all the optimism, fuelled by threatening boasts from some of England’s cricketers, the Lord’s Test match in no time turned into as retributively gruesome an anticlimax as the British Lions’ rugby tour had done earlier in the month. To be effective, swank must be supported by confidence in your own elementary basics, but once the bell sounded the Lions couldn’t tackle or pass and the cricketers, woefully, couldn’t hold their catches.

It is astonishing that England have not won an Ashes Test match at Lord’s since 1934 — and that one only because Hedley Verity cornered the Aussies on a wicked, fast-drying pitch. The Yorkie left-armer’s eight for 43 dismantled Australia on the third evening as he took the last six wickets in less than an hour, a collapse which had the one-man BBC wireless commentator Howard Marshall in such a tizz of comings and goings in his makeshift eyrie on the roof of the old Tavern that for the next Test at Old Trafford he was provided with a scorer (Arthur Wrigley, a Lancashire groundstaff player who was studying accountancy in his winters).

Three good old boys of summer —portly Pickwickian paragon cricket umpire, David Shepherd, took off his white coat for the final time in an international match at the Oval on Tuesday, and we shall know this morning whether nonpareil Jack Nicklaus has made the cut at St Andrews to extend by two days his cathartic farewell to golf. They bent the rules to offer Shepherd, 65 in December, next week’s momentous Ashes Test at full-dress Lord’s for his swan-song, but there is no remote drama-queen thesp in ol’ Shep, no milking the occasion like a Dickie B, and plebeian Kennington he said, was good enough for him.

In their bright-eyed, bushy-tailed beginnings, neither imagined it would come down to this. Next week two bruised (and soon to be buried) political figures look to a sporting event to seal for themselves and posterity some sort of remembered and lasting legacy. At the dazzling, world-watched opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games, who will be the sagacious veteran statesman whose bald and shiny pate will be picked out by the television arc-lights in the VIP tribune to be clamorously acclaimed by his people for leading, back in the mists, the administration which inspired such a glittering prize for his capital city? Will it be Jacques? Or will it be our Tone?

Midsummer — Wimbledon at full-throttled grunt, England’s cricketers in meaningful challenge with Australia at last, down by the river the bunting’s gay and the hanging-baskets plump and plenteous for Henley’s hearty annual heave-ho, and deep down in the cold southern seas this very morning we shall know who has drawn first blood as the rare and ancient rugby challenge resumes between marauding Brits and defiant New Zealand All Blacks. A couple of you were tickled by last week’s en passant here on the first Wimbledon of 1877 being suspended between semi and final to allow spectators to attend the Eton v. Harrow cricket at Lord’s.