Frank Keating

It was good last week to catch up with Henry Blofeld, relishable old bean and Grub Street comrade from way back. To prime his loquacious enthusiasms for a long, hot (some hopes) summer at the Test Match Special microphone, over a couple of nights we clinked far too many into the bottle-bank hole marked ‘green’ and on Friday Henry wowed a rafter-packed throng in the local school hall with An Evening with Blowers. ‘My dear old things...’ his intimate fruitiness collectively greeted them, and we were putty for the next two hours and then queued well past closing-time at the book-signing session. A single Friday on, and yesterday Henry was due to attend an altogether more historically auspicious occasion.

For the first time I can remember I haven’t bothered a fig about England’s Test matches. I haven’t even cocked an ear towards the radio. Keith Miller said you shouldn’t take candy from kids, and Bangladesh’s so obvious wretchedness about being outclassed depressed everyone’s spirits. Or is it an ageing codger’s grumpiness? Bangladesh can only improve by playing the best. I did not remotely feel so cheerless about one-sided contests 23 years ago when I was enchanted to be in Colombo to see Sri Lanka’s very first Test and, although England won easily, it was heartwarming to welcome a new side into the fold. And it took Sri Lanka just over a dozen years, didn’t it, resoundingly to wallop Australia in the 1996 World Cup final?

A friend, a particularly mordant romantic, reckons the saddest thing about first-class cricket’s frantic attempts to ‘get with it’ — and appeal to everybody except those who love it dearly already — is that each team’s scorer is now ordered by Lord’s to use computer laptops to notch the runs and wickets. Leisurely, lovingly inking-into the summer’s book the ones and twos, the dots and dashes, the w’s, the c’s and b’s, the lb’s and st’s are all now strictly banned by St John’s Wood decree. Not only that; this summer, by all accounts, is the first in which not one of the 18 county sides employs a scorer who was once a player himself. All press-button boffins now.

A friend, a particularly mordant romantic, reckons the saddest thing about first-class cricket’s frantic attempts to ‘get with it’ — and appeal to everybody except those who love it dearly already — is that each team’s scorer is now ordered by Lord’s to use computer laptops to notch the runs and wickets. Leisurely, lovingly inking-into the summer’s book the ones and twos, the dots and dashes, the w’s, the c’s and b’s, the lb’s and st’s are all now strictly banned by St John’s Wood decree. Not only that; this summer, by all accounts, is the first in which not one of the 18 county sides employs a scorer who was once a player himself. All press-button boffins now.

Wales hosts an English Cup Final for the last time today. The builders swear that a spanking new Wembley will be ready for the FA’s 2006 final. We shall see. Border-crossing supporters will be relieved. Jolly nice stadium Cardiff, sure, but the appalling clog of road traffic on match days has been a disgrace, while the railway arrangements have hovered between non-existent and shamefully shambolic. Cardiff has muddled through to get away with a pretty good press on the whole, and for half a dozen years the visiting hordes have readily come back for more. I wonder how the Millennium Stadium will get on now? Can the odd pop eisteddfod and six or seven rugby and soccer internationals sustain it?

With a clamour of various cup finals due to close out the winter’s activities — and with anniversaryitis so fashionable — I am surprised to have read nothing on the infamous Khaki Cup final of 1915, especially as it was the first notable match played, in only their tenth year of existence, by the team of 2005: League champions and centenarians Chelsea. The springtime before Liverpool (the Champions League finalists) had also made their first appearance in the Cup final, losing 1-0 to Burnley at Crystal Palace. Within three months, on 4 August 1914, war was declared and a hullabaloo grew through the autumn as a new season of professional football not only began but continued through the winter, Saturday after Saturday, even as the Flanders mud became churned with blood.

Dotted about the house is the occasional sporting print. Flash, bang, wallop, what a photograph! At the top of our staircase is Herbert Fishwick’s imperishable study at Sydney in 1928 of Hammond’s pluperfect cover-drive -— coiled power, poise, omnipotence, and with the famous blue handkerchief peeping from his pocket. Among the family snaps and sepia descendants on the walls of the downstairs cloakroom is Neil Leifer’s bespoke, breathtaking birdseye shot of Cleveland Williams canvas-flattened by Ali at Houston in 1966, a memorable Neil Libbert evocation of that golden afternoon at Wembley in the same year, and a Patrick Eager 1/500th-of-a-second first-ball freeze-frame of Warne vs Gatting at Old Trafford a dozen summers ago.

Obligatory at election time are party leaders compelled to treat voters as dolts by declaiming lifelong devotion to the people’s game. In 1997 Mr Blair made a complete idiot of himself with a tear-inducing reverie of a childhood on the terraces at St James’ Park drooling over Newcastle United’s Jackie Milburn — but without checking first whether he would have been out of nappies when the black-and-white legend last played there.

‘The Real General Election’ trumpeted a cynically astute headline in the Daily Mirror last week over a large blue campaign rosette bearing the picture of Frank Lampard alongside a red one framing Steven Gerrard, respective midfield dynamos of Chelsea and Liverpool football clubs which relishingly meet on Wednesday in the first semi-final leg of Europe’s Champions’ League competition. The winner will play either AC Milan or PSV Eindhoven in the final at the Ataturk stadium, Istanbul, on 25 May. Chelsea fancy themselves to settle the tie at this first strike on their home paddock. They have led the domestic Premiership by an ever lengthening street all through the winter (beating Liverpool three times for good measure).

The Windsor wedding at least, one trusts, signalled the end of some tiresome weeks for the royal family. So trying, in fact, that it would certainly not have noticed a final pesky shaft before the dissolution of Parliament which had a group of northern MPs bleating about royalty’s apparent preference for rugby union over its cousins of the league code. (A jolly good game rugby league — tough, honest, regularly thrilling — but too often insecurely fretful of its status; even the mildest censure down the years has meant reams of green-ink death threats from north of the Trent.

Forget moons, suns, solstices and altered clocks, for half the world spring officially sprang on Wednesday when the 142nd edition of Wisden was launched with a banquet at London’s Inner Temple Hall.

Until the 1980s, England vs Northern Ireland was a calendar annual. Then the ‘Home’ championship was brutally abandoned. So to those of a certain generation last week’s soccer fixture seemed surreal. As surreal, I daresay, as the play which opens in Stockholm next Friday — British playwright Nick Grosso’s depiction of a randy Swedish coach of an England soccer team described, deadpan, by the theatre spokesman as ‘a relationship-comedy twisted into the realms of the absurd’. Methinks Nick will have to be on top form to ratchet any new ‘twist’ from our sexy Sven’s real-life relationship absurdities.

What with the frenzied finales of Six Nations rugby, Cheltenham’s four days’ hooley, and my own ruddy all-day asthma, I had to miss John Jackson’s 70th birthday banquet in the Gay Hussar. I suppose in the old days the Manchester Guardian and the old Daily Mirror were some sort of soulmates, and certainly JJ and I can dance back together into the mists. In fact, he goes back further. My first Olympic Games were Tokyo’s in 1964, John’s first five-ringed circus was Rome’s in 1960; my first World Cup was 1966, his in Chile in 1962.

Final curtain for rugby’s 2005 Six Nations tournament: Grand Slams, Triple Crowns, Wooden Spoons. Before England and France presumed shared control of the old competition a decade or so ago, a clean-sweep Grand Slam season by one nation was such a rarity as to be scarcely a consideration. Sure, the glistening Welsh team of the 1970s won three vivid scarlet Slams on the trot. Scotland has achieved it only twice since 1925, when star sportswriter of the Daily Telegraph (always bylined ‘Colonel Philip Trevor CBE’) inventively described the exploit as ‘the impregnable quadrilateral’. Only on one single occasion has Ireland revelled in the gorgeous grandeur of the Slam. It was in 1948 and to the day they died my uncles would come over to tell the tale with relish.

To tell the truth, I am not a mad racing man, nor has betting much bothered me. Down the years I was dispatched often enough by the Guardian (then drearily prudish about racing) to keep an eye on the classics (as well as, I fancy, on the appetites and expenses of its wonderful, unappreciated racing writer Richard Baerlein) and found myself regularly caught up in the tizz and fizz of it all. And I’ve enjoyed always some of the sport’s other writers of info and grandeur, from Jack Leach, Lord Oaksey and Brough Scott, to the Spec’s own surreptitious star in the hedge at the morning gallops, Robin Oakley. But a Cheltenham man I am. As a boy, National Hunt’s high-days’ holiday and harbinger of spring was, to all intents, our local point-to-point.

On the face of it, Liverpool have the best chance of the four English clubs seeking progress in the European Champions’ Cup next week. They take a 3-1 lead back to Germany, but the away goal holds crucial significance and, wisely, no Scouser is counting chickens. Even more pessimistic should be supporters of Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United, each rudely defeated in the first leg. Of the quartet, however, I reckon Chelsea is the best bet to get through. For one elementary reason: they have a calm (and calming) fellow between the sticks, in gloves and pullover, who combines defiance, daring, dagger-sharp reflexes, and a safe pair of hands. Lanky liabilities stalk the penalty area of the other three sides.

The opening two weekends of rugby’s Six Nations championship were listlessly lacking in panache or brio. England and France have been generally dire, pantechnicons juddering along on empty, while Italy and Scotland resemble my old prep-school reports: ‘tries hard with poor results’. With intermittent verve and a smattering of dandy Celtic dances, so far only Wales and Ireland have flickeringly illuminated the tournament. Genuinely permanent shifts of power might be logged, however, when Wales play in Paris today, and tomorrow when England square up in Dublin’s dear, dilapidated old patch at Lansdowne Road. Too often down the last century have Ireland come a terrible cropper when they’ve sensed England for the taking.

One of Ian McEwan’s familiar set-piece exuberances in his acclaimed new novel Saturday — ‘undoubtedly his best’: Anita Brookner, The Spectator, 29 January — has neurosurgeon hero Perowne indulging in an intensely competitive game of squash with anaesthetist Strauss. The doc plays each desperately combative rally on the tightrope of his own mortality, as if every unsparingly venomous stroke might be his last. McEwan is spot-on: fiction as sporting verity.

Spring is springing ...and the ancient rugby rituals are under way once more.

Once again, soccer’s top-flight League contests in both England and Scotland seem condemned to be unchallenging two-horse races. The respective managers of Arsenal and Manchester United have been told to cool down their playground animosities, and we shall see this Tuesday evening if they can manage it. The singular Alan Shearer has at last potted his 400th goal; the Geordie is an old-time English centre-forward of authentic vintage, true inheritor of the line from Bloomer and Dean through Lawton and Lofthouse. Which leaves an uncluttered stage for the ancient FA Cup competition to fill with some bold strokes of genuine theatre in the fourth-round ties this weekend.