Roger Alton

It’s rugby, Jim, but not as we know it, as they nearly said on Star Trek. The Northampton vs Bath try festival may not have been to every-body’s taste but what the hell. It was an 18-try romp, with Northampton running out 71-48 winners, the second-highest points total in a top- flight rugby match. It was great fun but more like a Harlem Globetrotters game than the intense pressure-cooker slug-fest that the home nations are going to have to win if they’re to have any chance in next year’s World Cup. Earlier that day, a purring All Blacks side had walloped Australia by 50 points to 19: ten tries in all and a fluent, flowing New Zealand side that took you right back to the days of Carter and McCaw.

When the sonorous voice of Clive Myrie describes something as the ‘biggest sports story of the century’ in tones normally used for events in Kyiv or Gaza it’s probably time to sit up and listen. Or maybe not. The City saga – at root claiming that the club breached financial rules to pay its way from 2009 to 2018, when they won the Premier League three times – has been going on for eight years after all, and if Ferran Soriano, the chief executive, and the unfeasibly wealthy chairman, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, know what they are talking about, it’s got plenty more time to run. God help us! And they do seem pretty bullish. None of this, ‘OK guv, you got us bang to rights, we’ll come quietly’ stuff. Personally, I find it difficult to get worked up about this story.

As Spectator readers will surely be aware, many of the stories we read in the papers nowadays are there not because they’re important, entertaining, moving or amusing, but because they’re the kind – about weight loss, true crime, celebrity and so on – that get the most ‘clicks’ from online readers. And clicks mean advertising. It’s the same in sport reporting: football is endlessly popular even when it’s quite dreary (and I mean you, ‘international break’); athletics much less so. Just doesn’t get the clicks, you see, even when it’s the most thrilling spectacle around – like the World Ultimate Championship in Budapest at the weekend.

Who’s the greatest athlete on the planet? It’s hard to look beyond the Slovenian cyclist Tadej Pogacar, five times winner of the Tour de France, 2024 Giro d’Italia champion, victor in 13 one-day classics and twice World Road Race champion. Last week, he had the Spanish Vuelta – the one Grand Tour he hasn’t yet won – virtually sewn up, when he was badly injured in an accident in the peloton and carted off to hospital with a broken collar bone. Thankfully, his injuries weren’t as bad as Chris Froome’s in his career-ending, life-threatening accident in August last year when he sustained five broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a lumbar vertebrae fracture and a tear to the sac surrounding the heart.

Britain’s latest Charioteer of Fire has no need for grandad vests or a Vangelis earworm, just a smile as dazzling as her nail varnish, the longest legs in Christendom, a remorseless will to win… oh, and four gold medals. Make no mistake, Amy Hunt – who, along with an extraordinarily talented and determined GB team, dominated the European Athletics championships last week – could and should be the saviour of British athletics. You could not ask for a better role model: she even speaks fluent Italian and, like many Cambridge graduates, was very keen to take over in the group interviews she did after her races. If Andy Burnham had any sense he would enlist her for some ambassadorial gig.

Watching football work itself into a lather of self-righteousness is never a pretty sight. The English FA is now back-pedalling furiously, having sucked up to Fifa top dog Gianni Infantino for years. But if you look back over other recent Fifa head honchos, it is harder to find one who hasn’t been implicated in corruption of some sort than it is to find a TV advert that doesn’t feature Peter Crouch. There’s Joao Havelange; or you may prefer Sepp Blatter of blessed memory; then there’s Cameroon’s Issa Hayatou; and now of course dear old Gianni. All, no doubt, fine family men but not averse to a bit of skulduggery when it mattered.

It keeps on happening, the passing of sporting titans. First Garfield Sobers and now Kevin Keegan, a couple of the best, who charmed everyone on and off the pitch. Enough has been said about Keegan, his skill as a footballer, his drive, his hard work, his easy kindness to his countless fans. Not forgetting his perm, his Brut and his permanent presence on TV. He wrote a column for the Liverpool Echo when I was a trainee there in the 1970s. KK – then the sporting superstar at Bill Shankly’s Liverpool – would often come into the office to work on his piece with the sports editor, Vincent Kelly. He wasn’t happy to let it be ghosted while he did something else. He cared. And to us young whippersnappers, gawping at our hero, he was always polite and funny.

Whisper it if you must, but it looks as if Gianni (‘Today I feel gay…’) Infantino might have got it right with Fifa’s jumbo-busting World Cup, all 48 teams, 104 games and 39 days of it. Just look at some of the results: forget the Norwegians ‘Viking row’, Messi’s relentless brilliance, magnificent Mbappé, even wise Emma Hayes and her kitchen chalkboard. Look at tiny Cape Verde. With a population of 530,000, about the size of Bristol, it’s one-fifth the size of Jamaica, half that of Mauritius and one-third less than Gran Canaria. But they have been handling football’s aristocrats with the fervour of a French revolutionary execution party.

Cricketers Have Beer, Shock: well, who knew! This wretched incident in some joint in Chelsea involving Ben Stokes and Gus Atkinson in a dust-up with some extremely large young Saracens rugby players is hardly world war three, but its ramifications are sending shudders through the cricket establishment. At the time of writing the full details are not entirely clear, though it seems that an England Cricket Board (ECB) security guard might have been accidentally thumped before a full-blown ruckus ensued. Nothing good ever happens after midnight – a sentiment readers will doubtless be familiar with Whether a well-known and widely admired 35-year-old international sportsman should have been out in a nightclub in the early hours of Monday morning is for others to judge.

Looking forward to the World Cup? I do hope so. You can complain and say that a gargantuan tournament without Italy but with Cape Verde isn’t really worth bothering with. But Italy have been rubbish for years and it’s no bad thing when establishment sides get a good kicking (yes West Ham, we’re looking at you). And dear old volcanic Cape Verde, bless it, is in a group with Spain (shorn of any Real Madrid players), Saudi Arabia and Uruguay. I would love to see any of those games. And England manager Thomas Tuchel has played a blinder. But goodness, he was blessed with options. Take a look at this team: Nick Pope; Lewis Hall, Harry Maguire, Levi Colwill, Trent Alexander-Arnold; Morgan Gibbs-White, Cole Palmer, Adam Wharton; Phil Foden, Jarrod Bowen, Dominic Calvert-Lewin.

As all but the most tribal fruitcases would agree, Arsenal’s Declan Rice is an island of decency in the rather foetid river that is modern football. But even he seemed to be performing the Heimlich manoeuvre on a West Ham forward in the grapple-fest that was the epic 95th-minute corner last weekend. Like everyone else, Rice joined the all-in wrestling, bullying, grabbing, judo throw-downs and fouling that have disfigured so many of the corners we have seen this season and made these moments such a dreadful spectacle. As at an orgy, it is hard to see who is doing what to whom. After an eternity, the referee judged that West Ham’s Pedro had his arm across the Arsenal goalkeeper David Raya’s throat and disallowed the West Ham equaliser. Should the goal have stood?

Suddenly last Sunday in London nearly 60,000 amateur runners were able to say they had competed in a race in which one of the world’s greatest athletic achievements of all time was finally accomplished. Sabastian Sawe’s demolition of the two-hour barrier for the marathon ranks with Roger Bannister’s cracking the four-minute mile in 1954, or Hillary and Tenzing conquering Everest, the world’s highest point, the previous year. These epics test human performance to its very limit and are moments that should be celebrated for as long as human greatness is acknowledged. He revealed that before the race he had breakfasted on bread and honey, with a mug of tea.

If you can remember Pink ’Un newspapers and the days when FA Cup shocks really were shocks, then God bless you, you’ve got a few miles on the clock. Pink ’Uns (occasionally Green ’Uns, as in Sheffield and Bristol) were Saturday evening regional newspapers carrying results and reports of Football League matches that, in a miracle of newspaper production, mesmerising to behold, were on sale on the streets while spectators were still leaving the grounds after the final whistle. All closed now of course, along with the demise of the Saturday 3 p.m. kick-off. Who needs papers anyway when football fans can discover the state of play in matches at any time, anywhere?