Roger Alton

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.

Here’s an interesting question: had Thomas Tuchel been Portugal’s manager rather than England’s, would he have picked Cristiano Ronaldo to go to the World Cup finals? I am pretty sure not. The reason England are better under Tuchel than they were under Gareth Southgate is that the German chose a squad equipped to go the full five weeks. In the epic win over Mexico last weekend, what England needed in those nerve-shredding closing minutes was not for a Cole Palmer or a Phil Foden to tiptoe into the fray but for a battle-scarred old soldier like Dan Burn to take his place and start banging out the 40-yard headed clearances that kept his goalkeeper safe.

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.

It’s easy to be sceptical about top sportsmen turning to psychologists for help. A bit precious, no? After all, what’s wrong with the good old Fergie hairdryer treatment to unmuddle the thinking of some bewildered player? But when you hear Rory McIlroy extolling the virtues of the man who gets inside his cranium you start to think a little differently. Dr Bob Rotella, a craggy sports shrink from Vermont, is, it turns out, one of the key members of McIlroy’s team and they have been working together for years. McIlroy paid a very handsome tribute to Rotella after his second successive Masters victory.

It’s not the newest joke in the world, but worth a quick rerun right now after the latest in a stream of near-fatal road accidents. What’s the difference between a Range Rover and a golf ball? Tiger Woods can drive a golf ball straight for 300 yards. The extraordinary story of Woods’s decline is written in his face: how the lean, mean athlete of the 1990s has developed into a puffy-faced drug user and sometime drunk is something we once associated with former footballers and boxers. Woods is evidence that no one, not even the prodigiously rich and talented, is immune to the destructive power of addiction.

It certainly never happened to me when I was a lad – even after a particularly insightful essay on the causes of the English Civil War – but there’s a remarkable TikTok film purportedly showing Max Dowman, the Arsenal boy wonder, arriving at school on Monday (don’t forget he’s still only 16), and being applauded to the rafters by pupils and staff. It might of course be AI nonsense, but if it’s not true, it should be. Dowman has long been talked about for his extraordinary ability, and he finally burst into the public’s mind on Saturday with 23 minutes as a substitute in Arsenal’s nervy 2-0 win over Everton. Nervy, that is, until Dowman came on. His balance is sublime, he seems to glide over the pitch and he has a staggering footballing brain.

There’s something ineffably endearing about Harry Kane (though I am sure plenty of Bundesliga defenders would disagree), a sort of old-fashioned Englishness that was apparent in Captain Mainwaring. But unlike Mainwaring, he clearly gets on well with Germans. Even more important, he combines an apparent guilelessness with a canny understanding of how to do his job with distinction, which has made him the second most famous old boy of Chingford Foundation School after David Beckham.

Wales rugby coach Steve Tandy must have the most difficult job in sport, apart maybe from Jim Ratcliffe’s public--relations whizz. In a Churchillian moment, Tandy has called for national unity after Wales were humiliated by a sublime France in front of their lowest Six Nations home crowd in Cardiff. But here is a simpler solution. Ditch those red shorts. Wales have always played in red shirts and white shorts and who wears red shorts away from the beach? It might sound like a footling point, but it is symptomatic of the ease with which great national organisations are willing to turn their backs on their past, doubtless at the say-so of a few kids from marketing rifling through a laptop. Winter sports people are so admirable.

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?

So what was the best bit of this dispiriting Ashes series? Lucky you if you’ve found one, but for me – at the time of writing, before Jacob Bethell was belatedly allowed to unfurl his brilliance – it was the moving homage to the heroes of the Bondi massacre at the start of the Sydney Test. It was flawlessly executed, unlike a great deal of the cricket: a group of first responders, including paramedics, lifeguards, police and Ahmed al-Ahmed, the shopkeeper who disarmed one of the terrorists, were given a guard of honour as applause and cheers flooded the ground. If it didn’t bring a tear to the eye, check your pulse. Otherwise, what have we learned?

Maybe it’s the time of the year, or maybe it’s down to my sad little life, but surely I can’t be alone in feeling my spirits lifted by the example that Steve Borthwick and Thomas Tuchel are setting. The managers of England’s rugby and football teams have displayed courage, vision and a higher morality that could usefully be followed in other areas – politics, certainly, or business. Both came under fire in the early days of their management and stood resolutely firm. Model stuff surely. What Tuchel has done with his England side is a proper lesson for life. He has decided on a course of action – picking the best team but not necessarily the best players – and is sticking to it, ignoring all the off-stage squeals and drama.

There’s tetchy, and then there’s Ben Stokes ‘tetchy’ – pulling out his mic and stomping off cursing, or so I’m told, after Jonathan Agnew asked a disobliging question. Admittedly it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Stokes, an inspirational leader on the pitch who had just seen his team skewered in two days in Perth in one of the most brutal (and thrilling) Ashes Tests in history, and then had to do a live BBC interview. But this was the ever-courteous Aggers, for heaven’s sake, the nearest thing to a secular saint for TMS.  There’s no need for a four-letter outburst.

And so it begins, as Donald Trump likes to say, though not usually about cricket. He was offering his thoughts on the New York mayoral elections, which is not as much fun as the Ashes. Pleasingly, the goading is reaching volcanic levels as the Perth Test gets ever closer. Who needs Trump? The West Australian is not a paper many readers will be familiar with but its pages have been plastered with pictures of English players making their way through arrivals at Perth airport.

‘Gosh he seems full of himself’ was how my friend’s wife reacted when she came in to see Henry Pollock celebrating his stunning try against the Aussies at the weekend. And she was spot on too: 20-year-old Pollock, England rugby’s latest prodigy, whips up emotions, not least the desire from anyone who has played against him – and plenty who haven’t – to give him a good belting. He’s swaggering, confident, brash, with rockstar charisma and a bleached blond mop, and he can wind up opponents until they need a bomb disposal expert to calm them down. Referees might soon want to tell him to rein it in. That’s youth for you: who gives a damn?

Moments when a 24-carat superstar bursts on the scene are few and far between, but always something to cherish. And we rugby fans have had two in the past few weeks. First came the dazzling performance by Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, the Springbok No 10 who tore apart a powerful Argentina side in Durban in September, scoring a record 37 points with three tries, eight conversions and two penalties. With his effortless running and velvet touches all over the field, he suddenly gives the traditional raw power of the Boks an explosive new dimension. He is compellingly watchable, only 23, and will soon be as much of a benchmark of rugby excellence as the French scrum-half Antoine Dupont.