Roger Alton

Thank god for the Commonwealth Games: at least they gave us a brief respite from football transfer stories. Instead of having to read about an 18-year-old defender being bought by Overambitious Wanderers for the GDP of a medium-sized African nation, we could delight in Norfolk Island beating South Africa at lawn bowls, Kiribati and Nauru winning medals in weightlifting or Sri Lanka sharing a rugby pitch with England and Australia. It was a reminder of the brotherhood (and sisterhood) of sport and made me nostalgic for the days before the money men took over football, rugby and cricket. (Yes, especially cricket: have you noticed we don’t have a drinks break any more but a Buxton hydration break, and tea is now the Yorkshire Tea interval?

A jaw-dropping moment on the front page of Her Majesty’s Daily Telegraph the other day: ‘How to fix England’, read the  blurb, ‘by Kevin Pietersen’. Rather like ‘How To Stamp Out Diving, by Arjen Robben’; or ‘Take Vanity out of Football, by Cristiano Ronaldo’.   Pietersen joins a dressing room full of former international  captains — Shane Warne, Geoffrey Boycott, and Michael Vaughan — who these days devote their column inches to slagging off Alastair Cook in particular and most of the English Test team in general. It’s worth having a look at the flavour of the Telegraph Four’s jottings.

Iran, eh: who knew? Last time I checked it was the great Satan, locking up its own people, stamping out dissidents, and a centrifuge or two away from bringing nuclear winter to the world. Now it seems to be the West’s big hope in the war against the bearded hordes blitzkrieging their way through the Middle East. And as for their football team, we absolutely love them. They came just a few seconds short of severely embarrassing the hated Argies before a last-minute Messi wondergoal in their World Cup match. The crowd in Belo Horizonte clearly loved them and was full of highly photogenic young men and women in Iran shirts. Iran is a football-crazy country and if anything can begin to ease the awful stranglehold of the mullahs, it could be their football team.

A revealing handwritten letter emerged at the weekend from the England scrum half Danny Care, who wasn’t playing in the first Test against New Zealand, to his Harlequins and England colleague Joe Marler, who very much was. And how! ‘Joe, Just wanted to wish you all the best when you step on the battlefield tonight,’ wrote Care. ‘Go hard my friend, I wish I could be out there in the trenches alongside you.’ Say what you like about the military metaphor — and I think it’s bang-on for a match against the All Blacks — that note says as much about Stuart Lancaster’s England as a whole forest of commentary.

Ah teamwork! There’s no me in team, as David Brent used to observe sagely, but there are often plenty of cocks, as he didn’t. And really, you get to thinking, Lewis Hamilton ought to start sorting himself out. He whines and moans just a tad too much. Watching Lewis and Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg on the podium at Monaco, it was impossible to imagine how one human being could ignore another in so many ways in such a confined space. Max Mosley and the editor of the News of the World in the ante-room at the Pearly Gates couldn’t run them close. Lewis has an alarming habit of not getting along with people, which can’t be good for his prospects.

Sport is all about streaks, winning and losing, though whether one of the gloomiest runs in world sport — England’s footballing failure to reach the final of a major tournament for nearly half a century — can be brought to an end by Roy’s Boys remains to be seen. It seems unlikely, but how nice for to be going into a tournament with so little expectation and a team full of youth and vigour, playing without fear. Much better to be under the radar than being hyped out of sight. Can’t wait myself. Certainly one of the most remarkable winning streaks in sport came to an end last weekend — and an even more impressive streak continued into a third decade. Neither got much coverage, but they deserved to.

It’s hard to love Saracens rugby club — their centre is called Bosch, a word that also describes their bulldozing style of play — but you have to admire the demolition job they did on Clermont Auvergne in the semi-finals of the Heineken Cup. The flamboyant French side, free-runners to a man, had 68 per cent of possession, 64 per cent of territory and yet were tackled into impotence. Clermont limped off the Twickenham turf, stuffed 46–6. The English club play Toulon, the defending champions, in the final in Cardiff on 24 May and again I will be supporting the French team, not just  because this will be the last match of Jonny Wilkinson’s career.

The brotherhood of cricket, as we know, transcends race, creed, class and nationality. It can also be a big help when it comes to dealing with the law, as this East--er parable demonstrates. My distinguished Times colleague Phil Webster, besides being a doyen of political writers, is also a ferocious cricketer and a man once described as the meanest captain who had ever pulled on a pair of whites. Phil at this time — about 20 years ago — led a press team loosely affiliated to a long--defunct magazine. As is the way with these things, the team had acquired an opening bowler, a large and imposing figure from Jamaica called, let’s say, Courtney, who had little to do with journalism, more with the building trade.

It’s Boat Race time again and as soon as the BBC starts its broadcast on Sunday there will be those who invade Twitter and such places, having a moan faster than the Bullingdon Club can trash an Oxford curry house. Why’s it always the same two teams in the final? The more strident will demand why licence fee payers’ money is being spent on a private race that’s of no interest to anyone who wasn’t educated under one set of dreaming spires or the other. It’s amazing how many people went to Oxbridge, in that case. Why do more than seven million viewers tune in each year, and why has the BBC just renewed its contract for another six years? Why are the riverbanks rammed solid with spectators for four miles?

There are many eternal questions. Why do all aircraft, no matter how much your ticket cost, where you’ve come from, and what time you land, always dock at a gate requiring a walk of not less than 47 miles to the terminal? Why was there no running water in the taps on my train to Cheltenham on Friday? And why, beyond being an idiot, did I back Lord Windermere in the Gold Cup, but only for a place, thus depriving myself of several hundred quid? I suppose being an idiot does it. Now add another question, but whisper it: could England actually win the 2015 Rugby World Cup? They just failed to win the Six Nations because Ireland scraped a thrilling victory over France in the best and last game of a brilliant championship. England should have eyes now only on next September.

Just do it. The people who make trainers have been telling us to ‘Just do it’ for 25 years now. As a slogan it is simple and effective. (It was also, I learn from Google, inspired by the final words of the executed 1970s spree-killer Gary Gilmore. There’s a free fact for you.) But how many elite sportsmen can just do it? When there are hundreds of thousands of dollars resting on a shot or a kick or a smash or a putt, no wonder people go to pieces. They lose their confidence, overthink what they need to do, take an age to line up the target, then find their limbs go tight and they fluff the chance. Call it paralysis by analysis. The England cricket team are more than familiar with it this winter. The young just do it because they haven’t learnt to fear their sport.

You can trust the BBC to behave like a leaf blown by any breeze, but even that spineless leviathan (if such a beast could exist) might have tried to grow a pair and stick up for its admirably manic commentators at the Sochi Winter Olympics. It was Ed Leigh, Aimee Fuller and Tim Warwood on the opening weekend’s snowboarding contest that really got people going. There were a few hundred complaints, and one or two media observers who really should have known better got very snooty. Frankly anybody who can get worked up about some slightly over-the-top commentary on a sport no one has ever seen before should really get out more. However, the BBC, bless it, did promise a ‘review of its procedures’ or some such drivel.

Englishmen used to be deported to Australia as a punishment. Now they get sent back to England as an act of mercy. There was not much of a campaign to ‘free the press box three’ after Australia’s immigration services ordered the eviction of the men from the Sun, Mirror and Daily Mail before the winter’s wretched Ashes tour was over. Having arrived with the players for the warm-up matches and watched as defeat followed humiliating defeat, they were the last men standing when the one-day series got under way. Other papers had kindly brought home their ‘dukes’ after the Test series and sent the ‘butlers’, as cricket reporters call each other, to cover the hit and giggle.

James Cook’s third voyage as an English captain ended in disaster, stabbed to death and disembowelled by a pack of angry Hawaiians in 1779. The latest Captain Cook’s third tour since taking charge of the national cricket team has been just as successful, with Alastair’s England given the Hawaiian treatment by Australia. But don’t despair: for the British sports fan there are plenty of reasons to be cheerful. Try these: 1. Our women cricketers are thumping the Aussies, and it’s the women’s Ashes that matters, right? Just remind any passing Australian of that, and last summer’s Lions tour too, if you’ve got the time.

Sir Vivian Richards came to watch me play cricket the other day. That’s the sort of sentence you wait a lifetime to write. What’s more it’s true. Sort of. I haven’t been able to say anything like that for ten years, just  a few days before the Rugby World Cup final in Sydney in November 2003. I was at a screening at the National Film Theatre of a nautical epic called Master and Commander, starring Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany. Afterwards there was a Q and A with the actors. After a series of standard questions about the cinematography and suchlike, I put my hand up. ‘A question for  Mr Crowe, please. Who does he think will win the World Cup final on Saturday, England or Australia?’ ‘Are you being serious?’ ‘You bet.

British sport used to be dead. You only have to look down the list of past winners of the Sports Personality of the Year award to see that. In 1994 Damon Hill won it for not quite winning the Formula 1 drivers’ champion-ship; three years later Greg Rusedski won it for not quite winning the US Open. David Steele won it for making four fifties in an Ashes series. Ryan Giggs once won it just for still being around. But now things have changed. Last night three spirits came visiting. The Ghost of Sports Past poured a generous tumbler of Laphroaig, put on a DVD of 2012 and said, ‘We’ll never see a sporting year like that again.’ But he was soon replaced by the Ghost of Sports Present. ‘Rubbish,’ he said.

My friend Miles was bowling in a festival of wandering cricket clubs in Oxford the other day. First wicket down and in walked an immaculately turned out Japanese gentleman. As he took guard, he turned to the slips and said, ‘I’m the best batsman in Japan.’ Miles’s first ball he edged to the keeper, and tucking his bat under his arm he said to the slips again, ‘But I’m also the only batsman in Japan.’ Ah, cricket, lovely cricket. It’s a long way from the Ashes and Jonathan Trott collapsing from unspecified stress issues or Michael Clarke snarling at England’s No. 11 batsman, Jimmy Anderson for heaven’s sake, to ‘get ready for a broken fucking arm’. Is this really what people want out of cricket?

In sport, as in life, you just don’t know where you stand any more. Look at the Premier League: no club knows where they stand except for Crystal Palace, who are being stood on by all the others. Everyone else can beat everyone else. Manchester City, who must be one of the best teams, are eighth; Southampton are good for the Europa League but currently could end up in the Champions League. But it’s all good for business. The England football team are about to find out exactly where they stand after two friendlies and the World Cup draw next month. The England rugby team are about to find out exactly where they stand too.

The comic book Asterix in Switzerland is full of joys, not least the many jokes about Swiss obsessions with tidiness and bureaucracy. Watching the Basel Open last week, the audience was a treat. Immaculate of course, with giant glasses, and cashmere V-necks looped over the shoulders, and doubtless trading assets between matches over hot chocolate and a strudel. But even his home-town crowd and all the UBS credit cards in the Alps couldn’t lift the greatest Swiss of all to take what would have been only his second title of the year. Roger Federer was outgunned in the final by Juan Martin del Potro, having just squeaked past a rangy young Canadian called Vasek Pospisil (no, me neither), ranked about 40, in the semis.

The more you see of Jack Wilshere, the more admirable he becomes. He seems to have taken wholeheartedly to fatherhood, a path he embarked on when he was barely out of short trousers. And then there’s the agreeably relaxed way he was toking on a Marlboro Light outside a London nightclub the other day. It bought a nuclear storm on the poor lad’s head, of course — quite why is beyond me. There’s no suggestion he’s a chain-smoker, unlike the great Brazilian Socrates, who did about 40 a day and won the World Cup. He, of course, was a doctor. Young Jack did the smoking community no favours by initially claiming he was holding the fag for someone else, though he later came clean.