Roger Alton

Good old Pearcey, I say. England’s excitable stand-in manager refreshingly ruled himself out of the full-time job after his back-of-a-fag-packet team just lost out to Holland last week, because, he said, he wasn’t good enough. His actual words were, ‘I don’t think I have the experience for the job… the full-time manager of England at this moment in time is probably somebody else, not me.’ Well, full marks for honesty, but you might say the evidence is too scant — there’s insufficent sample size. Kevin Keegan could say that he wasn’t good enough to be England coach with the real authority of a man who had not been good enough for quite a long time.

My foul-mouthed friend Claudine had it about right after seeing Michael ‘full-­frontal’ Fassbender’s latest sex-and-angst gloomathon, Shame. ‘I didn’t know where to look,’ she said, ‘when Carey Mulligan started singing.’ And anybody who’s spent any time caring about Arsenal these past few years won’t have known where to look as the team was pulled apart by an ageing Milan side, before collapsing to Sunderland in the FA Cup. If you want a long and happy life with the full complement of legs, it’s always best to keep on the right side of Roy Keane.

You’ve got to hand it to Princess Anne. She’s been loyally pitching up for Scotland’s rugby matches through thick and thin, largely thin since the battle of Bannockburn, and unfailingly appears to be enjoying herself. She’s a real rugby fan, and if she were 30 years younger, she’d have had her eye, you suspect, on that young David Denton (the man of the match, if you missed it, and a back row forward of immense stature and equally impressive looks). However, without full hazchem uniform and headgear, I wouldn’t have liked to be anywhere near the Princess Royal if she were called on to deliver her post-match verdict.

By chance I was in Abu Dhabi as England’s first Test against Pakistan was getting under way just up the road in the sepulchral wastes of the Dubai Cricket Stadium. What could be nicer, I thought, as I sat in my hotel room, than watch a bit of cricket, and it’s local too. But in 24 sports channels, not a sausage. I could find camel racing, horse racing, snooker, meaningless Premier League games from days before, Australia’s T20 Big Bash, and some pointless veterans’ golf. But Test cricket, zilch, zero, nada. The new destination for global sport doesn’t really seem to give one.

Nobody ever seemed to have a good word to say for Ivan Lendl, though I personally enjoyed his general cool implacability. But why so disliked? It wasn’t as though he stood in the way of British tennis glory: Lendl’s career coincided with headlines that read ‘British Wimbledon hopes extinguished as Jeremy Bates loses rain-delayed first-round match’. No, we didn’t take to Lendl because he didn’t smile much and was as undemonstrative as you could get, the perfect bad guy to put in front of lovable showmen like Boris Becker, Pat Cash and Henri Leconte. Lendl was the last chip off the old Communist Bloc. If Rocky IV had been made about tennis, Dolph Lundgren would have played the baddie and he would have been called something like, er, Ivan Lendl.

Sadly, no blistering new memoir this year from Max Mosley — A Study In Scarlet: the History of the Whip (published by the British Horseracing Authority) — but there have been plenty of wonderful sporting books this year. Too many to list obviously, so I have chosen just four and, in the Leveson spirit of full and frank confession, all written by or about people I know and admire. Paul Kimmage’s Engage: The Fall and Rise of Matt Hampson tells the extraordinary story of the England Under-21 tight head prop who broke his neck on the training ground in 2005 when the scrum collapsed on him, leaving him paralysed from the waist down.

What a year for a world in turmoil: crisis, riots, revolution and economic catastrophe. And that’s just Manchester City. Meanwhile, there’s the cheering news that next year’s even more calamitous financial armageddon will coincide with London hosting a fortnight’s sporting event costing, oh, £23 million an hour give or take some change. Ah yes, 2011 — we will miss you dearly. But after a canny trip to the bookies, some highly complex leveraging against future gains, and by cashing in the remnants of a pension, this column has secured a few bottles of Asti for the traditional end-of-year awards ceremony.

The great footballer Pat Nevin, as fluent, funny and intelligent an ex-player as you are likely to find, tells a wonderful story about using the word ‘equidistant’ to a referee when they were lining up a free kick. The players looked at him as if he was an alien and the referee nearly booked him for swearing. One of the reasons why, notwithstanding the manly virtues and short back and sides of Bobby Moore’s World Cup heroes, for pasty, middle-class fans like myself who grew up when a footballer with an O-level was regarded as a freak (so much so that they were all nicknamed Bamber by the newspapers), the arrival of a player like the wondrous Brazilian midfielder Socrates was heaven-sent.

Bracing times for those of us who are part of the winter fuel allowance generation — FAGs, as we like to call ourselves. At Haydock Park, the courageous Kauto Star thundered back into the national conscience with a spine-tingling win in the Betfair Chase. The 11-year-old is an equine superstar in the mould of Red Rum and Desert Orchid, and the sight of him showing his Gold Cup conquerors, Long Run and Sam Waley-Cohen, a clean pair of hindquarters can’t make Boxing Day at Kempton come soon enough. Kauto’s trainer Paul Nicholls was probably still enjoying a celebratory drink when 34-year-old Darren Lockyer, as Australian as a sweaty singlet, ended his rugby league career by captaining his country to victory over England at Elland Road.

Parental advisory: what follows contains asterisks that some may find upsetting. It is clear that Steve Williams, Tiger Woods’s former caddy, and John Terry, the hopefully soon-to-be-former captain of England, are not particularly nice men. In fact they are assholes, to use one of Williams’s favourite words. So when Williams was asked what he would do with his joke caddying award at a blokey evening in Shanghai recently he said he wanted to shove it up Woods’s ‘bl**k asshole’. Now, had he just said ‘asshole’, nobody would have given it a moment’s thought beyond observing that, my oh my, Steve Williams is just the sort of guy you want to bring home to Mum. The use of ‘bl**k’ sent his remarks into the stratosphere.

So the All Blacks deserved it, didn’t they? Yes, yes and thrice yes. But after a brilliant World Cup, and a superb final, the best and the lowest scoring in the tournament’s history, just a few thoughts. The All Blacks stretched the rules just this side of breaking point: one more high tackle or offside, and there would have been an almighty twang and the whole edifice of Eden Park would have been brought crashing down. The amount of tackling off the ball was extraordinary and the gap for the Kiwi try was created by the French jumper at the line-out being thrown out of the way. When Piri Weepu kicked the ball out for half-time, you could tell how rattled the All Blacks were. They are difficult to warm to once they resort to that low-risk, no-joy rugby of dubious legality.

Well, we’re all Welsh now. Love the country, been there loads of times, adore the Millennium Stadium, in fact I’m about as Welsh as it’s possible to be without actually being Welsh. And I will be up at 9.00 a.m. on Saturday, cheering the wonderful Wales team on. On the other hand, my mum was half French so God knows what will happen. This World Cup has been about as dazzling as you can get. To those harrumphing about the poor quality of the games against the tier two nations, just see what Tonga, conquerors of France, have to say about that. As for England, well let’s move swiftly on, though two surgically enhanced cheers for Danny Cipriani, who has had a superb World Cup. He hasn’t put a foot wrong after all.

If the cap fits… There can’t be many people who can wear a quartered and tasselled silver cricket cap without looking as if they’re searching for a Hackett window display to stand in. But New Zealand captain Richie McCaw managed it the other day in the sheeting rain at Auckland on the occasion of his 100th Test appearance in an All Black shirt. In lesser hands — or on lesser heads — the cap would have resembled an undersized miner’s hat crossed with the Wellesley House under-14s school colours, and would have guaranteed the wearer several weeks of relentless bullying. Sitting atop McCaw, it only reinforced the image of an iconic figure hewn out of some timeless cliff face.

John McEnroe, who knows a thing or two about this sort of thing, said it was one of the best shots he had ever seen. The man who played it said it was a gamble, and it clearly broke the spirit of the man who received it. It was Novak Djokovic’s return of serve at 15-40 down, when Roger Federer was serving for the match in the deciding set of their utterly compelling semi-final at Flushing Meadow. Clearly thinking he had nothing to lose, and moving into some zen state of relaxation, Djokovic launched himself at a hard, fast serve wide to his forehand and unleashed a bullet that just dipped, unplayable, inside the sideline. It was quite as sensational as Carla Bruni’s jeans in Woody Allen’s charming back-to-his-best latest, Midnight in Paris.

So the blink-and-you-miss-it summer break is over and football is back with an all-consuming vengeance. Despite the new season hardly having had time to clear its throat, it is already spewing headlines like a TV newsbar gone postal. And that is just in England. If anything can induce a breakdown among the north London chatterers, it is Arsenal being on the wrong end of an 8-2 scoreline at Old Trafford, and Manchester United’s wasn’t even the best performance of the day. That was the preserve of Manchester City, who popped down to the capital and put five past Tottenham. Fortunately that rout didn’t produce a riot, though Arsène Wenger will hope that something will divert attention from the unravelling of his vision.

If, as seems universally accepted, eggs is indeed eggs, then the only other certainty in an increasingly troubled world is that Alastair Cook will eviscerate every English batting record, apart possibly from the highest individual score. His technique, concentration and stamina are monumental; his ability to eliminate risk is awesome. Even Stuart Broad said he had to smile from the dressing room as he watched Cook elaborately leave a loose ball outside the off stump. He was on 290 at the time: dispiriting for bowlers, remarked Broad. You don’t say… The first time I became aware of Cook’s prodigious performances was in 2005 when he won the Cricket Writers’ Young Player of the Year award.

So how was it for you, The Most Extraordinary Test Match Ever? Keen readers may have noticed this column two weeks ago was in raptures over the extraordinary batting, keeping and leadership skills of the Indian captain, M.S. Dhoni. Well that went very well, didn’t it? Bad luck if you were left holding the fort in the August exodus, catching glimpses of scores on mobile phones and TV screens and asking yourself what on earth was Bell doing back at the crease? And does that really say England are on 500 for seven? And who’s that on 90 — Tim Bresnan?? Hard to do anything but stop and gawp.

Strange to be writing about sport when outside it feels like Salem, where vengeful witchfinders prowl the highways and byways of the media and political landscape looking for someone or something, anything, to burn; where screeching harpies of press and internet call for the closure of papers they don’t like; and where sanctimonious preachers declaim from their leader columns that the intolerant consensus of the left must rule.

Well, did you pick out 21-year-old Petra Kvitova for the women’s title at Wimbledon? Me neither, though it shouldn’t have been that hard. Well, did you pick out 21-year-old Petra Kvitova for the women’s title at Wimbledon? Me neither, though it shouldn’t have been that hard. She’s the world number seven, was a quarter-finalist at the Australian Open, and lost in the fourth round of the French to the eventual winner, Li Na. She was also a semi-finalist at Wimbledon last year. We have been so used to watching blank-eyed as a Williams sister grinds it out that the exceptional quality of the current women’s game has been easy to overlook.

What is it that defines the greatest sporting spectacles? Is it competition or coronation? It made you gasp as Frankel laid waste the field to win the 2000 Guineas by a mile, but watching Mickael Barzalona drive Pour Moi from last to first in the Derby and take Carlton House in the last stride of the race could make a strong man weep. What was the greater Wimbledon final — the epic between Federer and Nadal in 2008, or a massacre such as when John McEnroe destroyed the Kiwi Chris Lewis in the early 80s? Well, I know which I’d prefer to watch.