Roger Alton

There are few better feelings than the sporting mood swing that takes place at this time of year. The clocks go forward and leave behind frozen pitches, abandoned race meetings and the set menu of men chasing balls of varying shapes in fixtures of no relevance. Now is when things start to matter. Defeat at rugby or football can be season-defining, a knockout blow, a pack-up-and-go-home moment. That’s real sport, the kind that matters because the hurt from losing takes time to heal. There is no denying the appeal of the sharp end of the Champions League and Heineken Cup, but beyond lies a sporting summer of wonderful variety.

There was an advert recently on Italian TV when four vast but genial blokes filled the screen extolling the virtues of an unspecified product, before the camera pulled back to reveal they were all Italian rugby forwards and squeezed shoulder to shoulder inside a minute Fiat. The ad was pleasing for a number of reasons, not least the sight of half a ton of grinning humanity crammed into a tiny space. But I particularly liked it because it seemed to show that Italian rugby was becoming part of mainstream Italian culture, like football, food and Fellini. Like anyone with a modicum of humanity, I am continually wrestling with the eternal conundrum of whether Italy or the game of rugby has contributed more to civilisation.

First an apology: in common with commentators, pundits and blowhards across the land this column may well have given the impression that it viewed the cricket World Cup as a preposterously overblown farrago of money-making and greed, built around a tired format and symptomatic of the corrupt and decadent way most major sports are run. About as appetising in fact as a John Galliano lecture on the Talmud. However, in retrospect, it seems clear that the tournament is in fact a canvas for some of the most exciting cricket ever played, allowing the world’s best players to showcase their talent at will, and in a vibrant, multi-layered format demanding exquisite captaincy skills and all-round athleticism. Is that clear?

Celebrations — not just an egregious though annoyingly addictive form of mini-confectionery, but the single hottest topic in sport. Celebrations — not just an egregious though annoyingly addictive form of mini-confectionery, but the single hottest topic in sport. This journal’s team of volunteers stationed along the touchlines of the nation’s football pitches report with sadness that nowadays schoolkids would much rather practise their goal-scoring celebrations than, say, trying to win the ball, pass it or even dribble it. Or possibly score goals. Hence the sight of youngsters rushing to the corner flag in the wider outposts of Hackney Marshes to practise rocking their babies, or breakdancing, or shushing opposing parents with a finger to the lips.

The cricketer Chris Cowdrey tells a charming and self-deprecating story about his one match as captain of England. It was at Headingley in 1988 in the fourth Test against the all-conquering West Indies. They had won ten of their last 11 Tests, and had not lost a series since 1980. They wouldn’t lose a series until 1995: it was probably the most powerful and successful team in any sport. Ever. The cricketer Chris Cowdrey tells a charming and self-deprecating story about his one match as captain of England. It was at Headingley in 1988 in the fourth Test against the all-conquering West Indies. They had won ten of their last 11 Tests, and had not lost a series since 1980.

The annual Ferrari junket to Madonna di Campiglio in the Italian Alps last week is, understandably, regarded by motor-racing journalists as the king of freebies. Expect a whole slew of sports stories about the new Formula One season, which roars off in a few weeks in Bahrain. But, in truth, 2011 has a fair bit to live up to. There was an excellent narrative last year as the championship battle went to the wire in Abu Dhabi with four drivers still in the hunt. The season might have been a thriller but it was still very apparent that modern grand prix racing cars aren’t very good at their core purpose: racing. So this year, a lot of very rich men will be crossing their fingers that the on-track show will have improved.

It seems churlish to be having a bitch just when two enthralling Test series are being played out in Australia and South Africa. And how enthralling they are too, by the way, the SA-India series being if anything even better than the Ashes. The sight of South African bowlers really having a go at Indian batsmen is the most pulsating drama in world cricket. And as for the Ashes, wasn’t England’s 517-1 declared one of the most astounding stats from last year? And that was scored not in Chittagong or Bulawayo, but in Brisbane against the Aussies. It’s a score that properly belongs in a battered Wisden from the 1930s.

So here’s a thing: if Fifa is so bloody venal and corrupt, then why on earth did England ever have anything to do with it? If much of its activity is spent lumbering poor regions of the earth with a vast web of unaffordable stadiums and expensive infrastructure before disappearing with billions of untaxed income, then why has there been such a howl of outrage that England wasn’t allowed to join in? And if they’re all so ‘buyable’, to use Andy Anson’s word, why did we send a prince among men, not to mention Prince William and the Prime Minister, to grovel before it?

Quite how much tawdrier the plotting and deal-making for the 2018 football World Cup could become it is hard to imagine, and how appropriate that not just Sepp Blatter but officials at England’s campaign are so keen to denounce the devastating Sunday Times investigation into Fifa corruption. Quite how much tawdrier the plotting and deal-making for the 2018 football World Cup could become it is hard to imagine, and how appropriate that not just Sepp Blatter but officials at England’s campaign are so keen to denounce the devastating Sunday Times investigation into Fifa corruption. No, the only World Cup that matters for England is the 15-man game due to kick off in ten months in Auckland. And eight years after Sydney, English hearts should be pumping that bit harder.

Never an easy team to like, Chelsea. For all but the most devoted, in a match between Chelsea and the Iranian Secret Police it would be a tough one who to support: well, maybe not. Come on you Muhabarat. But something strange is going on in west London: Roman’s centurions are becoming admirable, even likeable. As much as anything, that’s down to one engaging guy, their manager, Carlo Ancelotti. After last weekend’s defeat at Anfield, he didn’t blame anybody, he didn’t moan about his players (hello, Arsène), he just gave fulsome praise to Fernando Torres and the Liverpool defence who stood up to a major second-half battering. Never an easy team to like, Chelsea.

Andy Anson and Simon Greenberg are two splendid, clubbable chaps. Their current gig is running England’s bid to host the 2018 World Cup, and forgive me for sounding disloyal but I hope these two delightful fellows find themselves disappointed when Fifa votes on the 2018 and 2022 bids in early December. Andy Anson and Simon Greenberg are two splendid, clubbable chaps. Their current gig is running England’s bid to host the 2018 World Cup, and forgive me for sounding disloyal but I hope these two delightful fellows find themselves disappointed when Fifa votes on the 2018 and 2022 bids in early December. Because one thing England certainly doesn’t need is the World Cup in 2018. What is this bid all about?

Roger Alton reviews the week in Sport How depressing, and poignant, to hear Danny Cipriani talking at the weekend about his imminent departure to join his new rugby team Down Under, the Melbourne Rebels — one of the country’s most gifted fly-halfs is heading away just when England is really short of quality at No 10. And all because the blazers at Twickenham axed a real coach in Brian Ashton (that’s a coach who makes you a better player once you start working with him) and decided to get someone famous, whether or not he was any good at coaching. And as Danny Cip recognises, the team now running England don’t want him (and why? Because, I guess, he got in the papers a bit, and upset Brian Moore).

People who think that life is always about money will have a hard job explaining the Ryder Cup. Top golfers earn serious cash these days, and fairly so-so golfers do too. But once every two years they play for nothing; nothing, that is, beyond the honour of winning. If you think that all sportsmen care about is the cheque, just ask Paul Casey how he feels about being left out of the European team. The Ryder Cup also lies at the heart of the mysterious career of Colin Montgomerie, Europe’s captain this year. It’s his ninth biennial biff at the Americans, but his first when he’s not been playing. Make no mistake, Mrs Doubtfire has a phenomenal playing record: he’s never lost a singles match, not one.

What with all the whoring, coke-snorting and match-fixing, it has been a tricky few weeks for those of us, ahem, who look to sport for moral guidance. Incidentally, it’s worth remembering that all those stories which, quite rightly, have set huge waves rolling across the news and sport agenda appeared in the News of the World, a paper that has come under heavy fire recently — though if you listen closely you can hear the squeal of axes being ground. So keep in mind that without papers such as the Screws, some very dodgy people will continue to get away with some very dodgy deeds. As Donald Trelford, the former Observer editor, pointed out, this sort of journalism is sometimes described as ‘muck-raking’. MPs use the term disparagingly.

When the South African captain Hansie Cronje was accused of match-fixing ten years ago — the beginning of cricket’s current crisis — the overwhelming reaction was shock, even disbelief. We clung to the hope (at best) that the whole story might be fabricated, or (at least) that Cronje was a rare rogue in an otherwise honest game (well, give or take the odd exercise in conning the umpire). How innocent that reaction seems today. The match-fixing allegations made about Pakistan on the Sunday morning of the Lord’s Test match prompted deep sadness but not disbelief. That illegal gamblers use compliant professional cricketers to fix parts of cricket matches for corrupt spot betting no longer shocks us. It’s much worse than that.

There’s a chant they sing at Anfield to the tune of Yellow Submarine — ‘We all dream of a team of Carraghers...’. And so they should. The doughty old Scouser has emerged as something of a hero. There was his gift of £10,000 to Andy Burnham’s Labour leadership campaign, one of the most startling acts of political activism since Robbie Fowler showed his ‘I support the Dockers’ T-shirt. Carragher ended his international ‘retirement’ to turn out for England and Fabio Capello in the World Cup, so his gift shows that his appetite for lost causes is undiminished. Even more surprising, and engaging, was his warmth towards the England manager. Everyone has been lining up to give the Italian a bashing, but not Jamie Carragher.

Well, at least one Rooney did well this summer. That’s Martyn of course, one of the second tier of Britain’s medal winners at the European Athletics Championships who played a blinder to pick up an individual bronze and a relay silver in the 400 metres. The meeting was a simply glorious celebration of multi-ethnic harmony in Barcelona that was more or less enough to lift the nameless sense of dread that assails the soul at the prospect of a new football season.  Interviewed in a pair of mock giant black-rimmed glasses, Rooney explained that the whole team wore them one day as a tribute to their Dutch coach Charles van Commenee, who, said Rooney, found it all a bit of a giggle.

Quite the best piece about any sport you’re likely to read in a long time is a vibrant profile of Roger Federer in the New Yorker the other day by the octogenarian art critic Calvin Tomkins. In the course of it the Fed observes: ‘The problem with experience is that you become content with playing it safe. I have to push myself to stay dangerous, like a junior player — to play free tennis, but with the mental stability of an older player.’ Before the World Cup Bayern Munich’s Thomas Müller had won just two caps for Germany, Werder Bremen’s Mesut Özil had made five appearances for his country, as had his fellow midfielder Sami Khedira.

The veteran Himalayan mountaineer (70 next year) and now indefatigable fundraiser for his Nepalese charity, Doug Scott, held a packed audience spellbound at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington last week describing the moment he was swept from west ridge of K2, second only to Everest in height but far more dangerous. ‘I thought, this is the first time I have been in an avalanche,’ he said. ‘And then I thought, I am going to die.’ He added he felt very serene. Scott had already endured the world’s highest bivouac, without tent or sleeping bag, just below the summit of Everest, and the year before in Pakistan’s Karakoram crawled down the Ogre with two broken legs. So he’s not a man to take lightly.