Roger Alton

Consider this: barring the intervention of an usually malevolent deity, Bath’s Matt Banahan should be playing on the wing for England during the autumn rugby internationals. Banahan is 22 years old, 6ft 7in tall, and weighs in at 253lbs, or a shade over 18st. Go back 30-odd years and there on the wing for England was Liverpool’s Mike Slemen — this was in the days when Fylde vs Preston Grasshoppers was first up on Rugby Special. Slemen then was 6ft 1in and weighed 12st 4lbs, or pretty much like a reasonably fit bloke you might see on the street today. (If all you met on the street were a race of Matt Banahans, you’d be in Gulliver’s Travels.) There’s an instructive comparison here with American Football.

Africa’s time has come You couldn’t ask for a more devoted fan of Fabio Capello than me, but thank the Lord for that over-excitable defeat in the Ukraine last weekend. While the brow-furrowed Italian has turned an underachieving bunch of good players into a remarkably high-performance Roller of an outfit, something of a Lehman-style bubble had started to grow around England. It was that much-loved canyon between expectation and achievement: England only had to set foot in the land of the khaki shorts next year and the World Cup was coming home right where it belonged.

All good things must come to an end and so, sadly, do the mind-bogglingly scandalous things. Go on, admit it. We lapped up every twist and turn of Briatore’s turbo-charged chicanery. We marvelled at the sheer ridiculousness of the day-glo ‘blood’ spouting from Tom Williams’s mouth. We hissed at football’s foul play — from diving to stamping to sprinting-the-whole-length-of-a-pitch-to-gloat-at-the-racist-gooners-gate. What a humdinger. Lob in a cameo from Ponts to get the audience booing and you’ve got the must-see panto of 2009. But scandal seems to be deserting us and filling the void come some terrific episodes of sporting virtue. You know, derring do, victory against the odds — all the stuff sport’s meant to be good at.

In a recent issue of the brilliant weekly glossy magazine produced by the French sports paper L’Equipe, there is a picture that tells you all you need to know about modern football. It shows the owner of Manchester City, Sheikh Kaldoon al-Mubarak, leaving the stadium after the home game against Wolves. He is being driven away in his Bentley; all around are the black-suited muscle. To the left are a few fans, pale, slightly plump men and women in light blue replica shirts. They are on the same page, in the same place, but light years apart. And it’s only in the context of this absurd, corrupt, narcissistic world of extremes that you can begin to understand the behaviour of City’s excitable new star Emmanuel Adebayor in their enthralling 4-2 victory last weekend.

Amid all the fake blood and thunder, car-crashing, bashing and diving that has scarred the games we love in recent days, it is time for those few of us still deluded enough to believe that sport represents the very best that life can offer to reflect on a very happy man. Well, you assume he’s happy, though it’s hard to tell. His reassuring, be-scarfed, bespectacled and unmistakeably Italian visage has already graced several Premier League grounds this season, sitting self-contained in his own sea of tranquillity and confidence. Life is currently fab for Fab, and why not? Who can’t love Fabio Capello? He’s got what for years has seemed the most difficult job in football, England team manager, and turned it into what looks like the easiest.

Well, that wasn’t too bad then. The nameless sense of dread that seizes you at the start of each football season — you know, too many overtattooed men chanting En-ger-land, too many managers bitching at refs and each other, too many twerps earning too much money — all dissipated in a few minutes of sublime passing by Arsenal. And Wayne Rooney’s start promised so much for the rest of the season, as he sets out his stall as a true World Cup winner for England. This helped to make up for Rafa Benitez’s return to form, moaning as usual, and seemingly stuck in denial of the real problem — that he’ll miss the brilliance of Xabi Alonso. It was a weekend of staggering sporting revelations.

Not since Anita Ekberg cavorted in the Trevi fountain for Fellini’s cameras nearly half a century ago has the Eternal City seen a display of sensual aquatic superstardom quite like it. Federica Pellegrini was the undoubted galactica of the World Swimming Championships, bringing the capital, and the country, to a halt when she hit the pool. She won two golds and broke two world records, to add to the eight she holds already, and she has only just turned 21.

After the Lord’s Test you have to hand it to Ricky Ponting and the boys in the Baggy Greens — they have a sense of sportsmanship that is pretty much fair dinkum. As Adam Gilchrist explains in his brilliant autobiography, True Colours, the Aussie sporting psyche takes its lead from the school playing field. That means sledging is good sport, but sending on a physio for no reason other than to let the clock tick round is just embarrassing. So all those who took pot shots at Ponting for claiming the moral high ground after the Cardiff Test can just look again at the way Punter refused to be drawn into griping about dodgy dismissals, though Lord knows he had reason to gripe.

It was when Charlie Starmer-Smith, son of England’s Nigel and no mean scrum half in his own right, pulled himself to his full height of 5ft something, peered a long way up and asked Simon Shaw, the Lions and England oak tree of a second row, whether he’d mind if he, Charlie, tried to lift him up. It was then that I realised quite how special a Lions tour is, and this one in particular. Admittedly it was 4 a.m., some alcohol had been taken, and we were in the middle of the Taboo nightclub in downtown Johannesburg where the triumphant Lions joshed, joked, chatted and posed for photos with the hundreds of fans who wanted to share the moment.

In just over a week, on the day of the Wimbledon ladies final, or if you prefer, which I do, the third test between the Lions and the Springboks in Johannesburg, 180-odd riders in the heart of Monaco will set off at intervals for the opening time-trial stage of the Tour de France. It will be a magic moment in the late-afternoon Mediterranean heat when the greatest sporting event in the world starts to roll out again. But why do we love it? Though we know that everyone is probably on drugs, why does it still retain that epic grandeur? The other day Bernhard Kohl of Austria, the disgraced rider who finished third in last year’s tour before testing positive for EPO, gave a devastating interview to L’Equipe.

For obvious nomenclatural reasons I have always followed the triumphs of Roger Federer with especial interest, as massive back-page headlines like ‘Masterful Roger Rules the World’, or ‘Is Roger the Best Ever?’ lift the spirits no end. And now only 10 days to Wimbledon and the headlines will be back again. Roger the Great clearly wants it this year, as every year. Particularly to overtake Pete Sampras’s record of 14 Grand Slam titles after he drew level with Sampras in Paris and became only the fourth player of the modern era to win all four Grand Slam titles.   Watching the French final at the weekend, you felt for poor Robin Söderling who was presumably wishing to Christ he could be anywhere else.

There’s nothing easier than betting with hindsight, but you have to say that Coral’s offer of 3-1 on the four teams in the Premiership relegation scrap — Hull, Sunderland, Boro and Newcastle — failing to win was of a generosity to make even the Commons Fees Office blanch. Sure enough they all did even worse and lost, giving every impression of playing some of the crappiest football of the season. Newcastle looked dire, and Middlesbrough have been feeble all season, no matter how nice Gareth Southgate clearly is. I suppose it is just about fair that Hull stayed up, underdogs and all that; and Sunderland deserved it because Niall Quinn is a rare shaft of light.

There’s an awful lot of ghastliness in sport: from Didier Drogba, John Terry and Michael Ballack raving at the referee (that’s the captains of Germany and England behaving like a couple of hysterical schoolgirls), to a sozzled Ledley King shouting the odds at a nightclub doorman. Or Chris Gayle coming over to lead a totally demoralised West Indies cricket team and giving every impression he would rather be anywhere else in the world; though ideally, of course, over in South Africa picking up the readies in the IPL.

I first came across Simon Clegg several years ago when he was head of the British Olympic Committee and trying to drum up media backing for an initial bid for the 2012 Games. This was in 2002-03, and the rest, as they say, is oodles of work for Zaha Hadid and one heck of a lot of JCBs in the Lea Valley. Last year he popped up in Beijing with the Beau Geste-ish title of chef de mission to the British team. He’s always struck me as an amiable and able cove, but if he were to pitch up in Suffolk, you would expect it to be as captain of the local golf club, or some such.

The good guys are having a good time right now. And it makes a change from the usual headline-makers. Look at Chelsea. Hiddink and the formidable Michael Essien apart, John Terry’s men are all steely-eyed, humourless ambition — it’s difficult to warm to them. And the McLaren racing team — ferocious, implacable in their resolve, so ruthless they think nothing of spying and lying. Just as hard to like, despite the obvious charm of Lewis Hamilton. So let’s celebrate nice things happening to some unlikely people.

Right now in the States there’s a televised event they call the Mega March Madness. Right now in the States there’s a televised event they call the Mega March Madness. This is the college basketball play-offs, and the eight nightly games are all played simultaneously. So if you go into a bar anywhere from Hoboken to Hawaii, from Manhattan to Monterey you can take your pick from eight screens to watch with your Bud. Or all at the same time. And it’s looking like next week’s Masters will be golf’s equivalent to the Mega Madness. Sport has many heralds of spring — but nothing makes you get that endorphin rush quite like the first sighting of the bougainvilleas at Augusta National.

Soccer’s suits will be in Nyon, Switzerland on Friday pulling out the balls for the final stages of the European Football competitions and I confess I’m looking forward to it with a nameless sense of dread, as American Psycho Patrick Bateman observed. Soccer’s suits will be in Nyon, Switzerland on Friday pulling out the balls for the final stages of the European Football competitions and I confess I’m looking forward to it with a nameless sense of dread, as American Psycho Patrick Bateman observed. I’ll be hoping that Barcelona and Bayern Munich manage to avoid the same old quartet of English clubs that squat over the later stages of the Champions League these days like the baleful spaceship in Independence Day.

So the war on terror is over is it? Or so we’re told by everyone from David Miliband, scuttling to put distance between himself and his former allies in Washington, to assorted senior spooks, gallantly trying to cover their backs. Even the saintly Barack has indicated that talk of ‘war on terror’ is dangerous.

A damned fine spell A few of us had a small dinner the other day to thank Angus Fraser for his distinguished stint as the Independent’s cricket correspondent. Not quite reeling off 45 overs from the Nursery End, but a damned fine spell anyway. The evening was, as such occasions should be, wine-fuelled, good-humoured and jam-packed with cracking stories, most of them unrepeatable. Gus was one of those remarkable players who just stepped over the boundary ropes when they finished their career in the first-class game and then, seemingly effortlessly, took up a career as a first-class journalist (think Mike Atherton of the Times, the Telegraph’s Derek Pringle, or the Guardian’s Mike Selvey).

What treats await this weekend. An England Test match in the Caribbean; a north London derby in the increasingly fractious Premier League; and, joy of joys, at long last the Six Nations is back with three succulent games. There’s always an extra tang when rugby’s European showcase is also the selection process for a summer Lions’ tour. Long gone are the days when England felt they had a God-given right to the pick of places on any flight to the southern hemisphere — now they might not have a single man in the starting XV against South Africa. All the more reason why the highlight of the coming week will be England taking on Italy. Anyone who cares for rugby badly needs the Azzurri to do well.