Roger Alton

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.

The wonder horse Every so often a sportsman comes along of such supreme brilliance you can only watch and admire. Ian Botham was one — he could shut down offices when he went out to bat; so was George Best for a few wondrous years; Pele too; Roger Federer in his golden years when no one could come near him; Borg as well, cold and mysterious; Usain Bolt, who can destroy the best sprinters in the world in a few metres. Bradman by all accounts. They are sportsmen who can’t be explained in any normal way. Now we have one more great athlete, though this time with four legs. If you haven’t seen Master Minded, the six-year-old French-bred bay gelding trained by National Hunt maestro Paul Nicholls, then you’re missing one of the wonders of the world.

Cricket’s ‘golden age’ You have to hand it to Kevin Pietersen. He’s certainly got chutzpah — or should that be a death wish? Just when you might think he’d be happy, having finally won the battle to take part in the Indian Premier League, he’s gone and started another fight, but this time it was one he was going to lose. There are two ways of viewing his bloody and shambolic feud with Peter Moores, the England coach (sorry, make that the former England coach), that’s ended with all the main players lying dead, centre stage. One is that Pietersen’s a natural born winner, a man who will stop at nothing in taking his side to victory, and that with the Ashes coming down the track, he just wanted what’s best.

Without the hysteria-inducing presence of a World Cup, 2008 has been a year in which countless other major and minor sports have flourished. It has been a year of immense sporting achievement — thrills, excitements and real courage, with a series of ‘That Was the Best Ever...’ moments hurtling by, one after the other, like dominoes. I can’t think of a year like it. And the key to it all, the glory of great sport, is that you just didn’t have a clue what was going to happen from one minute to the next. When Sean Connery was asked if anything made him cry, he replied ‘Athletics’. And you can understand why: the great man, like most of us, would have needed emergency supplies of the Extra-Strength this Olympic year.

There’s got to be some direct relationship these days between the bad behaviour of the Twickenham crowd and the feebleness of the English team. When the Twickers faithful launched into an insanely enthusiastic rendition of ‘Swing Low’ as the All Blacks went into the haka last weekend, you knew there was trouble in store. The haka should happen in relative silence, just like the national anthems — though the crowd has taken to booing them as well. Do the Twickers massive think their borrowed slave song has greater resonance than the utterly authentic haka? As the Barbour and hip-flask brigade trundled back to the shires on Saturday evening, they might have thought it wasn’t such a good idea to irritate the All Blacks.

This wisdom of crowds stuff has always seemed a bit double-edged: for every silent and courageous candlelit throng gathering outside the cathedral in Leipzig in the 1980s before eventually bringing down the Berlin Wall, there are always far more examples like the braying boo-boys at Twickenham last weekend doing their bit to damage our reputation for sportsmanship. But if Britons have been collectively enlightened and witty enough to vote in their thousands, week after week, to keep John Sergeant in what is after all a dancing contest, not a political reporting contest, then let’s hope that the people mobilise once again in the name of a different cause: ensuring that Rebecca Adlington, and not Lewis Hamilton, wins the BBC Sports Personality of the Year.

Kevin Pietersen was peculiarly charmless, even by his own high standards, shortly after leading England to one of their most abject performances in any form of cricket in the Stanford 20/20 match. Did he mention how well Sir Allen Stanford’s West Indian team, an adept mix of old sweats and feisty tyros, had played as they whopped England? Not a word. He didn’t mention that the Stanford team had outbowled, outcaught, outfielded and out-thought England at every stage. This series has brought out some of the worst in grumpy English sportsmanship. Talking to the press after the game, Pietersen said: ‘We concentrated too much on the peripherals... There were just a lot of distractions... Coming into this week there was huge, huge uncertainty.

It’s showbiz As anyone with an unhealthy addiction to Saturday Night Live and presidential debates can tell you, Americans stage a contest like no one else. And that doesn’t just apply to the race for the White House. So if you find yourself in the mood for a slice of Uncle Sam as an election curtain-raiser this weekend, tune in to the American football. Or — if you can swing yourself a ticket somehow — go to Wembley and see for yourself. The NFL is coming to London, with the San Diego Chargers taking on the New Orleans Saints on Sunday. It will be a perfectly packaged event too, four hours of banging entertainment: that’s what the Yanks do so well.

Reasons to be cheerful The evenings are getting darker, someone called Libor has nicked all our money, and Scarlett Johansson’s got married. There’s little to smile about. So in a spirit of pro bono here are some reasons to be cheerful. For starters, rugby is becoming absolutely fantastic. Not quite the new football, but I wish. With a packed crowd in the purpose-built stadiums at Worcester, Leicester or Northampton you get a better atmosphere than at Old Trafford with a quarter of the numbers. The standard of the top games is awesome, and with someone like Dan Carter at Perpignan you can see the best players in the world on tap. And this weekend the superlative Heineken Cup gets going.