Roger Alton

So the end is near... or it certainly will be soon if England’s rugby players carry on trying to do it their way. One thing we can be certain about: England are not going to win the World Cup. There is a chance they might not get out of their group; Argentina are properly good and Samoa will be hard to beat. Even Japan could give England the run-around, though they are not the team they were. At this rate, England might finish up even lower than eighth – their current position in the rankings – come the end of the tournament. Time for rugby’s answer to ‘Bazball’. Not to go and smash everything and everyone they see, but to play with freedom and joy. Pass the ball, look for space, play tricks, play fast, play without a care in the world.

And they said Test cricket was in its death throes! This epic, attention-grabbing, emotion-wringing Ashes series ended in the last minutes of the last hour of the last session of the last day of the last match: who could ask for more? England have had a number of very good captains since Mike Brearley took voluntary redundancy from the job (for the second time) in 1981, but Ben Stokes has really measured up to his illustrious predecessor over the past six weeks of mesmerising sport. They are cut from very different cloth: Stokes is more intuitive than Brearley, who was perhaps more cerebrally attuned to the needs of leadership.

Great sport needs great rivalries, and that is why anyone with a pulse must celebrate being in the throes of an unrivalled confluence of extraordinary sporting occasions right now. As commentators grind on about what a bad place the world is in – ignoring the far worse places the world has been in over the years – a few hours spent watching the magnificent Wimbledon final between Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic is just the sort of high-octane thriller we all need, as well as a ringing endorsement of the qualities of man.

Shouldn’t we all just calm down a bit after Lord’s? Once prime ministers decide to intervene, you know things have gone too far. Rishi Sunak has made it clear he wouldn’t want to win a match that way apparently, which feels very much like Tony Blair’s decision to wade into the case of Corrie’s jailed heroine Deirdre Barlow. Mark you, that really was important. So… was Jonny Bairstow out after being stumped by sharp-eyed Australian keeper Alex Carey? Undoubtedly. Should the Australians have withdrawn their appeal? Possibly, because Bairstow had good reason to think the over was finished when he moved out of his ground.

It’s a long way from Edgbaston to Karachi, but that’s where my thoughts were turning after Australia’s last-gasp victory in an unbearably tense, always thrilling, wonderful Ashes Test on Tuesday. Ominously for England, Australia’s three best batsmen, and the three best in the world, misfired simultaneously over five days. But they still managed to win. Oh well… Anyway, we were at the Sind Club ground on a cricket tour to Pakistan. It hadn’t been that long since the Sri Lankans had been shot up in Lahore so there was still a bristling police presence at our game, reassuringly unsmiling blokes wielding very large submachine guns.

If you couldn’t watch the Europa League final between Sevilla and Roma, then you should count yourself fortunate. It was a nasty, bitter and forgettable excursion, blighted by fouls and time-wasting, that should make anyone connected with it ashamed, apart from the doughty English referee Anthony Taylor, who had a fairly good game. But for the players, 13 of whom were booked; the managers, especially José Mourinho, who had a shocker, shouting and cursing at all the officials; and Uefa itself, which did nothing to protect Taylor from being abused by a foul-mouthed mob who hurled a chair at him as he prepared to leave with his family from Budapest airport.

It’s not clear how many readers of this journal will be affected, but anyone planning a stag weekend in Prague ought to steer clear of the first week of June. That’s when the city hosts the Uefa Conference League final at the 20,000-capacity Eden Arena, home to Slavia Prague. The finalists are West Ham – average home gate a 60,000 sellout – and Fiorentina, average gate 25-30,000. Which raises the question: is Uefa just utterly useless or is it worse than that? This game could have filled Wembley twice over; now it’s like holding the coronation in a parish church Both finalists have been allocated 5,000-odd tickets, with the remainder going to assorted sponsors and what is laughably known as the ‘Uefa family’. This is insane.

Who can turn lying on a hospital gurney into a photo op? Emma Raducanu can, of course – beaming as she showed off her bandaged wrist and arm, in a photo of such quality it didn’t look like it was snapped by a passing nurse’s iPhone. It left me with a renewed sense of foreboding about Raducanu’s future in tennis. The tennis prodigy, who won the US Open two years ago, is super--talented and a wonderful athlete, but her 10,000 hours of practice must be receding into the background. That is the amount of time, Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book Outliers, that in the upper realms of excellence marks out the consistently high achiever. It applies no matter who you are, Gladwell writes: neither Mozart nor the chess great Bobby Fischer would have made it without putting in those hours.

What’s not to love about David de Gea? Manchester United’s goalkeeper might appear to have it all: a humongous salary, a lovely family, a sensationally beautiful wife, Edurne Garcia, who is a star in her own right in Spain, and a pleasing ability to behave like a complete berk. He is a mix of utter brilliance and complete rubbish. On Sunday, de Gea went the wrong way every time before Solly March shot over the top  Last week he made a series of terrible errors, backed up by a woeful Harry Maguire, to gift Sevilla a Europa League tie that United should have won quite easily. Then at the weekend he was magnificent in the FA Cup semi-final, keeping United in a game that Brighton should have won. But wait, he can’t save penalties!

It would take a brave man to pick a fight with Roy Keane, and nobody could quarrel with his view of Liverpool’s Scotland fullback Andy Robertson after a skirmish at Anfield. Robertson appeared to be feebly elbowed in the face as he approached linesman Constantine Hatzidakis at half time. The Scotland captain reacted in the traditional way, as if he had been waterboarded. Keane’s view was as ever imperious: ‘You know what he is that Robertson? I’ve watched him a number of times – he’s a big baby.’ If a linesman can’t smack Andy Robertson for getting handsy and lippy, then the game has gone Anyone who has ever seen Liverpool should be all in favour of referees’ assistants sticking one on Robertson every now and again. Karma or what!

It’s been quite a while since we celebrated any of Sharron Davies’s considerable achievements in the pool – well, a bronze and a silver in 1990 at Auckland was the last time – but I would bet a box full of brand-new Speedos to a secondhand pair of goggles that nothing has made her prouder than her part in World Athletics’ decision to ban transgender women from competing in female international events. She has campaigned for this for years with great courage and at considerable cost. Without her energy and bravery, it is possible that Seb Coe could have fudged the solution announced last week, when he ruled that he was following swimming and rugby rather than cycling and rowing, and there was no fair way to include transgender athletes in elite women’s sport.

Rejoice, as you don’t normally say after a hammering like the peerless French dished out to England at Twickenham. But looking on the bright side, at last English rugby knows its place, and it’s not pretty. The consensus in the hospitality lounges appeared to be that it was all Eddie Jones’s fault, though that feels a bit unfair to me. But hey ho, the darkest hour before the dawn and all that. And you can learn more from defeat than victory… fingers crossed. What we can see is that France and Ireland are in a different league, with Scotland close behind. Certain players, poor Jack van Poortvliet at scrum-half, and Alex Dombrandt in a hopelessly outclassed back row, should go back to their clubs.

Readers of a certain vintage might be familiar with the work of J.A. (Charles) Cuddon, a teacher at Emanuel School in London and author of the Macmillan Dictionary of Sport and Games, which ran to some two million words of mostly exquisite prose. This is how he started his entry on cricket: ‘Cricket is a bat and ball game for 11 players, the object of which is to score more runs than the opposing team. Less prosaically it is the High Mass of sport, a sacrificial devotion to the gods of skill and chance, the most complete and arcane devotion yet devised by man.’ For anyone inclined to question that definition, the almost unbearably thrilling New Zealand-England Test match that finished in the small hours on Tuesday would have answered their doubts.

The first two rounds of the Six Nations have exploded across the sporting landscape insuperlative - draining displays of skill and power. But still the England Rugby Union team is as baffling as Fermat’s Last Theorem. Why is it that a nation with resources other countries can only dream of performs so fitfully? How come England can produce a coach in charge of the world’s top nation – but that nation isn’t England? The England result against Italy looked good on paper, especially when compared with Italy’s narrow defeat by France, but closer analysis isn’t so encouraging. Especially worrying are the 40 tackles missed by England, a detail that if not improved upon will almost certainly result in crushing defeats by Ireland and France.

So should he stay or should he go? That’s Eddie ‘I don’t really care what other people think’ Jones, currently ruling the roost over England rugby at Twickenham. Though for how long is another matter. Clearly the language around Jones is changing: the announcement of a review of England’s dismal recent performances very clearly avoided any of the usual ‘We stand right behind the coach’ and ‘We are pleased with the team’s steady progress’ guff that normally sugarcoats such statements. The review of course is largely anonymous, in keeping with English rugby’s characteristic transparency.