Roger Alton

If you think the Calcutta Cup is just any old rugby match between England and Scotland, then the latest in BT Sport’s fine series of documentaries should put you straight. It’s called The Grudge and is about the 1990 Calcutta Cup, the climax to the Five Nations with everything at stake for the first and only time: the Grand Slam, the Triple Crown, the Championship and the Cup itself. The film is narrated by the actor Robert Carlyle, so not entirely unsympathetic to the men of Scotland. Craig Chalmers, looking slightly less boyish these days, chews the fat with Peter Winterbottom, who still looks like someone you wouldn’t relish packing down against. Flanker John Jeffrey sits on his Land Rover on his Borders farmland reminiscing while an amiable cow wanders by.

Something is happening here, and you do know what it is, don’t you Mr Jones? Stargazers – and even some more grounded folk – reckon it’s written in the heavens: that the team Eddie Jones was supposed to have been coaching will meet the team he will be coaching in the rugby world cup final on Saturday 28 October in the Stade de France in Paris. Jones, jilted last month after a seven-year relationship with England, the team he was preparing for the tournament that starts in France on 8 September, has this week been welcomed back into the arms of his former flame, Australia (also the nation of his birth), with whom he enjoyed a four-year partnership from 2001-5.

Norwich City are a likeable club, and currently run by a pleasant-seeming bloke called Allan Russell. He used to be the club’s ‘setpiece coach’, whose claim to fame was that he was working with the England squad in 2018 when they scored against the mighty Panama. Good for him, of course, but has football become too dependent on the ever-expanding phalanx of managerial officials now filling up the bench at every game under the sun? Is the beautiful game losing sight of what really matters? After all, this might be a world where a championship side can have a setpiece coach, but it is also a world where Pele had to flog his medals to get by. People tended to scoff at the fair play award won by England in Qatar. But why?

Few sights in the history of cricket have been more thrilling – or more terrifying for batsmen – than the great West Indian fast bowler Wes Hall coming in off his 30-yard run. He is now Sir Wesley, and frail at 85, but still as forthright and impressive as ever. I was privileged to be able to speak to Sir Wesley the other day (for the Oborne & Heller on Cricket podcast) and it was as thrilling as watching him play in the 1960s when I was growing up. He is a glorious figure, a man of adamantine integrity, total sportsmanship and unbreakable moral values, and a reminder, like Frank Worrell and Clyde Walcott, of a golden age of the great traditions of cricket culture.

When the burly honchos of the Rugby League World Cup gushed about taking the game to new heights, no one was actually thinking about the Golan Heights – but that’s where we are. What sounds like a fascinating quarter--final takes place on Friday (as I write) when the dominant team in global rugby league, Australia, take on Lebanon in Huddersfield – the birthplace of the game. Amid the blizzard of sporting world cups currently taking place across the globe, this match has it all. The Lebanese team, known as the Cedars, are coached by Australian Michael Cheika, one of the world’s most eminent coaches and a former boss of the Wallabies’ rugby union side. That’s an awful lot of rugby in the mix already.

Make no mistake: the game of rugby, which many of us love so much, is in serious trouble: it will have to change or die. The game’s scarily existential issue on the field – especially the brain health of those who play it – is one thing. But what is going on inside the heads of those who run the sport? The financial clouds hovering over English rugby are as menacing as Billy Vunipola coming on to the ball at full speed from the back of the scrum. Worcester Warriors are just the start: Wasps are in trouble, and Bristol could be next. There will be more. Only Leicester, Northampton and Harlequins seem out of the woods. Too much money is going out from the clubs and not enough coming back in. It’s as simple as that.

Don’t bother watching those gazillion-dollar TV prequels to The Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones. Who needs gratuitous nudity, multiple dragons and surprise beheadings when the real Nordic legend is bang in front of us, his mighty frame squeezed into the light blue of Manchester City and devouring the grass of the Etihad? (Though not literally, yet.) He is an outlandish--looking creature from the far north, clearly designed by some dotty scientist, faster, bigger, stronger and more ruthless than anyone else in football and effortlessly leaping higher too. Quick to smile, often at awkward moments, he moves effortlessly with that curious stiff-armed gait as he outruns everyone else on the pitch.

So farewell to cricket’s The Hundred tournament, or what seemed by the end to be beefy South Africans in ‘Butterkist’ shirts belting sixes over cow corner off some fairly inoffensive county seamers. Does anyone remember a single result? Or really have any loyalty? Fine, have it as a marketing exercise to raise a few quid for the game, but there aren’t enough great players. It felt a bit like some upgraded pub cricket – and it’s going to be with us for years. What could be massively more significant for the game in the long term is over the Atlantic, where the former England star Liam Plunkett is one of many former players attached to a new £100 million plan for a professional T20 league in America next summer, in six big cities.

British tennis fans famously only acknowledge the sport exists for a couple of weeks in the middle of summer in SW19. But they ought to think about changing the habit of a lifetime over the next couple of weeks, as Emma Raducanu prepares to defend her US Open title at Flushing Meadows. It’s been a dizzying year for Bromley’s best. Her journey from star-struck ingenue when she went to New York a year ago to her arrival back there this week as the champion and the face of a thousand magazine covers must have felt like a rocket ride to the Milky Way. But now she has to prove herself all over again. Since winning the US Open a year ago at just 18, she has failed to win another singles title and has won just 12 matches out of 28 on the WTA tour.

Well alleluia, English cricket doesn’t seem able to put a foot wrong these days. After hitting three cherries with Rob Key, Brendon McCullum and Ben ‘Bazball’ Stokes, they may well have struck the jackpot with the appointment of Richard Thompson, the Surrey chairman, to take over as head of the English Cricket Board, something this column has long advocated. Thompson has plenty going for him: uniquely perhaps among the game’s administrators he is both traditional and forward thinking. Traditional enough to have realised the Texan conman ‘Sir’ Allen Stanford, with his million-quid pile of money on the Lord’s outfield, was a wrong-un.

Are petrolheads’ days numbered? I only ask because having just been introduced to the quiet, petrol-less world of Formula E, I’m rather taken by it. Apart from anything else, part of the fun of spectating is making your feelings heard, which isn’t easy against the 130 decibels generated by F1 engines. The Formula E world championship arrives in London’s Docklands this weekend, weaving in and out of the ExCeL for races 13 and 14 of the season. That’s ‘E’ as in electric and plainly non-fossil fuel motoring is the future, though how soon isn’t clear. Formula E people think single-seat racing is a good way to promote it, and once you see a race you have to agree.