Roger Alton

Sport and politics have always been intertwined, but this was the year they became joined at the hip. Yorkshire racism; the growing protests about China’s sportwashing at the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022; anger about the Saudi takeover of Newcastle United; and the long-simmering anxiety about the Qatar World Cup. And with it, growing and very welcome, activism from sports-people: Lewis Hamilton’s rainbow helmet for gay rights in Saudi Arabia, Marcus Rashford’s indefatigable campaigning over child deprivation, and Michael Holding’s powerful interventions over everyday racism.

The good citizens of Stevenage would be well advised to prepare extensively for the likely open-top bus parade of their most famous citizen should Lewis Hamilton clinch his position as the best -Formula 1 driver in the world (ever) this weekend in Abu Dhabi. Because it could take some time. The Hertfordshire new town is a pleasant enough place, but it’s adorned with enough mini-roundabouts and dual carriageways to give even the most assiduous bus parade driver seizures. Still, if ever the extravagantly tonsured motor-racing ace deserved homage from his home town, it would be if he wins the 2021 driver championship.

Manchester United have ended up with a temporary coach before they look for an interim manager. Haven’t we heard that before? Oh yes, a few years ago, shortly before Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was given the job. It sounds like United haven’t got a clue what they are doing. Which is a bit rum for a stock-market-listed club and one of the biggest brands in the world. Poor old Ole just wasn’t cut out to be an elite football manager. But could anyone cope with the presence of that choleric United legend, Sir Alex Ferguson, up in the stands shaking his head mournfully at some on-field idiocy before burying his head in his hands in a piece of theatrical despair?

The new chairman of Yorkshire County Cricket Club played a blinder in his first innings, consistently hitting the boundary and finding a settlement to defuse the troubling allegations made by the county’s former player Azeem Rafiq. It’s a pity he wasn’t moved up the order earlier, as Yorkshire’s performance in the storm over allegations of racism has been truly dreadful. Cricket really needs to move beyond this as pretty soon a significant minority of the England team will be of Asian origin. Yorkshire was always a players’ county, seeing itself as a plain-speaking republic. But speaking as you find has its drawbacks, as does ‘banter’. Complaints about other counties are coming down the tracks.

Not so much the hair dryer: more a gentle home perm. Contemplating the increasingly less youthful visage of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer as he looked on powerlessly while his very expensive Manchester United side were dismembered by Liverpool, you couldn’t help wonder what Sir Alex Ferguson, glowering and irascible in the stands above, would have done with those players. He would certainly have got something more out of the infantile and malicious Paul Pogba, sent off for a mean tackle which betrayed his manager and his teammates. But as Solskjaer was clearly a Ferguson appointment, shouldn’t the old bully take a share of the responsibility? With a weak board and a weak chief executive, Sir Alex is still hugely influential: he could make things very tricky for whoever comes in.

Could rugby union get any better? The entertainment in the Premiership is breathtaking and the overall product as good as any you get in sport. But why is it not more widely loved? If you missed Harlequins’ epic comeback (where have we heard that before?) against Bristol last week, deepest sympathies of course, but do your best to savour any of Quins’ sensational tries. It was Marcus Smith’s in the 72nd minute that did it.

Any English person with a love of cricket knows life has its ups and downs. But until now we have had no need to feel truly ashamed. The decision by England to scrap a mini-tour of Pakistan feels like one of those watershed moments from which any reputation for fair play will never recover. The men’s tour would have been four or five days at most, to play a couple of T20s. It’s hardly a trek across the Antarctic. And this against Pakistan, a country which, more than any, needs international cricket at home. And a country which bailed England out last year, when Britain was in the grip of Covid, by playing a series of Test matches that did so much to keep the game alive. Now we can’t be bothered to honour an agreement to pay a brief visit there. It is a disgrace.

Not many people would have seen that coming. I’m talking of course of last Saturday evening and the women’s final at the US Open. Who would have guessed what the lady did next? She sat down and wrote Emma Raducanu a letter. OK, it probably wasn’t the Queen who wrote it. Some flunky would have done that, and then the message was rolled out once the Bromley biffer had nailed Leylah Fernandez with a crisp service ace way beyond the bemused and increasingly tetchy Canadian’s forehand. Raducanu is such a charmer, she even managed to slip in a nod to the LTA The establishment took a long time to acknowledge the feats of sportsmen and, more especially, of sportswomen.

Forgive the personal question, but how long does it take you to, you know, go to the gents, ladies, non-binary? Quite what Stefanos Tsitsipas was doing in there in any of his numerous toilet breaks during the epic first-round US Open encounter with Andy Murray at Flushing (geddit?) Meadows is anybody’s guess. It clearly riled Murray — never the hardest thing to do — who was playing as well as ever, and is the ironman, quite literally, of Grand Slam tennis. He has also rather wittily pointed out that Jeff Bezos can get into space and back again more quickly than Tsitsipas can go to the loo. There is something pleasingly humdrum about the world no. 3 grabbing a paper from his bag and wandering off to the gents. Who hasn’t done that at work?

‘Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers, and — as George Orwell said — old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist.’ Thanks to John Major, former prime minister and noted cricket lover, for those words uttered in 1993 — and that are not worthy of the derision with which they would almost certainly be greeted today. The beer may still be warm, the suburbs nearly as green, and dog owners as dottily doting as ever, but these days the shadows on county grounds are as likely to be cast by floodlights as by the sun, and any old maids are most probably tanked-up middle managers in drag.

Avery Brundage was known to his enemies as Avery Ice Age — and to quite a few of his friends too, I would imagine. He was a man of ‘dictatorial temperament’, according to one of his critics. A wealthy American, Brundage brought his ultra-conservative outlook to bear on the Olympics, which he bossed from 1952-72. He was, another critic said, bent on ‘insulating the Games from the meddlesome tentacles of the real world’. He was particularly keen on the idea of amateurism, regardless (or maybe because) of the fact that the amateur ideal was the brainchild of the English aristocracy that ensured they didn’t have to compete against the lower orders.

You would need a digger to explore the levels of irony in a Springbok chief slagging off an opponent’s dirty play. But that’s what Rassie Erasmus, the South Africa director of rugby, was up to when he used Twitter to question Owen Farrell’s choices of tackle technique. Fine and dandy and all part of the pre-Test build up to get the ear of the referee after the ferociously hard Lions defeat to a South Africa ‘A’ side. Yet hasn’t Erasmus got a point? Farrell has long had a taste for the high tackle and has largely got away with it. It’s going to be trickier now, I suspect, in what could be a boiling first Test in Cape Town this weekend, where Farrell will start on the bench.

Think of a punishing distance for a bike race. Double it, multiply by ten, throw in two of the world’s great mountain ranges — and now you have the course for that epic examination of man’s very being known as the Tour de France, a ruthless appraisal of his heart, mind and soul. Not to mention body. Trying to dominate such a mighty beast is extraordinarily difficult. There are men who have subdued it multiple times to finish in the yellow jersey. But dominate it? That’s another story.

The question is surely destined to become a pub quiz staple: ‘Who moved a bottle 18 inches across a table and was said by the media to have wiped millions from the share price of a major corporation?’ Cristiano Ronaldo’s casual dismissal of a product-placed bottle of Coca-Cola — and Paul Pogba’s subsequent pushing aside of a bottle of Heineken — during Euro 2020 press conferences earned them nearly as much attention as any sleight of foot they performed on the pitch. For years the corporations have been mightier than the players but this isn’t the case any longer. There has even been some talk of legal action against Ronaldo and Pogba but who would this benefit? More to the point, who would be most damaged?

One of the more egregious innovations of Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution was something called the ‘struggle sessions’. This involved the ritual public humiliation of anybody the local bigwigs had turned against — often in sports stadiums. The elderly Yangtze swimmer would have smiled approvingly at what has happened to Ollie Robinson, the England fast bowler who was forced to read out an apology on the eve of his first Test match for some daft and obnoxious remarks he made eight years ago on Twitter. He has now been banned, and something with the sinister title of the ‘integrity unit’ is poised to investigate further. But investigate what exactly?

Whatever became of athletics? It’s fallen nearly as far as show jumping and that is a long way. But the world needs athletics: it is the purest sport. Lots of countries can’t row or sail or do equestrianism, tennis or golf. Anyone, anywhere can run, jump and throw. But where is athletics now? Can you name the fastest man in the world this year over 100m?* Who are the best middle-distance runners? The sport has fallen nearly as far as show jumping and that is a long way In the 1970s and 1980s everyone knew the names of countless athletes, domestic and foreign.

Anything been happening in football in the past couple of weeks? No? Moving on then… Hang about though. The doomed relegation-free European Super League may have had a shorter life than the average mayfly but it generated the level of fury produced by poking a stick in a hornets’ nest. How justified was all the outrage? The idea that clubs such as City, Spurs, Arsenal, Chelsea and the rest of the ‘Shameful Six’ are friendly neighbourhood outfits where you could run into Chopper Harris down the pub has long gone. These are huge international businesses run by Arab rulers, Russian billionaires and US hedge funds.