You Cannot Be Serious!: The 101 Most Frustrating Things in Sport. Matthew Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ that threatened to turn nasty too. But I’m pleased to report that I have learned to control the appetite, and have it down to no more than fourteen hours a day.

      80

      Alastair Campbell

      The possibility must be acknowledged, before we go on, that whatever this psychotic dry drunk is remembered for when tomorrow’s historians do their work, it won’t be his contribution to British sport. They may prefer to focus on his role in preparing the ‘intelligence’ dossiers that helped take us to war in Iraq; his mutually destructive persecution of the BBC for reporting that role in a way that seemed entirely accurate to all but himself, the judicial buffoon Lord Hutton and a few Blairite ultras; and his part in the exposure of Dr David Kelly as the source for that report which led directly to the weapons inspector’s death in the woods. Next to all that, the degradation of the civil service’s integrity and independence and so much else besides, Mr Campbell’s sporting persona is a purely humorous one.

      The one-time writer of soft pornography and devoted fan of Burnley FC became the Comical Ali of British sport in 2005, when for reasons that pay credit to the eccentricity not just of himself but also of Sir Clive Woodward (see no. 62), he became ‘media manager’ on the calamitous British Lions tour to New Zealand.

      As so often in this book, the questions raised – by both the offer of the job and its acceptance – seem better suited to a month-long annual convention of psychoanalysts in Zürich than to a sports hack. Who, without relevant professional qualifications, would feel confident in positing a theory as to why Woodward thought it wise to place media relations in the grubby hands of a character with half the credibility of Pinocchio’s longer-nosed brother Whopperio? Why Campbell agreed to this lunacy is slightly easier to guess. Sitting in the kitchen of his Tufnell Park home staring longingly at the dormant red phone directly connected to Downing Street cannot have been much fun. Even so, boredom alone hardly explains in full why this delicate flower was blithely prepared to expose himself to the ridicule that must, it seemed at the time, ensue.

      So it did. Not since his namesake role model in Baghdad looked out of his ministry window at the American tanks rolling into town, and rushed to a press conference to inform the world that the Republican Guard was doing a bang-up job in driving the infidels into chaotic retreat, had anything rivalled what followed.

      The Lions were thrashed in all three Tests, and as the on-field débâcle unfolded the media’s attention was diverted to a spat between Woodward and Gavin Henson, whom the coach had curiously omitted from the squad for the first match against the All Blacks. It was at this point that Campbell’s gift for managing the media was unshackled. In order to persuade a British public bemused and livid at Mr Henson’s exclusion that reports of a bust-up were nonsense, he staged a photograph of Woodward and the father-to-be of Charlotte Church’s children walking together after a training session. It was taken by an agency photographer from a hidden position, with a long lens and possibly without Mr Henson’s knowledge, and Mr Campbell then distributed it to national newspapers in Britain. Mr Henson’s subsequent amnesia, as expressed in a book, led him to forget the agreement between them about this picture to which Mr Campbell has always laid claim.

      Not content with that morale-repairing masterstroke, Mr Campbell then underlined the humility for which he is loved by taking it upon himself to give a pre-match team talk. Why several members of the side, most vocally Ben Kay, were astonished by this, what with Mr Campbell placing rugby union as high as fourth in his list of sporting preferences (after football, athletics and cricket), who can say? As to the notion that he dipped a toe into the foetid pond of bad taste by invoking the exploits of the SAS in Bosnia to stir their blood, well, some people just live to take offence. Personally, I’d have been even happier had he referred to the work of British troops in Basra, in the war he played a small but crucial part in facilitating, but perhaps that’s just me. And to think Martin Johnson had contented himself with Agincourt before some of those same players beat Australia to win the World Cup for England two years earlier.

      Sir Clive, quite a spinner himself, declared himself delighted with Mr Campbell when the tour was over, explaining that the fault lay entirely with the media, and not one iota with its manager. ‘The media has missed an opportunity,’ he said. ‘If they had spoken to Alastair, he would have given them ideas on how they could have written more creative stuff.’ Indeed he would. He’d have persuaded them that the trio of savage Test defeats were thumping wins, the confusion emanating from a series of faulty electronic scoreboards. ‘That’s why I brought him along,’ Woodward went on, ‘to try to move everything with the media on to a whole new level, but unfortunately the media have not taken up the challenge.’ Idiot media. Sir Clive concluded by describing Mr Campbell’s contribution as ‘outstanding’.

      So it was. It stood out then, as it stands out now, as the most breathtakingly cack-handed display of media mismanagement in the annals of even British sport.

      79

      The Vuvuzela

      The one-note plastic horn that played its selfless part in producing the worst World Cup thus far was, so Fifa assured us when the global outrage was at its zenith in the tournament’s early days, too deeply embedded in South African football culture to be banished. Once, you could hardly help reflect, pissing in the pocket of the person in front of you was deeply embedded in England’s football culture, but if the tournament had come here in the early 1980s, would Fifa prissily have refused to discourage that for fear of treading on effete cultural feet? I don’t believe so.

      Before we go on, let me say this. I love South Africa and its people. One of the happier weeks of my life was spent there covering the story of the Lemba, a tribe who believe themselves to be Jewish, insist that the Ark of the Covenant (Ngundry Llogoma in their language) was once in their possession, and have the coolest flag known to humanity (an elephant inside a Star of David). Another was passed in a Johannesburg hospital attached to a weird, bubbling machine re-inflating the lung punctured by a burglar, in the home of old family friends, who had the impertinence to stick a bread knife into my chest. It’s an incident about which I never speak, though I will show the chest X-rays to anyone to whom I’m refusing to speak about it, pointing out the 1/12th-inch gap between the blade and the heart and the 1/18th-inch cordon sanitaire between steel and aorta.

      For all the literal and psychic scar tissue the incident left behind, hand on nearly-pierced heart, I’d rather relive that lively dawn encounter than listen again to that drone of basso profundo killer bees trapped in a drum. If what my wife, whose finishing school was bombed in the war, refers to as the ‘vulva labia’ is indeed a central panel in the tapestry of South African national life, so too are Aids and carjacking, and you don’t hear anyone slapping metaphorical preservation orders on them.

      78

      The Charlton Brothers

      Are Jackie and Bobby Charlton Jewish? I wouldn’t normally ask, because the fact that they were respectively decent and exceptional at football would seem to offer a definitive answer to that question. And even if it doesn’t, the existence of coalminers among their north-east forebears surely settles the point.

      However, there is something so immutably Jewish about their decades-long feud that you have to wonder. From Cain and Abel to Mike and Bernie Winters, and possibly (at the time of writing it remains too soon to be sure) David and Ed Miliband, the fraternal fallout has been a defining sub-strand in my people’s troubled history.

      Whatever their genetic roots, the Charltons have been pests for almost as long as they have been broigus, to use that Yiddish term for non-speakers. One intriguing thing about them … but no, that’s too fanciful a thought even for this book. One mildly interesting thing they represent is an apparent paradox that is in fact no such thing. It is often commented, in mystification, СКАЧАТЬ