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

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СКАЧАТЬ troops in mind, he suggested tweaking the rules by introducing a larger, harder ball, and abandoning pads. The absence of any masterplan to jettison the protective box may well be further evidence of that rumoured gonadic deficit. With only one to protect, imaginary Nazi cricket scholars posit, why bother?

      If the Führer had entirely misunderstood the point of the game, failing to appreciate the languor, subtlety, nuance and infinite complexities that make Test cricket the most captivating of sports, perhaps he can be forgiven. He was never a chap easily imagined daydreaming at deep fine leg, or taking four hours to score 23 on a flat wicket.

      Even so, and however unsuccessfully, he had blazed the trail of cheap-thrills pseudo-cricket that would find its apotheosis in Twenty20, and for that, among other things, he cannot lightly be forgiven.

      98

      Simon Barnes

      ‘I suppose the problem,’ observed the chief sportswriter of The Times once, when contemplating the crazy misconception that he merits the teasing of the inferior and the envious, ‘is that some people can’t come to terms with the idea that intelligent people like sport, and might want to read someone who tries to write about sport in an intelligent way.’ How true this is, how very, very true. I mean, it’s hardly as if there are incredibly bright and thoughtful writers like Hugh McIlvanney in the Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday’s Patrick Collins out there covering this turf, is it? It’s not as if Mike Atherton, Matthew Syed, Marina Hyde, Paul Hayward, Oliver Holt and others sate the appetite for smart and insightful sportswriting. ‘My attempts to do so have met,’ Mr Barnes went on, ‘with a bewildering hostility in some quarters.’

      Bewildering indeed. To be a lone oasis of intellectualism in an arid wasteland of moronic cliché must be a grievous weight on the shoulders of this most engagingly unpompous of hacks. Yet, like Atlas, he bears his burden stoically and without complaint. ‘Occasionally I’ve come up with some high-faluting notion,’ said this Pseuds Corner fixture, ‘and somebody will say, “What if Private Eye got hold of it?” I say, “Well, fuck them. Let them get hold of it. I’m setting the bloody agenda here, not these guys.” ’

      It’s that ‘occasionally’ I love. At his best, when writing about his Down’s Syndrome son and even every now and then about sport, Mr Barnes – an eerie doppelganger, with his lupine face and ponytail, for the Satanic character Bob in Twin Peaks – is very good indeed. At one iota less than his best, when presenting himself as what someone identified as a ‘posturing narcissist’ – well, suffice it to say that another hack once expressed bewilderment of his own on finding him using the words ‘unpretentious’ and ‘unselfconscious’ (of Amir Khan) with apparent admiration.

      From the canon of Simon Barnes, you could pluck many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of examples to illustrate the massive range and power of his mind, or indeed his commitment to wearing his learning lightly. Sometimes, for example, he will restrict the Nietzsche references to no more than one a paragraph (I’m a Heidegger man myself, with the odd Hegelian twist). But space is short, so let us leave it to this all-time personal favourite to give the flavour. Roger Federer, Mr Barnes once declared, is ‘as myriad-minded as Shakespeare ever was’.

      Sometimes, as the agenda-setter himself might be the very last to agree, there simply are no words.

      97

      The Argentine Polo Player

      The abundant ridiculousness of the sport itself need not detain us here. That it appeals to male members of the House of Windsor within a death or two of the throne is ample comment on its mingling of needless physical danger and grotesque unaffordability. Its appeal to the female sex is predicated on something else, of course, as close students of Jilly Cooper’s oeuvre will need little reminding. Why frustrated women d’une certaine age prefer the ogling of equestrians, and inter-chukka traipsing around fields stamping down displaced pieces of turf to work off some of that ardour, to availing themselves of the splendid pornography so freely available on cable television, I cannot say. All we know is that the Argentine polo player, that prancing ponce of the aristo sporting world, makes the polo field cougar paradise.

      Invariably sickeningly handsome and repulsively dashing, this archetype of gentrified machismo has correctly identified the tight-buttocked, muscle-bulging activity of riding around swinging a mallet as the speediest route to a life of idle riches. For decades, long before the trail was blazed by Sarah Ferguson’s mother, wealthy English and American women have been alighting on the pseudo-gaucho talent pool as a source of mid-life gratification.

      Exactly how many of the players are descended from gentlemen who hurriedly fled central Europe in the mid-1940s is unknown, though any genetic inheritance from Prussian cavalry-men would obviously be handy for horsemanship. One of the age’s finest players, meanwhile, glories in the first name of Adolfo.

      Yet it is not for us to visit the sins of the great-grandfathers on the great-grandsons. What it is for us to do is point out that these show ponies are essentially glamourised gigolos with nothing on their minds but the servicing of Anglo-American sugar mummies and the cushy lives their capacious purses will thenceforth provide. What polo represents to the Argentine, in other words, is a hole with a mint.

      96

      Blake Aldridge

      So much nauseating drivel is intoned by sports people about the primacy of the collective effort – the striker insisting he couldn’t care about scoring so long as the team wins, for example, when he’d massacre an orphanage for a hat-trick in a 3–9 defeat – that any expression of individuality in a group context generally acts as an anti-emetic. When, however, a member of that group, even a group as small as two, pinpoints the midst of competition as the time to slag off his partner, the antidote loses its efficacy. When that same group member chooses to do so at the side of an Olympic pool, by speaking to his mother in the crowd on his mobile phone, you know you’re dealing with a fool of the very first water.

      The diving prodigy Tom Daley, who represented Britain in the 2008 Olympics at an age when others are gingerly ditching the armbands, was admittedly an irritant himself, with all the robotic references to his sponsor. He paid tribute to ‘Team Visa’ with all the frequency and sincerity Barry McGuigan lavished on ‘my manager Mr Barney Eastwood’ before the two went to attritional courtroom war.

      But then, precocious fourteen-year-olds are irritating, as parents and Britain’s Got Talent viewers need no reminding. They also tend, inexplicably, to lack Olympic experience, which perhaps explained the sub-par performance in the Beijing synchronised diving event of a pubescent boy who would confirm his talent a year later by winning an individual world title in Rome.

      Aldridge, although more than a decade older, allowed him no such latitude, publicly criticising Daley during the competition despite the experts identifying Aldridge himself as the weaker performer. As for the phone call, filial piety is a wonderful thing, but there are times and places to demonstrate it. Seldom since Oedipus has a public figure found a less appropriate method of showing the world how much he loves his mummy.

      Aldridge’s punishment was not the putting out of his own eyes, but a lurch into a new sport also covered by live cameras. Sadly, he seems to have as much talent for shoplifting as for diving, winning his first conviction in May 2009, a few months before Daley won his gold in Rome. He was fined £80 by police for nicking stuff from B&Q.

      Encouragingly, he appears to be showing more sticking power in this career. He was arrested again in February 2010 on suspicion of stealing wine from Tesco and assaulting the security guard who caught him at it. His trial awaits at the time of writing, and we wish him well. If and when it takes place – if it hasn’t СКАЧАТЬ