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

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СКАЧАТЬ to the boxer Naseem Hamed. Mr Hamed narrowly failed to shepherd Ronnie into the Muslim faith. He never did become Rahquet Rhani al Sull’ivan, but it was apparently a close call.

      However unlikely the image of this tortured, saturnine figure being called to prayer by the muezzin, the external discipline might have helped a man who conceded a best-of-seventeen-frame match to Stephen Hendry when 0–4 behind with a terse ‘I’ve had enough mate’, and whose notion of good grace in defeat, at the China Open of 2008, extended to bragging about the girth of his penis at the press conference, and inviting a female reporter to fellate him, before giving her a helpful demonstration by mistaking the head of his microphone for a lollipop.

      In the absence of that religious discipline, it becomes ever harder to overlook the contempt with which he treats his genius. At times, in fact, genius has seemed an inadequate word. Roger Federer is a genius, but always had to work devilishly hard to cope with the raging Mallorcan bull Rafael Nadal (and usually failed), and even the likes of Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray.

      At his best, O’Sullivan appears not to be working at all, potting balls at ridiculous speed and with absurd ease with either hand. Perhaps this explains why he seems not to value his gift at all. Often, in fact, he seems to resent it, and to wish it dead. As a fabled wit once observed – Oscar Wilde, perhaps, or possibly John Virgo – each man kills the thing he loves. Ronnie hasn’t killed it yet, but it seldom blossoms as gorgeously as it did, or as it should.

      Still harder to excuse is the contempt he shows his public. Whether or not his lip-curling disdain for snooker is sourced in insecurity he tries to cloak in contrived diffidence, his concession of frames when he needs a single snooker to win them has been getting on the top ones for too long.

      The disrespect he shows almost every rival other than John Higgins is more a comment on him, needless to say, than on them. Whenever the likable Mark Selby, who has the nickname ‘Jester’ for the compelling comedic rationale that he hails from Leicester, wins the last four frames to beat him, Ronnie makes it crystal clear that he doesn’t rate him, and hints at having thrown the match away because scrapping against so palpable an inferior is beneath his dignity.

      As for the continual threats to quit, no public figure in history has announced their retirement so often – yes, Streisand, that includes you – and reneged. He knows he can behave as boorishly, lewdly and disrespectfully as he wishes without that retirement being forced on him because he remains the biggest draw, if not the only one, in snooker, and that without him the dangerous decline of the game (a world championship sponsored by Pukka Pies, forsooth) might well become terminal. But the little-boy-lost act ran out of whatever minimal charm it had long ago. There comes a time in every wounded lamb’s life when, however much they fucked him up, his mum and dad, the leonine thing to do is not to roar but stoically to hide the misery and behave. At thirty-five, that time is now. If not, the next time he announces his retirement, he might find that the majority reaction isn’t a plea to reconsider, or even a weary shrug, but a sigh of relief.

      89

      Pelé

      If Pelé had shown the same talent with his feet as he has exhibited since retiring with his mouth, he would have been, at best, Emile Heskey. Never has the old saw that former sportsmen should be neither seen nor heard been more perfectly illustrated – and that includes such fellow entrants in this work as Mark Lawrenson, Sue Barker, Sebastian Coe and even Kriss Akabusi.

      Genius that he was on the pitch, off it he struggles to make the cut as a half-wit. You can barely wade through five pages of his autobiography without encountering a variant of ‘Once again, my business judgement sadly betrayed me.’ So it was that money troubles obliged him to advertise Viagra, thereby betraying our memories of the wonderfully lithe, natural seventeen-year-old striking talent who devastated Sweden in the 1958 World Cup final, and later electrified the 1970 tournament. The last thing you want from a sporting god is the image of him struggling with flaccidity.

      The same talent for misjudgement that caused his frequent flirtations with bankruptcy (you could sell him a batch of $103 bills for twice their face value) extends to his reading of the one thing he might be expected to know a little about. As a football pundit, Pelé is barely less mythical a figure than he once was in the yellow and blue of Brazil. Romario, a successor as leader of the Brazilian attack, once said, ‘Pelé is a poet when he keeps his mouth shut,’ while the World Cup-winning coach and briefly manager of Chelsea Luiz Felipe Scolari chipped in with this little gem: ‘I believe Pelé knows nothing about football. His analysis always turns out to be wrong. If you want to win a title, you have to listen to Pelé and then do the opposite.’

      The Sadim of football punditry (like Midas in reverse, everything he touches turns to lead) has made too many sensationlly daft predictions for them all to be catalogued here, so we must confine ourselves to a few favourites.

      Pelé’s pick for the 1994 World Cup was Colombia. Suffice it to say that the Colombian defender Andrés Escobar had been shot dead in a Medellin car park before the final was played. In 1998 he went for Norway. Norway. Four years later, the scorer of more than 1,000 career goals studied the World Cup field, and plumped – I’m not making this up – for England. To repeat, that’s England. E.N.G.L.A.N.D.

      Over his insistence, long ago, that Nicky Barmby would become a player of unarguably world class, and his categorical statement that an African nation would win the World Cup before the year 2000, let us lightly pass. Perhaps the highlight of highlights from the mouth of this soothsayer of soothsayers was his contemptuous dismissal of his own country’s chances in 2002 (the year, you may recall, he predicted an England victory). Brazil, insisted Pelé, would not survive the group stage. How tantalisingly close the team came to fulfilling his expectation, as they became the first country ever to win all seven games in normal time en route to lifting the Jules Rimet Trophy.

      Whoever would have believed back in 1986 that of the two players universally acknowledged, then as now, as the greatest of all time, it would be Diego Maradona – much too adorably deranged nowadays to warrant an entry of his own in this volume – who went on to become the more beloved, and Pelé who would establish himself, even in football, as the imbecile’s imbecile? If only there were a Viagran equivalent for a limp and lifeless brain.

      88

      Brian Barwick

      When Caligula set the template for hilarious over-promotion, who would have thought that the day would dawn when the Football Association of England would make the creation of a horse as Consul of Rome seem a tediously conventional employment decision? In fact, giving his horse Incitatus that much-prized post was the sanest thing (not the highest of bars to clear, in truth) Caligula ever did. Its purpose was purely ironic. He intended to satirise the cravenness of his Senators by obliging them to celebrate the appointment as a masterstroke. As, to a Senator, what with being in terror of their lives, they did.

      What Brian Barwick’s ironic intent in hiring Steve McClaren as England football coach might have been, on the other hand, I’ve no idea, because the only thing satirised there was the luminescent idiocy of Barwick himself and the FA of which he was chief executive. However, since the only other possible explanation is that he regarded Mr McClaren (see no. 25) as a gifted international coach, there is no option but to hail him as the world’s first, and doubtless last, kamikaze satirist.

      Truth be told, this erstwhile TV sports executive looks nothing like an anarcho-comic genius. With the wide, bald dome and bristly little moustache, he more closely resembles Mr Grimsdale, the 1950s middle-management archetype in all those side-splitting Norman Wisdom flicks that still have them queuing round the block in downtown Tirana.

      Mr Grimsdale can be excused for repeatedly hiring Norman, having noted the calamitous results of doing so in thirty-three СКАЧАТЬ