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

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СКАЧАТЬ his own, yet no one but he was vaguely surprised that McClaren’s England stint concluded beneath a deluge of farce (brolly and all) of which a coalition of the Keystone Kops, Laurel and Hardy, Jim Carrey and our own Chuckle Brothers could barely have dreamed. McClaren’s inadequacies were so evident to all but Mr Barwick that the first obituary to his England career was published the day after his appointment was announced. This was at least a day late.

      Still more humiliating than the act of panic itself (in such a state was Barwick after his fiascoid failure to hire the Brazilian Luiz Felipe Scolari that he’d have given the job to a hat stand with the requisite coaching badge) was the way in which he chose to present it. Fans of Gordon Brown’s blanket denial in the summer of 2009 that he had intended to fire Alistair Darling as Chancellor should note that Brian Barwick had blazed that trail. He donned his straightest face to inform us that Mr McClaren had been his ‘first-choice candidate’ all along, within days of allowing himself to be filmed at Heathrow en route to talk to Scolari in Lisbon – the very act of amateur-hour incompetence which provoked the media frenzy that in turn frightened Scolari into telling Mr Barwick to stuff the job up his jacksie. And in the sense that Mr McClaren dwelt in a holiday cottage a few inches to the south of Mr Barwick’s upper colon at the time, this is precisely what he did.

      Two years later, soon after McClaren had masterminded the epochal disaster at Wembley that saw England lose to Croatia and fail to qualify for Euro 2008, old Grimsdale followed him out of the FA. His involvement in football now rests with his place on the board of Hampton & Richmond Borough FC. So let us end this appreciation on an uplifting and life-enhancing note by congratulating Brian Barwick on finding his level at last. Long may he enjoy it.

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      Sledging

      All that strictly needs to be said of the relationship between this cricketing branch of low-level bullying and genuine wit is this: of all the cricket-playing nations, sledging is beloved solely by the Australians.

      There was a time, long ago, when it may have had some appeal. When W.G. Grace reacted to having his stumps clattered by informing the bowler, ‘’Twas the wind which took the bail orf, good sir,’ and the umpire chipped in, ‘Indeed, doctor, and let us hope the wind helps thee on thy journey back to the pavilion,’ the coalescence of mannerliness and the lingo of the Amish barn-builder lent the exchange some charm. Nothing there to induce the enquiry, ‘Where is thy ribcage repair kit, good doctor, when thou most sorely requireth it?’ perhaps, but rather sweet for all that.

      By the time, some half a century later, that F.S. Trueman was advising an incoming Aussie batsman who shut the gate to the pavilion behind him, ‘Don’t bother, son, you won’t be out there long enough,’ the art of sledging may already have been in decline. Another half a century on, and it is virtually impossible to find any sledge that is not predicated on either the batsman’s girth or the conceit that his wife has a sexual appetite so rapacious that her reflex observation, having serviced the entire Household Cavalry, is to ask after the whereabouts of the Scots Dragoons.

      Perhaps this is too harsh. It could be that Shane Warne was indeed a larrikin Mark Twain, and Adam Gilchrist an ocker Tallulah Bankhead. We’ll never know for sure, because seldom do the stump microphones capture the inter-ball hilarity. However, now and again a sledge is picked up. It may give a flavour of this nourishing comedic form to quote this citation, offered by New Zealand blogger Michael Ellis as his candidate for history’s greatest sledge: ‘And of course you can’t forget Ian Healy’s legendary comment that was picked up by the Channel 9 microphones when Arjuna Ranatunga called for a runner on a particularly hot night during a one-dayer in Sydney. “You don’t get a runner for being an overweight, unfit, fat cunt.” ’ It is not known whether the Sri Lankan felt it beneath him to offer the mandatory reply to a portliness-related sledge (‘Yeah, mate. Well, it’s yer missus’s fault for giving me a biscuit every time I fuck her’).

      The oppressively limited range of subject matter qualifies the sledge as sport’s closest equivalent to the haiku. If the batsman isn’t fat or a cuckold in the imagination of the Oscar Wildes of the slips, he must be gay. ‘So,’ Glenn McGrath once enquired of Ramnaresh Sarwan, ‘what does Brian Lara’s dick taste like?’ ‘I don’t know,’ responded the West Indian, preparing a foray into virgin sledging territory. ‘Ask your wife.’ If anything encapsulates the exquisite subtlety of the two-way sledge, it is McGrath’s counterstrike to that. ‘If you ever mention my wife again,’ he said, expecting a degree of sensitivity (his wife, now deceased, had been diagnosed with cancer) his reference to the fellating of Mr Lara might be seen to have sacrificed, ‘I’ll fucking rip your fucking throat out.’ Whether or not Mr Sarwan is indeed a friend of Dorothy, who would deny that Mr McGrath, in common with all the legends of Australian sledging, is a spiritual friend of Dorothy Parker?

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      Graham Poll

      The public laundering of dirty washing is never a savoury sight. Every family has its private embarrassments, and the sane ones do what they can to keep them private. None of us wants the neighbours to learn our grubby little secrets. The same goes for companies, in which a specially acute strain of loathing is reserved for the whistle-blower.

      So too it is with countries. You and I know that secondary education in Britain is a disaster, that scandalous numbers leave school barely literate, and that the innumeracy statistics are equally shameful. We know that the developed world’s educative dunce’s cap rests upon the British head, and it anguishes us. Government after government tries, or pretends to try, to sort it out, and through the lack of funds, will and courage, fails. These things we know, and these things we naturally prefer to keep to ourselves.

      Yet in every family there appears to be someone who can’t avoid spilling the beans, and in the case of our national family the blabbermouth is Graham Poll.

      In front of the several hundred millions watching Croatia play Australia in the 2006 World Cup, our leading referee revealed that the British education system produces adults who, let alone struggling with their twelve-times table, cannot count to two.

      Late in a game of mesmerising fractiousness, Mr Poll had sent off a brace of players when he showed Croatia’s Josip Šimunić a second yellow card. The ensuing calculation was not, on the prima facie evidence, a demanding one. This was not an equation to have the average ref whispering, ‘Get me Vorderman on the phone NOW’ at the Fifa fourth official through his little microphone. Put simply, the equation was as follows: 1 yellow + 1 yellow = 2 yellows = 1 red.

      On Sesame Street, Big Bird would have cracked it like a nut with a diseased and brittle shell. Yet it tantalisingly eluded Mr Poll. He allowed Šimunić to remain on the field for several minutes before ploughing virgin territory by making the Croat football history’s first recipient of a third yellow card. Then, and only then, possibly concluding he’d gone as far along Revolution Road as seemed decent in one night, did Mr Poll fish into his back pocket for the red card.

      Along with the mischievous pleasure at the pricking of a bumptiously over-inflated ego went a dash of sympathy. A reputation built over many years had been obliterated by one moment of inexplicable daftness, and that, as Gerald Ratner would confirm, is nothing to be relished.

      Mr Poll retired from international football the next day, in the manner of the cabinet minister who elects to resign to spend more time with his family the night before he appears on the front page of the Sun.

      The damage had already been done, of course. The dirty secret about British education had been broadcast to the planet. The subtle irony that this unwitting act of whistle-blowing ensured Mr Poll would never blow a whistle again on the international stage may have been little consolation to the man who cannot count to two.

      85

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