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

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СКАЧАТЬ humble. You don’t dominate a sport for years without a rapacious ego. All we ask is that they have the wit to give the appearance of modesty on the rare occasions it’s demanded, and this now seems beyond Federer’s grasp.

      The emperors of Rome had slaves positioned behind them at all times with the sole purpose of reminding them of their humanity by whispering the mantra, ‘You too shall die, Lord.’ Federer could do with one of those as his career comes to what one hopes will, for all the irritation he can generate, be a very slow and gentle close. That, and a style counsellor on the lines of Reginald Jeeves, who always found a way to prevent Bertie Wooster from wearing one of those white smoking jackets he’d bought in Monte Carlo that were capable of cauterising the retina at twenty paces.

      100

      Neville Neville

      Excuse the self-indulgent lurch into personal philosophising, but I have two iron rules of human existence, and two alone.

      The first is that anyone who imagines that something as infinitely complex and perplexing as human existence is susceptible to an iron rule is, axiomatically, an imbecile.

      The second is this. Never trust anyone who has the same name twice. Humbert Humbert was Lolita’s paedo-stepfather, and Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy. Like so many iron rules, this has its one exception (Lord Chief Justice Igor Judge, or Judge Judge, seems a good judicial egg). Neville Neville, on the other hand, serves only to confirm it.

      Can you honestly blame a man, you might ask, for his parents’ startling lack of imagination? Of course not. What you can and must blame him for is not availing himself of the cheap and simple remedy that is deed poll. What the advantages of hanging on to both names could be, apart perhaps from halving the time required in adolescence to practise the signature, I can’t imagine.

      But it’s not the wilful refusal to jettison at least one of those Nevilles that earns this double namer – a football agent with just the two clients (can you guess? Go on, have a crack) – his berth in this book. That refusal did, after all, inspire what may be the second-best football chant of the last twenty years. The first is the Chelsea ditty about Gianfranco Zola, sung to the tune of the Kinks’ ‘Lola’, that went thus:

      If you think we’re taking the piss

      Just ask that cunt Julian Dicks

      About Zola

      Who-oo-oo-o Zola …

      The brilliance, I’ve always felt, lies in how the Sondheims of Stamford Bridge eschewed substituting that ‘piss’ with the ‘mick’ that would have made it very nearly rhyme. This deliberate avoidance of the obvious strips away any lingering threat of Hallmark-greeting-card tweeness, and imbues the song with an emotional force, even poignancy, it would otherwise have lacked.

      The Old Trafford chant regarding our subject, sung in the earliest days of his issue’s Manchester United careers to the tune of Bowie’s ‘Rebel Rebel’, was barely less uplifting, if bereft of the assonant genius celebrated above. This is it:

      Neville Neville, they’re in defence

      Neville Neville, their future’s immense

      Neville Neville, they ain’t half bad

      Neville Neville, the name of their dad.

      With one of the brothers, this was also uncannily prescient. The future of Gary ‘Our Kid’ Neville, with club and country, was indeed immense. More than that, Gary, one of the more articulate native players in the Premier League (he speaks English almost as well as the less fluent Dutchmen), would prove to be football’s most influential trade unionist in the years between Jimmy Hill masterminding the scrapping of the maximum wage in the 1960s and John Terry’s heroically flawed attempt to spear-head a mutiny against Fabio Capello during the World Cup of 2010.

      You may recall how Gary, the Lech Wał

sa of his generation, nobly led the England dressing room in threatening to withdraw their labour in protest over the ban imposed on his clubmate and fellow England defender Rio Ferdinand for the amnesiac skipping of a drugs test; and how he spearheaded the snubbing of the media after one international in umbrage at their criticism. Anyone on several million quid per annum who can bring the flavour of the Gdansk shipyard to the England dressing room is more than all right with me.

      Philip, alas, is quite another matter. More gormless and less gifted by far than his elder brother, his career has contained just the one moment of immensity: the immense act of foolishness that concluded England’s involvement, under the riotously clueless stewardship of Kevin Keegan, in Euro 2000. England, astonishingly incompetent even by their own standards in the final group game against Romania, had inexplicably recovered from conceding an early goal to lead 2–1 at half time.

      The plucky little Ceau

escu-executors duly equalised in the second half, but with a couple of minutes remaining England had the draw they needed to make laughably ill-deserved progress to the knockout stage. And then, for no apparent reason, with Viorel Moldovan heading harmlessly towards the byline, Our Philip chose to scythe him to the turf. Short of picking the ball up and dribbling it around the box in homage to the Harlem Globetrotters’ Meadowlark Lemon, he could not have gifted Romania a more blatant penalty.

      An admirably distraught Phil would eventually receive full punishment (a transfer to Everton), but from Neville Neville there has been not a word of regret for his own central role – part genetic, no doubt, but surely part nurture as well – in the creation of this national humiliation.

      Shameless Shameless.

      99

      Adolf Hitler

      On 28 May 1940, Winston Churchill held the most important Cabinet meeting in British history. With the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax championing the majority view that the military situation was so hopeless that the only option was to sue for peace, the new Prime Minister had a desperate fight on his hands to keep buggering on against the Hun. The need to win round his ministers elicited from him what is regarded as even his greatest speech – the fight must continue even if it meant every one of them bleeding to death in the dust, he said, because a nation that is conquered can rise again, but one that surrenders is finished for ever. The memory always amuses when a peevish politician does what Hillary Clinton did in the spring of 2008, and insists that fancy oratory ain’t worth diddly.

      For all that, I can’t help wondering if Winston could have spared himself the rhetorical bother had he known then what we know now about Hitler and cricket. In the event, all he would have needed to do was inform the Cabinet, take a vote and go back to his bath.

      In fact this outrage didn’t emerge for another seven decades, when a contemporary account by a Hitler-loving Tory MP, one Oliver Locker-Lampson, was unearthed. This related how in 1923 Hitler came across some British expats enjoying a genteel game of cricket and asked if he could watch them play. Happy to oblige, these thoroughly decent coves went that extra mile for post-Versailles Treaty hatchet-burial by writing out the rules of the game for his perusal. Hitler, having duly perused, returned a few days later with his own team and took them on. The scorecard of this Anglo–German clash has never been published, but from what followed we may presume that the result pre-empted the one to follow in 1945.

      In an unwonted flash of intolerance, Hitler took umbrage at the rules, declaring the game ‘insufficiently violent for German fascists’ СКАЧАТЬ