This sporting life

One of the lasting legacies of the 2012 Olympics was to get the great British public interested and enthused about sports other than Association Football.  There is no doubt that the Olympics raised the profile of cycling in the UK, which was already riding high after Wiggo had won the Tour de France, not just a tremendous sporting achievement but that achievement that the English cherish above all others – Beating The Foreign At Their Own Game. 

That’s why the news that the Big Departure for the 2014 Tour would be in Leeds was greeted with such enthusiasm, as Brits who for years had associated bicycles with spindly rickets-ridden grocery delivery boys toiling up northern cobbled hills or district nurses built like the figurehead of a tea clipper sailing magnificently through country lanes atop a noble iron steed would instead be treated once again to the thrill of the road race and a sporting event which, when watched live, whooshes past you in a few seconds, allowing the rest of the afternoon free for drinking and talking about pies.

When the Olympics were in progress, unfavourable comparisons were drawn between the overpriced nancy-boys who, the public slowly realised, had not won a major international competition in their living memory, and Team GB who all appeared to live with their mums, went to bed at four in the afternoon and were assembling a hoard of gold that would put a dragon to shame.

Once the Olympics ended and the soccer season started, the normal order quickly reasserted itself and soccer dominates the media once more.  Although it’s probably fair to say that this domination is not as total as it once was, as editors realise that if the BBC were able to dedicate whole channels to single sports, like canoeing, the least they can do is dispatch a hack to a riverside in spate in Wales to record the activities of a bloke in a fibreglass shell trying to paddle up a waterfall.  Dickie Davis was decades ahead of the game, there is a World of Sport out there, beyond even the seasonal favourites of soccer and rugby.

They used to say that soccer was a game for gentlemen played by thugs, and rugby was a game for thugs played by gentlemen.  That’s no longer true, it’s fairer to say that, professionally at least, soccer is a game played by foreigners whilst rugby is a game played by blokes who, if they are going to punch an opponent, at least have the courtesy to do it in front of the ref.

More than anything, soccer is a tribal thing.  For many fans, the order of preference is Club, Country, Bird.  And it’s played everywhere, all you need are two boys, each with a jumper and you have the set up for a goalie, a striker and some goalposts, in short, a game.  It’s more difficult to organise an impromptu game of rugby, where you need at least two public schools with a bitter rivalry.

And while it is very easy to knock soccer, let’s not forget in these tough economic times the role that soccer plays in stimulating the economy.  Clubs change the design of their strip seven or eight times a season, necessitating their fans to visit the club shop on a regular basis to enable them to dress like a fat version of their sporting heroes.  At a local level, the players themselves spend money in bars, clubs and restaurants in a quest to maintain goal-scoring fitness levels.  At an international level, with so many players now being so foreign that they have to hold their arms out straight not just to celebrate goals but to properly display their twenty-seven syllable surnames, they are sending home a portion of their wages and so re-floating the Euro.  And of course let’s not forget their contribution to certain professions, eminent QCs with a good record of getting their client off charges of racism or sexual assault in time for Saturday’s match do not come cheap.

In rugby, of course, the players at least have the courtesy to commit sexual assault right in front of the ref, usually in the scrum.