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.
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