Who won the Ashes, really?

Who won the 2017/2018 Ashes series?

(The Ashes, for those who don’t know, is possibly the most famous sporting contest on the planet.  It is a competition taking place every two years between England and Australia.  The game in question is cricket.  For those unfamiliar with cricket, please press the backspace icon a few times and Google ‘Kardashians’, this will be a far better use of your time than reading the following).

Of course, there are those that will say that Australia won the Ashes.  There are those also that will say that England lost the Ashes.  There is, after all, an important difference between the two matters.

What is undoubtedly true is that England’s tour Down Under was trouble-prone.  There were players that could not join because they had got into a spot of bother back home (famous sports stars get into ‘a spot of bother’ rather than being ‘charged for assault’ just like middle class students involved in vandalism are involved in ‘high spirits’ or if you go to a decent public school; ‘japes’.) and the performance on the pitch was not great.  Hovering over all of this was the unique cricket pastime of ‘sledging’ or as non-cricketing types call it ‘abuse’.  Any cricket fan will recognise the title of this Blog (although it is named G&P for quite different reasons) and will have drawn their own conclusions about which category certain Aussie and English players.

So, Australia retained the Ashes.

But BBC Radio 5 Live won the Ashes.

Here’s why.

The coverage was magnificent.  There is nothing like Test Match Special.  Arguably, the best thing to ever happen to TMS was for the BBC to lose the rights to televise cricket and then for digital radio to come along.  This meant live and uninterrupted coverage of play in Australia throughout the night, bookended by anticipation and analysis.

The BBC rightly committed programming time to exploring the phenomenon of nocturnal radio.  But it boils down to this:

If you are watching television through the night there will come a point about three in the morning when your entire body craves sleep and you feel as if somebody has replaced certain parts of you with grit.  You trek up to bed late/early and get up a few hours later feeling shocking.

Not so with radio.  One places the radio by the bed, turned down low because distractions are falling away as the midnight hour advances, and then you listen throughout the night.

Of course you don’t.  You are soundly asleep by 12:05 but occasionally stir as you subconsciously process the fall of wickets and any streakers.

You awake refreshed and ready for the day.

Radio coverage is far, far better than television coverage because the quality of the commentary is so much better.  TMS is an institution and can afford to only accept the greatest talents.  Ideally, one should apprentice until one is about 80, and then one may consider oneself a TMS fixture.

The thing about TMS is it knows that it is shepherding souls through the darkness half a world away, and it takes this privilege and responsibility seriously.

On this tour, with the performance of the England team, there was an element of pastoral care to be considered, as the commentary team did not want to wreak untold psychic damage to the unconscious subconscious attentive minds.

Moreover, this was happening over the Christmas period.  The best Christmas present that the TMS team gave the listening public back in England at the commencement of the Boxing Day test was hope.

The Big Off, it's the Tour de France...in England

If you want something done right, do it in Britain.

No matter what your event, it goes better in Britain.  The best Olympics ever?  London.  Best city for a marathon?  London.  Greatest arts festival in the world?  Edinburgh. 

But if you want something done exceptionally do it in Yorkshire.

This is a country with special qualities.  Yorkshire is often described as ‘God’s own country’, especially by Yorkshiremen.

Yorkshiremen are without doubt the lovliest people in the world, who can greet you with a cheery ‘ow do?’ with equal enthusiasm and with their flat cap equally horizontal in sun, sleet, snow or rain…when they are in Yorkshire.

The moment they step outside the County, you truly understand why they refer to it as God’s own country; to hear them endlessly bang on about it you’d think it was the Garden of Eden as they bring a missionary zeal to describing just how bloody great Yorkshire is.  Tirelessly.

So, best stage of the Tour de France ever?  Yorkshire.  Naturally.

It would appear that the simple solution to securing the success of any sporting spectacle is simple; hold it in Britain.

Especially cycling.  And no wonder.  This is a country that loves cycling.  When you’re a lid cycling means freedom, when you’re an adult cycling means being able to purchase loads of cool gear and nod meaningfully when people talk about carbon fibre.  And no wonder we produce such talent.  Every kid with a bike has the capacity to become a world champion.  And plenty of them have a training regime from an early age, up at an early hour summer and winder, putting in the miles.  They’d go even faster if they didn’t have to stop every few yeards and put newspapers through people’s doors.

But it’s not just children.  The sight of men in lycra thundering along Britain’s roads is not at all an unusual one.  Or a pretty one.  The sight of athletes, who actually look good in lycra, thundering along Britain’s roads, is a little rarer.  And a lot prettier, if you like thighs.

Usually the sort of chap to be seen of a weekend, top to toe cycling gear, looks like he is racing towards a pub or pie shop rather than a yellow jersey and a drugs test.  Middle aged, but like many middle-aged men not old enough to know better, men who wander into cycle shops appear to suffer from the same condition that grips the type of man who purchases an insanely powerful motor cycle, or lots of Lego.  They are trying to recapture their youth, which is something of a challenge no matter how hard one peddles.

The Tour de France traditionally starts with a stage called ‘The Big Off’, which takes place outside France.  Usually this takes place in a country so near France that it is indistinguishable from France, like Belgium, which is either a country or a beer and mussels theme park, I’ve never been sure.

In truth, the nation is right to be excited about hosting the Big Off.  It’s actually right to be over-excited about hosting the Big Off.  This is a big deal.

Because the Tour de France is impressive, the race footage tends to be swooping helicopter shots of idyllic villages, castles and monasteries.  It should really be accompanied by a swirling, stirring orchestral score and a telephone number at the bottom of the screen to ring to get your brochure.

The excitement has been building for some time now, developing into expectation.  This is drama, this is excitement, speed, colour, swooshing along roads, flinging water bottles left and right, the crowds loving it and, of course, the names of the villages being rendered in French on the BBC, something that will especially cheer a certain class of claret-coloured illiberal xenophobe and possibly stimulate UKIP membership.

This is the greatest Big Off ever because it’s taking place in a country that loves cycling, is used to putting up with road closures, is enthusiastic to the point of mania when it comes to cheering and is taking place in a country so beautiful one might be mistaken for thinking some of it is CGI for a fantasy film.

Professionals

Visiting a different part of the city, it’s increasingly obvious that different areas are home to different tribes.  For instance, in the City itself, you get an awful lot of people and bicycles.  This is not, I suspect, because they can’t afford the bus fare.  Looking at the bikes and the freshness of the lycra that these people sport as they pass in a day-glo swoosh, this is a two-wheeled tribe that have decided that public transport is simply not for them, possibly because they do not wish to become contaminated with poor.

Then there are men who look normal, except on their feet they have trainers in clown-shoe colours with soles of a thickness that would not look out of place in the glam rock era.  That’s right.  Men.  Wearing trainers to work.  What next, lip balm and hair conditioner?

The City is home to Professionals, making their way to work with the same sort of purposeful intent you see insects exhibiting in nature documentaries. 

Traditionally the definition of a professional is somebody who gets paid for what they do but lately I’ve been thinking that there’s more to it than that.  A mini-cab driver is paid for their work, but so is Lewis Hamilton and I know which of the two better defines the term ‘professional driver’.  Of course, this does not mean that you would want Lewis Hamilton as your mini-cab driver, as his habit of stopping for new tyres three times every trip might prove inconvenient, as might his habit of grabbing his fare’s bottle of fizz, shaking it up and spraying it all over the place every time he dropped somebody off at a party.

Roughly, only 3% of people who get paid to do something are expert enough in it to be called ‘professional’ in the true sense of the word.  Normally, the deficiencies of the remaining 97% go unnoticed because they work in HR, or B&Q, or somewhere else with initials instead of a name.

Hence, I propose that the definition for professional be: somebody who earns enough to afford a pool and a hot partner, or can change a fucking till roll unaided.

Lawyers are a good example of multi-tiered professionalism.  For reasons far too dull to go into I’ve been wandering past the Old Bailey on a regular basis recently and, because the only thing I dislike more than huge corporations are bloody protestors trying to tell me where to drink my coffee, I’ve been popping into Starbucks for my java and really, really, enjoying it (secret recipe: full fat milk, one shot of Big Coffee and a pinch of guilt).

Obviously, there is the standard issue Man With A Beard writing something on his Apple Mac but in the Starbucks near the Old Bailey you also get trios of lawyers clustered round those little tables the size of mushrooms.  One has a laptop, one has a file, one has a mobile, all three have worried expressions and no wonder, in twenty minutes they are due in court and this is their prep.  There is evidence of muffin consumption.

Meanwhile, and example of the REAL professional was already standing outside the Court.  She has adopted the ‘pissed off raven’ look that all successful female barristers acquire when they reach the tipping point of assurance in their profession, with wig, gown and black tights it’s a look they lifted from Patricia Hodge in ‘Rumpole’ but have made their own with the simple addition of a fag.  Yes, while the boys and girls are in Starbucks drinking latte and green tea, the real deal is having their breakfast Benson & Hedges without even smirching the slash of red lipstick that proves they can be a successful lawyer and a woman too. 

This then is the lawyer you want if you’re in a tight spot.  The Starbucks Three are not the team you want defending you if you are facing a ten stretch being banged up in a cell with someone they call ‘The Fairy With The Enormous Cock’.  If you’re in trouble, you want your lawyers at the very least to be a) pounding fags and espresso or b) from off telly.

Balls!

'Fast ball!  Fast ball!  Fast ball!'

Ah, the Six Nations.  Good because it’s rugby, good because it’s a major tournament, great because it’s one of the rare sporting events that is broadcast on the BBC.  If Sky and ESPN continue their domination of sports broadcasting, the only sporting choice left to those too tight to pay to watch their team perform disappointingly is going to be Little League and fights in pub car parks.

The thing about the Six Nations is that one starts the tournament with such high expectations and, because it is stretched out over a number of weeks, it takes a while for those hopes to be crushed.

'One can’t help but feel that cricket might be improved if the batsman occasionally 

chased the bowler around the pitch with his bat in response to irresponsible bowling'

There is also spectacle.  At Murrayfield they have a piper and a field gun, presumably to keep order if Scotland actually score a try.  There are the anthems, everybody singing, everybody crying.  There’s also the ever present threat of a bit of off-the-ball action, which is what a punch-up between players is referred to as.  This is not the sort of behaviour one would expect to see from professional sportsmen, although one can’t help but feel that cricket might be improved if the batsman occasionally chased the bowler around the pitch with his bat in response to irresponsible bowling.

The downside to watching the Six Nations is the commentary.  For some strange reason, the BBC’s rugby commentary team seem to be afflicted with a disproportionate number of old women.  Not that I have anything against old women, old women are lovely, it’s just that when an ex-rugby player is being unswervingly negative about a team who, whatever their performance, are sweating and bleeding and steaming in the driving rain in order to win the game, it does rather detract from one’s enjoyment.

This is the year though, when I add social media to the mix.  Have you ever watched a sporting event whilst following it simultaneously on Twitter?  It’s fantastic.  It’s like going to the cinema, watching a film and having everyone talking at once, sharing their ill-informed opinions and giving advice to the characters, all in neat little soundbites, but in real time and with the added bonus that there is plenty of ‘off-the-ball’ action between Twitterers (Twonkers?  Twypers?) who do not share the same opinion.

Following Twitter and watching telly has been something of a short-term craze for me this past week.  Once you get into it, it’s hard to stop until you have a breakthrough moment that you’ve seen it all before and, actually, it’s not adding to your enjoyment of ‘Bargain Hunt’ as much as you thought it might.

It is a great idea, real time updates on social media from people who are having the same experience that you are.  Like with so many great tech ideas though, it’s the execution that lets it down.  That and the users.

Because what you are really looking for is somebody to make amusingly cruel comments that add another layer of enjoyment to whatever you are watching.  There’s even an app that allows you to filter social media comments about live television and, in the short term, it is gigglesome but in the long term depressing that so many people are at home at five thirty on a Saturday night watching ‘Jurassic Park’ in their pyjamas.  That’s my thing, that’s not your thing, alright?

I’ve been in a stadium watching a rugby match as part of a social network known as a ‘crowd’ and the comments are, generally, kept to a minimum of ‘ooooh’, ‘ahhhh’ and ‘fast ball!’, which seems to get shouted an awful lot, along with hints and tips and advice for the players and the ref.  These do not, generally, make for good tweets.  Mind you, neither do the things actually being tweeted.

So I’m just going to assume that a live sporting occasion is a shared experience without relying on any actual evidence, and I am going to go on believing that the sort of people who tweet really do have better things to do on a Saturday night than watch ‘Jurassic Park'

in their pyjamas.

They are wrong, of course, there is no better way to spend your Saturday night.

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.

Re:cycling

Bikes.  Lycra.  Olympics.

This has been a spectacular summer for cycling.  Not actually cycling, of course, it’s been bloody miserable weather and unless your cycle came equipped with those pontoon things that they fit to helicopters to allow them to land on water and get attacked by sharks, it’s unlikely you will have enjoyed cycling this summer.  Certainly, I get out on my bike now and again, usually when I want to make a short hop and am both to lazy to walk it and far too tight to bother paying for parking at the other end and certainly again, this year, I began to question being too tight to pay for the optional rear mudguard on my bike, as the spray from the rain thrown up by my rear wheel somehow managed to both hit the nape of my neck and soak my arse.

The spectacular cycling was mainly happening in the velodrome of the Olympic Park and in the streets around Hampton Court, where Team GB showed two things; that if you are one of the greatest cyclists in the world at the peak of your form, you are likely to be looking at the arse of the member of Team GB in front of you and thinking very dark thoughts indeed, and that if you wear lycra, you need to have the body of an Olympian underneath it.

Cycling is, apparently, the new golf.  This, I think, means that middle-aged men have something to get them out of the house at the weekend for a few hours and also something to spend vast sums of money on in order to have a better time doing it.  I have no idea where carbon fibre comes from but I do know that bikes made out of it are very expensive and, presumably, whoever owns a carbon fibre mine spends most of their evenings rolling around in cash, hookers and coke.

The worrying words in the paragraph above are ‘middle-aged’.  In isolation, not a cause for concern.  Let me throw in another word.  Lycra.

I know, I know, we all thought that the practice of wearing lycra as a surface layer finished in the eighties, at the conclusion of which it was tossed in the huge cultural skip along with ra-ra skirts and rolling up the sleeves on your jacket.  Apparently not so.  Middle aged men are wearing lycra to cycle.  The result…have you ever seen sausage meat being squeezed into its skin?  No?  Lucky you.

Because the reality is if you want to be a champion cyclist, you have to be superhuman.  This is why the only people who should appear in public wearing lycra are those with super-powers, or the sort of people who have got up at four in the morning every year since they were eight and spent all day practicing pedalling.  By which I mean Olympians.

Because to be a champion you need an unhealthy degree of obsession.  You may think all you need is enough steroids to make a racehorse break the sound barrier and more blood bags than a vampire banquet, but not so.  You also need a bike so advanced it makes a Formula 1 car look like something that clowns pile out of in the Big Top.

Middle aged men will proudly show you their carbon fibre bikes so light that they can pick up with one finger, after they have unscrewed the GPS system, the water bottles, the on-board defibrillator and so on.  This is a far cry from the bicycles of my youth that gave so much joy, machines that appeared to be made out of scaffold poles welded together and were practically indestructible, or at least child-proof, which is practically the same thing.  These same hearty beasts of burden in grown up form propelled district nurses around and were often to be seen with bags of groceries suspended from both handlebars as stately matrons returned from the shops.

The Olympics came to London to inspire a generation.  They did.  In this case, it’s the generation of blokes over forty who walked past the Harley showroom and straight into Action Bikes for some serious kit and some very tight pants.

Bikes today are so light they have to be tethered to railings to stop them floating away.

Olympic glory

The best way to explain a visit to the Olympic stadium in London is to compare it to a pilgrimage, and in particular the effect that seeing a cathedral and a crowd for the first time would have on a rural medieval mind.

It's that profound. Entering the Olympic park is exciting enough, as more and more people join a mass all travelling in the same direction, but getting up close to the Olympic stadium is something else. It's immense, the culmination of every stadium ever built, from a circle scratched in the dust to the Colosseum to Wembley, distilled, rolled into one and constructed on the scale of the gods. It's like Karnak with a running track.

And appropriately, it has it's myths. Like the transport system is crowded. Far from it, travel to and from the park was smooth and easy. And that the airport style security would take two hours. All I can say is that I wish security at Gatwick was that friendly and efficient. The troops were fantastic. No doubt about it, these guys seen close up have moved beyond the status of troops and are now officially Warriors, and are obviously enjoying the novelty of having kids wanting photographs with them rather than being shot at by angry bearded men.


The same goes for the police. Most police spent their time lending their helmets to small children to have their pictures taken in. The mounted police horses showed great patience as they were continuously patted and the police were presumably thinking that this was a lot, lot better than a year ago, when people were throwing things at them. Things that were on fire. Even the police snipers on the roof of the Holiday Inn were probably having a good time. I hope they were in a good mood anyway.

Inside the stadium, the atmosphere was such that one suspects that there is actually a noble gas called 'euphoria'. I was giddy to the point of nausea with excitement, the early start and the altitude that our seats were at (second to back row, meaning you don't miss a thing happening on the track or field, or indeed anywhere below cloud level).

The best way to describe the Olympic experience, seeing an Olympian in action? It's like watching your team go a goal up in the last minute of play in the final, it's like your favourite band hammering out the opening chords of your favourite song at the gig, it's being pushed into your seat as the airplane accelerates down the runway, it's pure, unadulterated exhilaration. With added cheering. And it's like that all the time.

The crowd's reaction to the athletes was incredible. As Mo Farah ran his 5000m qualifier, the crowd applauded as he passed and the sound circled the stadium like an audible Mexican wave, for twelve and a half laps of the track, building every time until on the last lap it was a constant cacophony of clapping, shouting, cheering and screaming. Mo qualified and I believe the correct sporting term is that the crowd went bananas.

There were also moments when the reaction of the crowd made one ridiculously proud to be British, like the athlete who pulled a muscle and limped home, helped across the finish line by 80,000 people cheering, or the woman competitor from Saudi Arabia, last in the race, first woman competitor from her country, and the reason the entire stadium erupted as she ran for home.

History was made. To be part of that, to be making that history is a privilege and the crowd knew it and embraced it and applauded, cheered and shouted it. It's no wonder that Brits have been using the word 'proud' unironically.

And when the crowd got behind the Team GB competitors, it lifted them, with Lynsey Sharp in the women's 800m doing the last 200m like a rocket, gifted wings by every raw hand and throat.

Team GB was also much in evidence on the front of every tee shirt and baseball cap and if anyone was in any doubt about who was supporting what team, the Union Flags worn as scarfs, capes or sarongs banished that doubt. Thank God that the Union Flag is such a design icon and looks fantastic on everything from socks to hats, imagine coming from a country that features some sort of fowl as your national emblem. We don't care how well you do in the games, there is no getting away from it that that your flag has a chicken on it.

And to put one argument to bed, rock music + athletics = fantastic! Anyone that has ever run with a running mix will appreciate that the right beats gets the heart pumping, and apparently it goes for the spectators too!

And of course, I had to visit the largest McDonalds in the world. It was...excellent. Oh god, the shame. I've not been to a maccy dees in twenty years but that cheeseburger tasted just the same as it always did (fries were a bit sweeter than I remember though), just as good as it always did, just as satisfying as it always did. Once through the door at the express lane a lovely young woman took our order on a hand held gadget and by the time we had paid it was ready. Out to the garden area, got a seat no problem. The place was heaving but super-slick and rather relaxed. It's also maybe reversed my prejudice about the golden arches that started with the McLibel trial and rolled on from there but now, maybe it's time to start wolfing down those big macs again. I still recall with affection the result of a big mac meal, with a greasy wrapper and that curious feeling of satisfaction and nausea that comes from inhaling 250% of your recommended daily allowance of fat, grease and clumsy slaughterhouse worker.

And the restaurant was great place to take a break, because the Olympic park was home to, what looked like, half of the population of the planet. The were people everywhere, including volunteers (happy to take your photograph) and folk with insulated backpacks peddling beverages - the beer comes in plastic bottles, how about that for a culture shock? No matter, I wanted to bribe one of them to follow me round all day like a mobile mini-bar. Maybe that's the way forward, not one bloke with beer and another with water, but one chap with overpriced beer, spirits and toblerone. And not just at the Olympics either, I think it could catch on in everyday life.

There is a lot to be impressed by when watching athletes that are doing things in front of you that you would normally associate with CGI, but one of the most impressive things is their focus. The pole vault, 5000m qualifying race and hammer throw are all happening simultaneously and each athlete is in a world of their own, oblivious to the incoming wildly thrown hammer or bloke falling to earth like an angel. It's this focus, I think, that makes an Olympian, the ability to separate yourself from the dross of everyday existence. It's probably this same quality that gets you up at five in the morning on a wet winter day to go on a training run.

The Olympic hype began the moment we secured the 2012 games and the build up has been on the hysterical side for months but nothing, nothing can actually prepare you for being in a place which, for a brief period, is arguably the most important place on the planet.

Just to prove the point, the only event that even came close in terms of human achievement this week happened on Mars.

Two wheels good

The men’s Olympic road race runs out from and then back to the centre of London but on Box Hill in Surrey it dos eight circuits of the Hill. This is the place to see the race.

Which is obviously what the thousands who lined the route thought. The crowd was divided into two broad camps, those who were there to get close to an Olympic event, and cycling fans. You could tell the cycling fans, they had come on their bikes, in lycra. Middle aged men should not wear lycra, no matter how sport appropriate it is, it’s not age-appropriate. The only way to make a middle aged bloke with a gut look worse than he would naked is to put him in a skin tight lycra tee shirt and shorts that are brightly coloured.

The event itself was breathtaking. Just as you have no appreciation of what a horse race is like until you have stood against the barriers and felt the ground tremble as the horses thunder home, so you have no idea of the speed and scale of a mass cycling road race until you’ve seen it up close, and it does get close, with cyclists passing inches from the tip of your nose and the wind from the rushing peleton rippling flags and banners as they sped past.

Encouragement came in cheers and applause for the riders, as well as good luck messages of encouragement scrawled on the tarmac. I’m not sure what they say about Britain in Iran, but when the Iranian cyclist, who was a little behind the pack on his own, goes home his image of the Great British Public will be loads of people clapping and bellowing ‘come on Iran!’. We may not like their nuclear programme, but we like a plucky cyclist.

Also starting to wonder if there is some sort of nickname index for how posh a sport is. Basically, if your name is shortened and ends in ‘…ers’, it’s a posh sport, like cricket (Tuffers). If it ends in ‘…o’, it’s a bit less posh, like cycling (Wiggo, Cavo). And if it ends in ‘..ker’, you play football.

Come on Tim!

There is an argument that the best way to enjoy any sport is to watch it on telly, especially if the coverage is on the BBC and so uninterrupted by adverts featuring models from the ‘ordinary looking people’ books of model agencies, i.e. ugly kids enthusing about chips. The best way to watch Wimbledon, I have always considered, is to pack a picnic, place the telly at the end of the bed and watch from beneath the comfort of a duvet, occasionally shaking the covers to remove pork pie crumbs. Tennis being a sport so dull that it’s best to watch it in conditions safe to doze off in.

Unless, that is, you are lucky enough to get tickets. This means that not only do you have the impetus to actually attend (f**king how much for a ticket?) but you don’t have to queue, the queue for tickets famously being like the ones normally associated with an Asda check out the week before Christmas, or outside a polling booth at a newly democratic country’s first free elections since the General was shot.

And Wimbledon is an experience. Forget the tennis, that’s the least of it. What you have is a sprawling complex, like a Village, which is clean and tidy and full of happy and courteous people. The person I went with described it as being ‘like an enormous Waitrose’ but I’d go even further and describe it as a place where the normal rules of Englishness are suspended, in that people speak to one another.

Moreover, in a world-turned-upside-down way, the ground staff are incredibly helpful. Not just polite, helpful. If they see a couple doing that thing where they squeeze together and the bloke holds the camera out, wishing he had the reach of a gibbon so he could get some more background in, a member of staff will offer to take the photograph and will not even attempt to run off with the camera. Can’t see the staff on my local railway doing that.

The Village is comprised of tennis courts and snack shacks and picnicking areas, and people wander from one to the other, gazing and grazing. My first impression was somewhat influenced by being hit by a tennis ball (on the elbow, where else) two minutes after stepping into the place, and I barely had time to consider whether it was worth recovering the thing as evidence to use to sue whoever the tosser was that couldn’t keep his serve inside a court, swiftly working out that anyone that crap at tennis would not be worth suing, even if they were playing at Wimbledon, when some blazered official swooped and ran off with it. I later learned that they sell the used tennis balls. I have yet to determine whether this is to legitimate tennis fans, or pandering to some hitherto undiscovered extreme form of fetishism.

Centre court itself is like a crucible. Sitting high and looking down, it resembled a cross between the Emirates Stadium, a boxing ring and a church. Make no mistake, this is the site of fierce sporting competition played out in a theatre the design of which has remained largely unchanged since the days of the gladiators, but the crowd here at least hush when somebody serves. And there are less lions.

Was there ever such a game? Even cricket doesn’t come with this much ritual, personnel and obscure rules and scoring attached to it. There is an umpire sitting in some sort of pulpit, there are line judges, there are ball boys and ball girls and looking over it all is the all-seeing ‘hawk-eye’. Oh, and a couple of players.

In this case, Victoria Azarenka and Serena Williams. Every time she exerted herself, Miss Azarenka made a noise like some sort of whooping bird, of the type that you would not wish to have nesting outside your bedroom window. She let out a whoop like a spooked mule and the crowd really did seem to enjoy it. She lost to Miss Williams, who looks like she was put together from off-cuts from Arnold Schwarzenegger and who merely grunted whenever she thrashed the ball.

As these two battled it out on the balding lawn of centre court, there were other distractions for the crowd. Sir Cliff Richard was in the royal box, tanned to the point of mahogany and proof that after a certain point cosmetic surgery can leave you looking like a cadaverous bull’s testicle, wearing the dodgiest syrup seen outside a puppet theatre.

As polite and relaxed (glasses and bottles chinked, cans hissed as they were opened) as the crowd were, a scene unfolded in front of us that resembled a Bateman cartoon that may well have been titled ‘The woman who took a mobile ‘phone call on Centre Court’. Never has a child so mastered the art of pretending not to be with the mother sitting right next to them as the boy in front of me did.

The English love an underdog and Tennis provides something of a tricky challenge for them as the upper hand in the game can go first one way and then the other. There were chants of ‘Come on Serena’, then ‘Come on Victoria’, then the occasionally drunken attempt at intimacy with ‘Come on Vicky’ and finally the crowd wag with ‘Come on Andy’. I resisted the temptation to bellow ‘Come on Tim!’ as being bottled to death by tennis fans as a result seemed a real possibility.

Everyone was turned out immaculately, the players even exhibiting style with two balls tucked into their pants. The Ralph Lauren styling however, makes the line judges look like sinister extras from The Great Gatsby.

More than the tennis, the day is about the experience. If it was all about the sport, the courts would be packed and the bars deserted. This was certainly not the case. But panama hats off to the All England Lawn Tennis Club, one is allowed to take in a picnic, including a ‘reasonable’ amount of booze, which was quantified this year as a bottle of wine per person. Notice that they did not mention spirits and in the spirit of making the most of the day by drinking heavily at lunchtime, I managed a half bot of champagne (Christ, I sound like Bertie Wooster), followed at various intervals by cans of ready-mixed gin and tonic or Pimms and lemonade. It made the whole thing very watchable.

But I don’t want to give the impression I put together an irresponsible picnic, I also packed several pork pies.

Our sporting life

The British are a great sporting nation, but it’s the English who excel at summer sports, not least by managing to persuade people that half of the bloody stupid things they do are actually sports and not, as it appears, some sort of folk rite. If bowls is a sport, morris dancing should be an Olympic event.

The English are good at summer sports because they get the weather for it. True, at present the weather favours summer sports like rowing, but usually the gentle summer sun favours the gentler sports. An Englishman likes a sport where he does not have to actually physically exert himself.

For the Scots, golf is the game they can claim to have given the world. It’s a good fit for the national character, as there is nothing quite like teeing off into the teeth of a howling gale and losing, in no particular order, ball, match and bet in order to set one firmly on the path to alcoholism.

The Welsh have made rugby their own. Large men rub up against one another, sweating and heaving in a dirty and brutal struggle. Then they come up from the pit and play rugby.

The Irish have hurling. Pints of second hand Guinness into the gutter on a Friday night.

For the English, essential sporting equipment is not a bottle, box or hurling tongs, but a panama hat, blazer and club tie.

Croquet is the epitome of an English summer sporting pastime. It is, to begin with, insanely complicated. Not just a matter of thumping your opponent into the ground like a tent peg using your mallet, you instead have to go round and through various hoops before hitting the pin to finish. There is a rumour that Dan Brown’s next book is about somebody who uncovers the hidden meaning in the game and then spends the next 200 pages feverishly wanking with assorted objects, including a pine cone and a small bust of Queen Victoria, up his arse. Erotic fiction is quite the departure for Dan and it will be interesting to see what his fans think of it.

But back to croquet. Apart from being so complicated that ironically the only person who can understand it enough to play tactically is Stephen Hawking who, of course, is unlikely to be swinging a mallet any time soon, it has a reputation for being played by posh people. Presumably this is because like shotguns, the only people trusted not to go bonkers when handed a mallet are those with breeding. When handed a double barrel shotgun, the correct response is to drive immediately to a grouse moor and attempt to depopulate it, not to drive immediately to a Natwest and attempt an unconventional withdrawl.

So posh is croquet that here in the village the bowling club briefly became a croquet lawn (croquet is played on nothing as vulgar as a pitch) and croqueters were to be seen enthusiastically knocking balls through hoops with every indication that they knew what they were doing. Possibly they were using an app but I suspect they were simply using the same English Assurance About Being Right that allows them to express forthright views on immigration at dinner parties. Not that I’d ever criticise a croquet player, the way they swing those mallets they could do me more damage than a chaffing pine cone.

There is something splendid about croquet though. Like bowls which requires the sort of green that more resembles a snooker table than a lawn, like cricket where the leather and willow are incidental to the tea and the quality of the light on the pavilion, so it is the sport entire that we hold dear; the English summer sunshine on a blazer’s brass buttons, the quiet applause as a player does something unfathomable yet obviously popular, the congratulations through gritted teeth as matches are won and lost and, of course, the shrieks of fear and terror as the president of the bowls club finds out that the captain of the croquet team has defiled his beautiful lawn by knocking bloody great hoops and pegs into it and goes absolutely fucking mental.

Oh, sorry, he’s English…absolutely fucking eccentric.

G&P Awards - Sport

Sportsman of the year – it’s been a great year for sport, as long as you were not an England rugby fan. 2011’s World Cup saw the unnatural prospect of having to watch a rugby match with a cup of tea rather than a beer, then saw the startling development that you can drink beer first thing in the morning, it’s actually just social convention that frowns upon it. The tricky think was to get out of the habit when the World Cup ended, but after a few days most of us were back to nursing a beaker of coffee on the train rather than a can of Harp. While the rugby team were rather better at throwing dwarfs than the ball, there were notable successes in other fields, with records set in badger baiting and deer chasing. However, the award has to go to Richard Carello, the jockey who distinguished himself this year at meet at Chepstowe by starting on one horse and, when it started flagging, tossing another jockey off of a neighbouring horse and winning the race on his horse-jacked mount. Caarello was, quite properly, disqualified for improper use of the whip in unseating the other jockey.

In the news

That’s it, it’s time to roll up the internet. I don’t care what you’ve used it for, updating your status on Facebook to tell everyone you’ve left your wife to get together with your school squeeze that you contacted through Friends Reunited (remember that?), selling second hand tat, buying yet more tat, tweeting, twittering, twatting and looking at porn, porn, porn. Doesn’t matter, nothing will ever be as good as this story:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12161449

That’s right, a drunk Russian circus. This story has everything, clowns, dangerous animals, ‘mythical beasts' and all of it soaked in alcohol and sadness. And not just any sadness, Russian sadness. Their plays are famously dour but, by God, it takes misery to new heights to have a sad circus. It’s like Ray Bradbury had collaborated on a story with Charles Bukowski. The bit about the family walking through a blizzard, a BLIZZARD, to see the circus only to find that it had been shut down by the police before it could be burned down by the folk who had seen the first, and only, show is enough to make a gargoyle weep. Instead, it was just the children blubbing.

Crying kiddies aside, this is a great idea. I mean, normally at any sort of show you expect the audience to have had a drink, but the performers as well? Genius! Everyone knows that the only way a normal person can tolerate theatre and especially musicals is to bolt gin both beforehand and during the interval. Who can doubt that the RSC would not put in even greater performances if the actors were hammered too, and can you imagine the reviews ‘Patrick Stewart was the greatest pissed Polonius ever to throw up on the stage of the Swan’?

And why draw the line at theatre? Formula 1 is just blokes in cars going round and round while the teams argue about diffusers, which I thought was something that you fitted to a hairdryer. Any sport that the teams look to settle in court is not to be respected but, what if every time a driver pitted, he had to down a vodka shot? Obviously Red Bull would dominate yet again but it would be good to see the drivers knocking the stuff back instead of just advertising it.

I actually went to the circus once. I dimly recall a lady in spangly tights and a sense of tremendous enjoyment but what I remember most clearly was the sheer amount of snacking I got through – a hot dog smothered in sauce and onion, popcorn and God alone knows what else. I probably didn’t need fed again for a week. Certainly the circus comes every year to the village, no doubt to give children the opportunity to run away somewhere for a life of mucking out the clown caravan and nursing a crush on the trapeze girl.

Match report

A colleague of mine one mentioned the surprising fact that she was a season ticket holder for Watford Football Club. Presumably, that means she has a designated seat that she always sits it, just like the others who sit around her and presumably that means that the chap who sits in front of her must be getting fairly fed up with hearing her favourite phrase to employ when Watford are underperforming: ‘Oi, Watford, it’s a good lot the other lot are shit too!’.

When, though, does our enthusiasm for sport take on that abusive edge? I’ve just come from my nephew’s little league game, where his team won three two after extra time. Now, I’ve been to little league games before but this was a cup final and, if it was decided on decibels, I would have been impossible to call between our coach and theirs – although I award extra points to their coach for the aggressive way he managed to scream ‘get up!’ every breath. This could refer to keeping the ball in the air, moving up the field or stop rolling on the floor blubbing and wanting your mum to stop the bleeding after a particularly nasty tackle.

I’ve attended various little league matches over the years, watching my nephews progress from basically bumbling tots chasing after a ball to morose teens who, on a Saturday morning, stop: growing, sprouting hair, producing acne or thinking about girls and divert all that energy (and that’s a LOT) into sprinting around a football pitch for ninety minutes like a ball-seeking missile made of elbows, knees and aggression. When the kids are young, every action is met with applause, even when the opposition score a goal. Because we ant them to learn sportsmanship.

Tonight was different, tonight when the opposition scored there was, from our side of the pitch (oh yes, it was like the Sharks and the Jets out there), polite applause. There’s a difference.

So I’m used to shouty coaches and screaming fathers trying to live out their dreams of footballing glory through their sons (or daughters), but tonight as a special treat we had a footie mum. A footie mum is just like a pushy mum, but louder. Think of the sort of woman with scary hair and glittery eyes who breeds show dogs, cross her with somebody who lives in a caravan with a satellite dish attached and who breeds dogs for illegal fights and you’re getting the picture.

Looking at the kids charging round that pitch and listening to a coach screaming ‘fame and glory!’, one does wonder if the kids are doing it for their benefit or our entertainment. It was certainly thrilling, if only because I know that there is no child so inconsolable as one who feels he has let down his team, himself and his coach and the fallout from defeat would be grim, but there was a little bit of guilt, like you always get when you see a kid performing, when you think ‘is this worth it? Look at them, there’s fear and anxiety and desperation but is there enjoyment…is this exploitation?’

Then the final whistle went and I thought ‘fuck it, we won, who cares?’. Then the kids sprayed lemonade like it was champagne. Which is ironic, because when I have the opportunity I drink champagne like it’s lemonade.

The Beautiful Sentiment

Why support a premiership football team? Certainly, if you like matching decorations then supporting Manchester United is fair enough, as a visit to their shop will outfit you with a themed duvet, lampshade, wallpaper, toothbrush holder and loo roll. The same can be said of Arsenal and Chelsea, with the added benefit that you can complete your collection of footie tat with a tattoo.

If you were born in the area and they are your team then fair enough, but it's something of a mystery why most of Manchester United's supporters don't live in a Manchester post code, they can't all have moved out of Manchester (although having visited Manchester, that's not a bad idea).

Maybe it's to be associated with success. If one had to support one's local team, simply by being in their catchment area, most supporters would spend their weekends shivering in rain-swept provincial footie grounds, risking food poisoning from the catering and trench foot from the stands, instead of watching Premiership football matches from the warm safety of the pub.

Misery. That's the usual reason you stick with a team. You watch one match where they should have won and that they lose and that's it, you've made an emotional investment and the next thing you know you're buying replica kit to wear at 3:00pm on a Saturday.

Which is what, perversely, has drawn me to take an interest in Aston Villa. They have followed the lead of FC Barcalona, who don't have a sponsor's name on their kit but rather sport the word UNICEF to raise awareness of that organisation and have the name of a local children's hospice, Acorns, instead.

This, I think, is tremendous. And imagine the edge it gives you over some tosser with the name of a paint company, arms dealer or airline on his chest.

Ping Pong

The only two sports that are called what they sound like are ping pong and canoeing. Ping pong isn’t even called ping pong, it’s called table tennis – what blatant crap, when was the last time you saw a table offer a choice of surfaces, grass, clay or that blue stuff that‘s probably made of rubber or something? It’s ping pong because that’s, sort of, the sound it makes.

Canoeing is so called because when you are rolled upside-down by a wave and are being swept towards some deadly rocks, the sound you hear when seventeen gallons of water are forced into your ears is: ‘canooooooooooo’

Problems present themselves. Many winter sports simply make that ‘shussshh’ sound.

But not when you listen closely. Skiing makes a ‘shush, shush, shush, shush, shush’ sound, speed skating makes a ‘shushshushshushshushshush’ sound. The four man bob sounds like this: ‘Aggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh’. The luge is quite different, not only is the pitch of the scream several decibels higher, it’s follow up with: ‘Fuuuuuuuuuucccccccckkkkkkkkk!’.

The great thing about renaming sports is that it pricks pretence. For instance, boxing. Boxing would be renamed ‘Oof!’. Boxing can be defined as two blokes knocking the hell out of one another, but the boxing federation spits people up by weight, so suddenly there’s bantam weight, seagull weight, vulture weight, heavy weight, yo momma weight and Of Course You Don’t Look Fat In That Outfit weight (women’s boxing). Still want weight classes? Okay, It’s called Oof! And you can differentiate by using different fonts and point sizes.

Formula 1 racing? Easy. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

To be good at sports you can’t rely on natural ability, or even magic boots. You can’t even rely on drugs anymore, not just because of the testing but because you just know that the bastard in lane two has managed to get some of the good stuff.

The situation is fast developing where just about everything we eat has some kind of banned substance in it, at least that’s how athletes facing a ban plead. Apparently their kebab, unknown to them, had ginsing root, steroids and some sort of horse stimulant in it. Unless they are able to pull a horse-shoe out of the chilli sauce bucket at the kebab van to substantiate this, it’s unlikely to get them off.

The argument that an athlete can accidentally take some sort of banned performance enhancing substance is, of course, complete tripe (100% steroid free tripe). If everyone is unknowingly chowing down on food adulterated with performance enhancing drugs, why is the news full of stories about everyone getting fatter? It should be about burger inhaling kids breaking the world record for the egg and spoon race on school sports day.* (Headline: ‘fast food!’).

Just about the only stimulant left to athletes is an iPod with some inspirational music on it (‘Gold’ by Spandau or the ‘Rocky’ theme), or a coach willing to stick a dab of mustard on the end of his finger and stick it up your arse at the start of the race. Even then the Japanese would have the edge: wasabi.

*A nostalgic aside, I recall that at my primary school the starter was always the caretaker, because he had a pistol. As a child I thought nothing of it but now realise that it was obviously some revolver he’d probably prised out of the hands of a Jap in Burmah after a machete fight, and that sports day organisation meetings probably went thus:

Deputy Headmistress: And for the position of Starter this year…
Caretaker: I have a gun.
Deputy Headmistress: Yesss, I’m not sure that’s appropriate.
Caretaker: I have a gun.
Deputy Headmistress: Maybe the children would prefer something less…
Caretaker: I have a gun.
Deputy Headmistress: Just because you have a starting pistol does not mean…
Headmaster: (Smiling benevolently, filling pipe) That’s not what he means Marjory.
Caretaker: I have a gun.
Deputy Headmistress: Oh.
Headmaster: Our Caretaker will be Starter. As usual. Next?

I thought all school sports days had a caretaker with a WWII sidearm starting races. To this day I can’t really run unless I have the smell of gunpowder and the screams of an accidentally shot badger to encourage me,

Anyone for tennis?

The sound of grunting, punnets of strawberries at eight quid a pop and middle class people sleeping rough and queuing like refugees at a border post can only mean one thing – the start of Wimbledon.

Tennis is the most middle class game in the world. Before you have a racquet, ball or any kind of skill, you have to have a decent washing machine or at least a tub of water and a shedload of bleach because this is a game played in whites. At least it is at the all-England tennis club and I suspect the reason behind this is because, well, if you allow aged male duffers to set the dress code, then white sensible knickers combined with micro-skirts is going to be the result.

Wimbledon is soaked in tradition, and usually rain. By tradition, this sport sees the great British hope pluckily get through a couple of matches before they meet somebody good, or Australian, and then they are pounded into the court in a chalk-dust raising display of home-turf humiliation.

Tennis, though, isn’t really an English game. Okay, it was invented here and so on, but like a middle class family, it’s emigrated. Football is the same, except that like a criminal, it was deported. In the case of Football it went to South America and became a religion. As for tennis, it’s now played more on the Continental courts of those with a second home is France, or in Australia, where the clay surface was invented, or as I believe it’s termed, the outback.

One thing is for sure, the ground may not be saturated (yet) but the telly coverage is. And I don’t really mind this to be honest – there’s something therapeutic about the light green, the gentle thwock thwock noise and the occasional grunt or trouser cough of a straining athelete.

There’s only one thing that’s slightly disquieting – the muscles on the women players, and the way they tuck their spare balls into their knickers.

Up and under – with fizz

The six nations is underway, which means that every weekend I can be found sporting my replica Scotland shirt and screaming at the television.

Screaming at the television is a very different occupation to shouting at the television. Shouting at the television is what you do when you are confronted with stupidity. This is, of course, something that happens every day in real life and we put up with without comment, but I’m buggered if I’m going to let it happen in my own front room without remonstration. Usually shouting at the television happens on the hour, as this is when news bulletins are broadcast.

There are occasions when the screaming turns to shouting and these are less to do with the performance of the team than the performance of the commentators. I don’t know what it is about rugby commentators but they are, at least the domestic ones, the most negative breed of people I’ve come across.

If a team wins, it’s because the other team made errors and beat themselves. If a team loose, then they are written off for the rest of the tournament (interesting to see if they learn the lessons of England’s amazing performance in the World Cup).

The real issue though, is the narrow lexicon of rugby commentators. A few seasons ago, you could not watch a match without hearing a commentator opine that ‘they’ve left themselves a mountain to climb’ when a side go more than ten points down. (Wales apparently left themselves with a ‘hill’ to climb on Saturday. Presumably we can look forward to other landscape protuberances being pressed into use, I especially look forward to hearing that a team has a tumulus to climb, as I’ve often seen them marked on maps but have no idea what they actually look like).

If they go fifteen points down, then ‘you’re just playing for pride now’.

This season, apparently, is all about fizz. Is the team fizzing, in a state of fizzment, has there been sufficient showing of fizz? With a new stock phrase added every year, by 2020 you won’t need a commentator at all, just a randomiser.

To me, commentary should be limited to who is passing to whom, how the pass was achieved and what local club they play for. If it’s the player’s birthday or his wife has just had a baby, this may also be mentioned. It used to be that commentary options were either listening or turning the volume knob down. If the match was on the radio, one listened to the (better) radio commentary as a matter of course (especially if it was Test Match Special). Thanks to the digital age, one now has ‘commentary options’ when watching a match. These though, are fairly restrictive, telly commentary or usually the local radio commentary from the home nation.

It’s coming to the point where I’m going to mute the teevee and stick on some music. You know how they cut together the ‘best bits’ of the match into a montage at the end and play ‘beautiful day’ or something over it? Well, imagine the whole match being like that.

12 days of Christmas – Looking forward, looking backwards

I’m quite looking forward to 2008. Certainly, it’s good to know that, for instance, there will be no more Star Wars films at the cinema to piss on more of my childhood memories. Good to know too that the Olympics will be happening during the night, meaning that you don’t have to watch any of the tedious crap. The only events worth watching will be the sailing, and only then if they bring in a rule that allows you to launch broadsides.