SPECTATOR SPORT
The madness begins
FRANK KEATING
Overture and beginners, please. This is it, for real, and mercifully the hysterical months of jingo-jangle jibber-jabber are stilled and silenced into concentration today when, at long last, the England football team plays the first of its three qualifiers in the World Cup against Paraguay in Frankfurt. To reach the sudden-death knockout stages in a fortnight’s time, England also need, as they say, ‘a result’ against Trinidad & Tobago in Nuremberg on Thursday, and against Sweden in Cologne on Tuesday week. The strident tedium of the trailers has been excruciating. Now all shall be revealed. Will the defence dither and drift? Has the once dagger-sharp Lampard refound his edge; Gerrard his appetite; Owen his speed off the mark? Is Beckham, anyway, too old, too rich and too distracted? Could, even, the ludicrously steep salary of Sven the Swede (nearing £20 million for five years’ work) turn into money well spent?
More than 60 years ago, my father would come home for a Saturday lunch from the Gloucester cattle market with — as well as a packet of wine gums as a treat for us — a copy of that week’s Punch and Spectator. I distinctly remember wondering if the former was to help Dad keep abreast of the prizefighting world, and the latter a weekly update for general sports’ watchers. In fact, each mag did sometimes include sporting articles — Punch with, say, Bernard Hollowood on village cricket, or A.P. Herbert on the Boat Race; and for sure, by the time I was out of my pram and able to read, the Speccie each week through the late 1940s to the mid-1950s unfailingly carried an enchanting piece on all manner of sports by Labour MP, former Oxford rugby Blue, J.P.W. (‘Curly’) Mallalieu. They were the first sporting essays to delight me; to sow the seed and to hook me for ever, I suppose.
On Mallalieu’s Spectator watch, two World Cups were played — that of 1950, when the might of England was humiliated 1–0 by the United States in Belo Horizonte, and 1954 (smithereened 4–2 by Uruguay in Berne) but on neither occasion did Mallalieu, properly oblivious, bestow so much as a single sentence on this football in foreign parts, as he concentrated simply on the timeless midsummer season of olde Englande: the cricket, the golf, Henley, Wimbledon, the important matters. Likewise, almost, decades later when editor Dominic Lawson kindly appointed me for my first six-year bash in this corner in the spring of 1990. A World Cup was coming up — Italia 90 and ‘Nessun Dorma’, remember? — but we agreed not to go unnecessarily overboard about what was already beginning to get totally out of hand and we confined World Cup coverage to a single ‘profile’ of the England manager Robson. We never once so much as mentioned Gazza, and heartfelt letters to the editor thanked us for our moderateness at sticking to the cricket and tennis. Within a year, of course, the whole caboodle had gone completely and unstoppably bonkers when a young teacher, Nick Hornby, published his enlightening confessional about an articulate, insecure, graduate depressive being cured by standing on the Highbury terraces in a red-and-white scarf, and so a whole new constituency was told it was okay, even ‘cool’, to go to tinkling socialite dinner parties and discuss earnestly the difference between midfield dynamos and overlapping carriers, Banksie and Shilts, Hoddle and Waddle, 2-3-5, 4-4-2, 4-3-3 — or even (Sven’s last desperate ‘lotto’ throw today?): 4-5-1. After you with the brandy.
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