An odd year ahead
Simon Barnes
ODD-numbered years have an odd feel to them in sport. That is because each even- numbered year has a colossal, daunting and unmissable centrepiece: the Olympic Games or the World Cup finals. Such is the gour- mandising relationship between media and sport that instead of revelling in big events as and when they come, we feel somewhat cheated and deflated at the prospect of a Whole year without a major sporting festival. In point of fact, we have an intriguing year ahead. It looks like being a year dominated by national teams, each facing a different but searching examination of its progress. The first and most difficult question is how we will pronounce the name of the England football team's coach-in-waiting. Will we shoehorn him into a British that's-how-it's-spelt-so-that's-how-we'll- bloody-well-pronounce-it sort of space, and call him Gaw-run? Or will we show that we are all Europeans now, and celebrate the appointment of a Swedish coach to our team of cosmopolitan footballers, and call him Yer-ran?
Sven-GOran Eriksson is taking over this Year, and will have the difficult task of trying to steer an already struggling side through a fraught and difficult qualifying group. He takes over from Kevin Keegan, a good- hearted man but a tactically blind coach, who believes that tactics are a kind of pep- permint. Where is Eriksson's blindness? Time and results will reveal all, of course; but it seems to me that his problem is a romantic ideal of England and English foot- ball. Why else did he take the job?
The England cricket team has an encounter with Australia in the summer. England are, astonishingly enough, on the sort of roll we have not seen for more than a decade: they have won three series in a row, and look like a team of united purpose.
Australia, however, have been for some years the very best, and the chances of vic- tory do not look immense. But those inclined to predict an English victory are not certifi- ably insane. England are a side growing in confidence, while the current Australian side have reached and sustained a peak. Now, the heart of the side is beginning to show its age. It has at least come to a point when you can write quite comfortably that England's per- formance will not be supine. They will go into the series as contenders.
The rugby team ended the year looking like world-beaters, with the rugby world mourning the fact that the World Cup is three years away. But there was an aston- ishing self-certainty about the three succes- sive victories over southern hemisphere teams that really ought to see them domi- nate in the Six Nations championship.
Last season was enlivened by England's last-minute slither on the tartan banana- skin: a rain-sodden occasion in Edinburgh when the Scottish team turned into all- conquering heroes at the sight of a few patronising Englishmen.
The England team has been telling us for years that they are among the world's finest, and in the closing months of the year they looked the part for the first time under the current management. Sustaining that over the next year is the next test; flattering to deceive is, after all, the grand tradition of English rugby.
Three England teams, and each one at a different stage on the up escalator. Can't think when that was last the case. Wonder where they'll all be in 12 months.
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