Last rites
FRANK KEATING Even before the last splurge of qualifying group games are played in rugby union's World Cup, consensus agrees the tournament has already turned into a calamity for the four from the British Isles. Even a quarter-final place will mean a grievous sudden-death public execution next weekend. We shall see. Mind you, say the silver-lining bright-siders, the rugby in France has at least been a jolly sight heartier for domestic spirits than that of England's cricketers in South Africa's Twenty20 'world cup' — another game we 'invented', although in the latter's case the pathfinders were zootsuited fast-buck marketing men.
At both the rugby and cricket, the wailing post-mortems began piling in long before the last rites are actually administered on the field. In France, for optimistic diehards at least, there remains for one more week the faint glimmer that a Lazarus, whether dressed in red, white, blue or green, could yet rise from his bed and begin sprinting and jinking, dodging and weaving with joyfully victorious abandon right to the final on 20 October. For realists, however, the prosecution is already in savage spate. In England, the club treadmill is taking the brunt of the blame — too many attritional matches being played by dim, overmuscled iron-pumping hulks; also bang-to-rights, of course, is a conservatively dud national coach. In Wales, the problem is the incessant, incestuous squabbling by inbred clubs (plus, it goes without saying, a conservatively dud national coach). In Scotland, players may bust a gut, but the `fans' seem oblivious; and Ireland has been saddled by the same team for so long it has just grown old and lame and grey together; naturally, they are lumbered, as well, by a conservatively dud national coach. Oh dear, only a few weeks ago fair stood the wind for France: well, hadn't the British Isles quartet had half the summer for meticulous World Cup preparation in secret training camps, while the southern hemisphere countries had to travel north, hotfoot, with scarcely a weekend off after finishing fevered domestic competition?
England's cricketers play the first international match of their Sri Lankan series this coming Monday in Dambulla. Will they remain as desperately 'shot' as they were in the South African hit-and-giggle slog? A joke tournament, sure — but abysmal England were the pay-off joke. Why continue picking one-trick one-hit wonders from the county game instead of, simply, the 11 best available cricketers, as Australia does? In the concluding debacle, I watched on Sky Sports India's batsmen flay England to all points of the Durban coastline. Carnage. Half an hour before, on the same channel I saw a snatch of Surrey's crucial county match against Lancashire at the Oval — and gloried in the resplendence of Mark Ramprakash 'blocking' boundaries with beauteously instinctive timing as he posted a majestic curtain-call century, his ninth of 2007 and, in all, his 96th. In doing so he topped his 2,278 runs (average 103) and eight centuries of 2006. When he embarked on this outrageous blaze 18 months ago, Ramprakash was 36 and deemed far too old for international cricket. Ludicrous. Geoffrey Boycott was also 36 when he was restored to Test cricket after a three-year exile; coincidentally, Graham Gooch was 36 when he was capped again after being dropped as 'past it' in 1989. Look it up: once back, Boycott scored a further 3,500 Test runs with ten hundreds; Gooch scored 4,000 more with 12 hundreds. Have England's (dud) Test selectors once asked Ramprakash if he'd please play international cricket again? Have they heck.
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