Yesterday didn’t go to plan. The intention was to do stuff, travel to places and generally get active. The reality was rather different. I’ve still got the August Football Blues – which is to say that I find August way too early to watch football, although I have been to one game so far – and I can’t bring myself to watch Saturday Soccer without the great Jeff Stelling and with the fanatical Godwhacker Simon Thomas, who appears to be an adequate, some might say generic TV presenter, but Stelling he ain’t. So I settled down for an afternoon and evening of sport on the telly. I’m not sure that all of it was the best use of my time.
First, it was a rugby union friendly match between England and Fiji at a half-empty Twickers where, perhaps, the posh boys decided to stay in the car park rather than watch the dismal fare on show. I don’t blame them. The World Cup starts in two weeks and I am not unhappy that I will be out of the country for the first two weeks of it.
Having performed abysmally in a series of friendlies against Wales, Wales again and Ireland, I reckoned that Fiji had been brought over as the whipping boys who would, as usual, play adventurous and ultimately reckless rugby union before tiring towards the end as England rattled in the points. Sadly, at least for England, Fiji failed to read the script and were comfortably the better team throughout. We now go into said World Cup as the bookies’ favourites … to fail to get out of the group, or the ‘pool’ as rugger chaps call it.
I am not overly patriotic at the best of times, but normally I like England teams at most sports to win. But the performance against Fiji wasn’t worth getting excited about and by the end I was rather hoping that after sacking the head coach Steve Borthwick, who somehow is making a crap team even worse, the RFU might consider withdrawing the team from the tournament to save us further humiliation.
The rugby union coverage on Prime was adequate at best, but the commentators and pundits were woeful. Nick Mullins prattled on, as if desperate to fill any dead air, thus missing numerous calls by the it’s-all-about-me referee Jaco Peyper and the two main pundits were simply hopeless. Former England hooker Dylan Hartley couldn’t be objective because, as he said, he had too many friends in the team, and Topsy Ojo spoke with all the authority and knowledge of a man who has won all of two caps for the national team.
Things looked considerably up on Sky when they screened Wigan Warriors thumping victory away at Catalan Dragons, a sport in which players do not spill the ball at every opportunity, kick the ball in the air every time they get the ball and miss straightforward tackles. As a near lifelong Wigan fan – I loved them when they were in the second division back in the 1960s and absolute shit, honest guv – I felt uplifted, something which only got better when I watched the second innings of the hated Hundred cricket competition.
The Hundred is definitely hated by traditionalists and old people, who are probably the same people, but it’s certainly grabbed my attention this season. Last night, Southern Brave rattled up an impressive and unbeatable 196-1, except that Manchester Originals, led by the brilliant Jos Buttler scored an even more impressive 201-3, winning with four balls to spare. Yes, it’s a franchise, yes it’s geographically nonsense with vast parts of the country unrepresented and yes it’s a bastardised form of Our Summer Game but look at the crowds, look at the number of young people attending games and watch the bish bash cricket, which I have been doing with surprising regularity. Anyway, it was great.
Finally, it was boxing. Never my favourite sport because of the very nature of a sport which is to render one’s opponent unconscious. That can never be a good thing and the result is former boxers who struggle to string words together due to severe brain trauma. But I still watched Ukraine’s Oleksandr Usyk knock out Britain’s Daniel Dubois in the ninth round. I don’t feel great about watching boxing and yet it is strangely compelling, sport at its most raw and exposed. And when Dubois crumpled to the floor late on, I thought to myself, I wonder if he will remember any of this in the years to come?
That was my sporting life and what a waste of time and life it was, apart from the Wigan game, obviously, and perhaps the Hundred, too. Watching all this great sport reminds me that I’m too old and infirm to play almost all sports these days and that playing, even as badly as I did, was so much more fun than watching.
