Clive Davis

ASHES TO ASHES

I don't want to spoil Norm's enjoyment of the Test series, but Simon Hughes sees worrying times ahead for Australian cricket. Call it the English disease, if you like:

It starts at the top. After the Australian victory in Adelaide, I sat outside the dressing rooms waiting to interview Ponting. He emerged after a while, having been delayed by a congratulatory call from the Prime Minister. This was typical of John Howard, fawning all over star sportsmen and pronouncing on all things cricket, while the national economy disappears down the swanny. Meanwhile in education, his government has so far been unable to stifle the burgeoning disquiet about declining levels of PE at school or silence the nannying clamour in this law-obsessed country that cricket is dangerous. And teachers over-burdened with admin are increasingly reluctant to spend after-school hours supervising games...

As with England, the running of junior cricket in Australia is increasingly in the domain of the volunteers, those parents (and grandparents) who unfailingly give up their evenings and weekends and holidays to coach and umpire and ferry the kids to matches. Except that in some states they are not picking up the slack like they were. In Perth, for instance, where I played grade cricket 20 years ago, there has been a steady decline in the amount of colts cricket as fathers work longer hours and children fall into the grip of computer games. Since the 2005 Ashes, there has been a slight surge of interest, but it just camouflages a general trend.

Depressing, yes? But there's worse to come.

...The Americanisation of Australia is happening fast. Junk food and obesity are increasingly prevalent, their effects visible during the lunch intervals at the Adelaide Oval. Groups of 10-year-olds trotted out on the grass to play kwik cricket. I was taken aback by the lumbering physiques of some of them. Ten years ago you'd have seen any number of stylish batsmen, sprightly bowlers with athletic actions and natural throwing arms, and Shane Warne's Spin Set (containing a manual and two easy-to-grip balls) was the top-selling Christmas present. This year it's the latest Nintendo game.

NOT CRICKET

Norm is so busy enjoying the sights and sounds of the Gabba that he may not have had time to read the obituary of Geoff Griffin. Not exactly the most famous cricketer of all time, to be sure, but a central figure in one of the most notorious "chucking" episodes of modern times:

Though Griffin bowled at half-pace, he was again judged to be throwing... Cruelly, when he switched to underarm in order to finish the over, he was no-balled by Lee for not informing him of his change of action.

A DAY AT THE EMIRATES

Thanks to a very generous friend of ours, my two eldest boys were able to go to the Arsenal vs Newcastle match on Saturday. I dropped them off at the Emirates Stadium, pottered around in Islington, then picked them up at the final whistle. Two quick thoughts from someone who doesn't go near a football ground that often any more. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, but the supporters I saw were incredibly well-behaved. As we were leaving Highbury & Islington station, three teenage Muslim girls wearing hijabs passed in the other direction. I braced myself, expecting the sort of abuse that was common currency back in the Seventies and Eighties. (I recall a particularly nasty afternoon stuck amidst the Everton crowd at Goodison.) This time, not a word.

The other thing that struck me, as I was standing outside afterwards, was how many home supporters left the match - which was a bit of a cliffhanger - in the last ten minutes or so. (I'd heard that getting back to the Tube can be time-consuming.) I was following the action by peering up at the close-circuit TV screens in one of the bars. The fans could easily have done the same, but they strode off into the night. If I'd spent as much money on a ticket as they had, I'd have stuck around. But maybe they were "customers", not fans.

Apologies for the blurred image, but I quite like it.

PUTTING LINKS

Republicans and twelve irons... the connection is even more pernicious than I thought. Here's a piece that Michael Crowley wrote more than a year ago:

The Republican obsession with golf reveals the party's phony posturing as the champion of average Americans. All the hand-wringing among Democrats about why liberals don't go to NASCAR races or duck hunts misses the fact that Tom DeLay and Bill Frist don't go to monster-truck night with the guys from Deliverance either. They hit the links at exclusive country clubs with rich donors and corporate lobbyists. That's who they are. Golf is an expression of the party's elite upper-class id. And that id is what's corrupting the party.

[Hat-tip: AM]

My feelings about golf are summed up by the scene in Falling Down where Michael Douglas creates mayhem on a green and inflicts a coronary on a man in silly striped trousers. Why doesn't that ever happen in the Open?

Oh dear, I just tried to Google up a photo of that episode. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that Douglas runs his own celebrity tournament. Pass the Uzi.

BROWN IS, ER, BEAUTIFUL

I don't normally expect all that much from articles about mixed-race Britons - a subject close to my heart - but Anna Kessel's Observer story on football turned out to be an exception:

You have only to look at England's World Cup squad this summer. Six out of seven of the players described as "black'"were mixed race, but this was not mentioned on TV or in the written press. Mixed-race people account for about 1.4 per cent of Britain's population, so for mixed-race footballers to make up 26 per cent of England's elite is a huge achievement.

It's fair to say that Stan Collymore doesn't have a particularly shining reputation, yet he delivers the most thoughtful observation about a sense of belonging, or the lack of it:

Show me two rooms, one with black footballers, one with white footballers, and I would pick a room on my own.

Not at all a gloomy piece, though, even on the discussion of that awful word "half-caste". I did a Sunday Times interview with the American author Lise Funderburg on this subject a decade ago, when she published Black, White, Other, and even then I was struck by how much more relaxed everyone had become about the identity issue. The sense of stigma that my generation grew up with is withering away. As is the unspoken pressure to sign up to one identity or another. My kids are totally unflustered by it all. Sometimes I wonder if that's because they lead too sheltered a life, but on the whole I think they've got it just about right.

[Via Pickled Politics.] Pootergeek offers own take in The Age of Beige.

OFFSIDE

Copyright problems over at the football video site, 101 Great Goals. I hope this isn't a sign of things to come.

CROATIA 2-0 ENGLAND

I didn't see it; listening on the radio was painful enough.

Assuming Martin O'Neill is tied into his contract, is this the moment to  start a Bring Back Graham Taylor campaign?

TWO SPORTING PARABLES

The thin line between success and failure... Brian Doogan has a poignant interview with Leon Spinks - ex-heavyweight champ and conqueror of Muhammad Ali - now working as a janitor in Nebraska:

"I'm happy here," he said, with not a trace of self-pity, smiling at a small boy who followed him along a corridor while he mopped the floor. "Kids come up to me all the time... I like it. I like doin’ what I'm doin’. I'm still breathin’, still makin' money and I have people round here who look out for me."

I was about eight when it happened, so I have only hazy memories of the bizarre case of Donald Crowhurst, the yachtsman who almost pulled off one of the most outrageous scams of modern times. Jim White writes in praise of a new film about a nautical morality tale:

The entire nation was behind him, thrilled by the efforts of the plucky amateur... He would be the hero he had always dreamt of being. But he knew the truth. And while he sailed back towards England he was going rapidly bonkers. In his cabin, he kept an audio diary. The sad, demented entries provide an awful soundtrack to the film, as the enormity of his deception dawned on him. Knowing only humiliation lay ahead, he decided to jump overboard.

His yacht was discovered floating unattended by a passing tanker. On board was the evidence that he never went round the world: the parallel log-books, the confessional tapes, the home movies of him sunbathing... This is the material that nearly 40 years later would make the movie of his life, a movie which will reduce the hardest of hearts to a shipwreck.

BETWEEN POSTS

Football blog 101 Great Goals is pondering the delicate question: "Who are the great black goalkeepers?" 

Soca warrior Shaka Hislop came close in his prime, no?

While I try to think of other candidates, here's another poser: who was the worst goalie ever to play for a great team? I nominate Felix, from Brazil's World Cup winning side of 1970.

STUD MARKS

As Hungarians take to the streets in an attempt to bring down the too talkative prime minister, here's a chance to recall the great football riot of 1954... No, I hadn't heard of it either. Anne Applebaum explains how the country's surprise defeat in the World Cup Final prompted a dress rehearsal for the ill-starred uprising that broke out two years later:

The "magical Magyars," as the British press called them, had won the Olympic gold medal in 1952, had beaten the then-invincible English team in London, and had defeated the Brazilians and Uruguayans on the road to the World Cup final. Soccer was then the most popular sport in Hungary, and the Communist Party took full credit for the team's success...

But the Hungarian team lost the final – to capitalist West Germany. That night, there were riots in the streets of Budapest. Angry fans burned sports newspapers and marched to the house of the Hungarian team captain, shouting for him to resign. Within days, the riots had stopped. Although not a word about them had ever appeared in the press, they were not forgotten. "Everybody felt something had happened," wrote one memoirist... It was an outbreak, an expression of discontent, a demonstration. It was something forbidden that tasted good."

As in her review of Victor Sebestyen's new book about the tragic events of 1956, Applebaum goes on to make some pertinent points about how the West can get into a tangle over which matters most, reform or stability.

(Aside for footie fans: lovers of the beautiful game - and of good films -  should get hold of a DVD of the story of the Germany-Hungary final, The Miracle of Bern. I've plugged it a couple of times before, but who's counting?)

[Hat-tip: Michael A.]