Things I Hold Dear

From an early age I have been a sports obsessive - player and spectator. I still play golf (frustratingly badly and I'm afraid there is no false modesty at play in this) and I still run and cycle for fitness. However late middle-age (I suppose I ought to admit that it is really early old-age) affords more room for spectating. I ought to add that I also still enjoy reading good sports journalism and books. All of which brings me to some recent realisations that the land I eventually leave behind (I'm in no hurry) risks being very different from the one I inherited from my forebears.

Association football is the great and beautiful beast that threatens to swallow the sporting landscape whole. We have the continuing saga of Manchester City and their legion of uber-expensive lawyers trying to wriggle off the hook of the dubious Financial Fair Play Regulations. Regardless, the beast lurches on breathing fire and burning cash. 

Cricket may just about me my favourite game to watch and I think it spawns the very best writing on sport. One of my most cherished possessions is the 1960 Wisden, given to me on my fiftieth  birthday by two dearest friends - 1960 was the year of my birth. It records first-class cricket in the age before the birth of one-day cricket. It records a civilisation gone with the wind. And yes I know that things had to change but something seen on television today brought home to me that test cricket, that magnificent yet frustrating animal, is dying on its feet. Today is the first day of the South Africa v Australia test at Durban. There is hardly a soul in the ground. Sad, sad, sad. I fear a world peopled by 'franchise players' trailing their coffins around the shrinking world at the behest of television and playing nothing more spiritually sustaining than glorified pub cricket. 

My greatest love as a player was rugby union. The game has been savaged by professionalism. the fifteen man code, at its monied levels, has become a twenty-three men per side cauldron of collision. Meanwhile the amateur game is tragically diminished. I can foresee a not too distant future where the amateur game hardly exists. This pains me but I have no solution to offer. The world is becoming a lesser place.

And all of this in the week when the greatest nation on the modern Earth (it just about still is despite Trumpian privations) announces that it will stream the execution of a murderer for public consumption. That atrocity does, I suppose, put my sporting woes in context.