I think the commissioning editors at Radio 4 were keen to broadcast interviews during that week with no political implications whatsoever, something which otherwise causes the BBC more than the usual amount of headaches about “balance” at such a time. The only condition, therefore, was that I couldn’t have any MPs as a guest — but I imagine that most listeners, even to Radio 4, would not see that as a privation after so many weeks of wall-to-wall politics.

On the other hand, I did invite the former world champion, Gary Kasparov, who in retirement from top-flight chess has devoted himself largely to the political struggle against Vladimir Putin. That formed the main theme of our interview. The discussion about his own physical risks if he were to have remained in Moscow were put into the sharpest perspective by the murder of Boris Nemtsov, soon after the programme was recorded.

But during our game the only terror was the one I experienced in trying to fend off Kasparov’s chessboard attack while also holding up my end of the conversation. Over the years, his grandmaster opponents had frequently spoken of the sheer intimidation they felt: and even in a friendly game in retirement against an amateur, I learnt that Kasparov is still terrifying. At one point he smiled wolfishly and declared, “I’m coming for you, don’t you worry”; and he played each move with a physical force that suggested nothing so much as the hammering of nails into a coffin.

Fortunately, as in the other two series, I play only one chess genius (in the first series I encountered the women’s world champion Hou Yifan, and in the second the men’s champion Magnus Carlsen). This time my eminent amateur opponents are the author of Stalingrad, Antony Beevor; the television presenter and former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan (yes, really!); the investment guru and world’s biggest sponsor of chess, Rex Sinquefield; and the six-times world snooker champion, Steve Davis.

In our interview Steve told me that he was taught chess by his father when just five years old, before he ever picked up a snooker cue. And his love for chess has lasted: he still plays regularly online. In a way, the two games have much in common, even though the snooker balls are governed by Newtonian physics (being physical objects) while chess is purely geometric.

Both pursuits require the calculation of a series of moves ahead, and both require the ability to concentrate for hours at a stretch. So it’s not that surprising that Steve Davis’s manager for almost four decades, Barry Hearn, has described snooker as “chess with balls”.

There have been some chess grandmasters with more than a passing passion for snooker: the former world champion Anatoly Karpov was keen and once played a unique chess and snooker match against  Davis (no guesses required as to which man won which section of the event). Most notably, the six times chess champion of Russia, Peter Svidler, has devoted a large chunk of his life to playing snooker, and in fact made some money at it in games for stakes. 

In our interview, Davis was clear that snooker and chess are pursuits with less in common than I had tried to suggest and that the very finely honed physical skills required for his professional pursuit were absolutely critical to mastery of the snooker table. Indeed, he said that the main reason why at 57 he is no longer able to do what he once could at the table — and thus was no longer a contender at the very top — is an almost imperceptible loss of fine-motor co-ordination.

I reassured him that a similar decline afflicts chess players who are well into their sixth decade — although in their case it is to do with a loss in mental focus. Conversely, in both chess and snooker, players appear to achieve startling results at a much younger age than was once thought possible. In chess, this has much to do with the development of computer software which enables the young to assimilate knowledge rapidly in a way that was simply not possible in an earlier era. But for snooker there is no such explanation; perhaps it is just that thanks to Steve Davis’s renown and impeccable reputation, parents were happier than they had been to encourage their children to take up a game once seen as slightly seedy.    

For the moves of my game against Davis, you will need to go to www.chess.co.uk where they will appear immediately after the broadcast. But if you can’t wait until then to see the former snooker champion in action over the board, here is the game he played against the Editor of Standpoint in a 1997 match between teams described as Academics and Philistines.

This was the amateur board but Daniel Johnson’s play with the black pieces here is as forceful as any professional’s: 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.0-0 Nf6 5.d3 h6 6.Nc3 d6 7.h3 g5 (This looks like a risky shot, but it correctly targets White’s Kingside weakened by 7.h3) 8.Nxg5 (White should probably have reinforced the g4 square and gone for safety with 8.Nh2. Instead Davis hazards a long pot) hxg5 9.Bxg5 Rg8 10.h4 Bg4 11.Qd2 Nd4 12.Nd5 (It looks as if Davis is about to embark on a big break, but Daniel’s thunderous reply reveals just how well placed the balls are for Black) Bf3! 13.Kh1 (13.c3 seems more challenging, but then Daniel would have been able to execute a spectacular clearance with 13…Nxd5! 14.Bxd8 Rxg2+ 15.Kh1 Rxf2+ 16.Kg1 Rxd2 17.Bxd5 Rg2+ 18.Kh1 Rf2+ 19.Kg1 Ne2 checkmate)….Nxd5! 14.Bxd5 (Taking the Queen with 14.Bxd8 now leads to mate in two with 14….Bxg2+ 15.Kh2 Nf3++)…Qd7 15.Kh2 Bxg2! and since 16.Kxg2 Qg4+ leads to rapid checkmate, Davis conceded the frame.

The post Snooker Without Balls appeared first on Standpoint.

James’s strange fruit was West Indian cricket yet his words are just as apt a description of the sport’s incarnation in Pakistan. In Wounded Tiger Peter Oborne recounts the game’s progress in that country from colonisers’ pastime to national obsession with the meticulousness and dedication such a rich and unlikely story deserves. Like any good cricket writer, he keeps in mind James’s best-known line, “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” As with Oborne’s excellent biography of Basil D’Oliveira — ;the South African all-rounder who played for England after the apartheid regime banned him from first-class cricket — Wounded Tiger puts the sport in its proper social and historical context. 

Immediately after the partition of India, Pakistan’s cricketing infrastructure was as flimsy as its national identity but over the years cricket and nationhood would grow symbiotically. The country had very few domestic teams and the sport wasn’t particularly popular beyond the middle-class neighbourhoods of Lahore and Karachi. When the fledgling Test team played at Amritsar, just 35 miles from Lahore, during Pakistan’s first tour of India in 1952, the players found themselves under police guard in a city where four of them had grown up. There were no longer any Muslims in the city and the stadium they had known as Alexandra Park was now the Gandhi Grounds. 

It wasn’t long before the Pakistanis established themseves on the international scene, quickly notching up wins against England and India. One thing these early successes had in common with later triumphs was that they were achieved in spite of chaos behind the scenes.

Oborne credits Abdul Hafeez Kardar and Imran Khan — two autocratic, Stakhanovite, Oxford-educated and Savile-Row-suited captains-with overcoming this administrative incompetence. Indeed, he divides Pakistani cricket until 1992 into two eras, the “Age of Kardar”, 1947-75, and the “Age of Khan”, 1976-1992.

The national team reached its zenith with World Cup triumph in 1992 when Imran Khan led them to victory against England in the final. In his telling of the team’s journey from inception to this triumph Oborne is perhaps a little too assiduous, providing detailed reports of matches of little consequence. It is when he puts down his Wisden and picks up his reporter’s notebook that he is at his best. He has interviewed almost every significant living figure in Pakistani cricket and it is their stories that grip the reader. 

After 1992 the historian of Pakistani cricket, Oborne says, begins to feel like Edward Gibbon. Depressingly, establishing 1992 as the high point is far easier than identifying the exact moment things hit rock bottom. Was it when Pakistan were thrashed by Australia in the 1999 World Cup final at Lord’s and their fans, with tears in their eyes, accused their heroes of fixing the match? Was it when, in the aftermath of 9/11, the team first experienced the shame of not being able to play home matches in their own country? Was it in 2009, when terrorist gunmen ambushed the Sri Lankan team bus in Lahore, murdering eight Pakistanis? Was it 2010, when Mohammad Amir, a brilliant but naive 18-year-old, bowled a no-ball so flagrant that it soon led to his exposure and imprisonment for match-fixing? 

Whenever the exact nadir was, the challenges faced by Misbah-ul-Haq, Pakistan’s present captain, make him the unsung hero of world cricket. Brought back into the team in 2010 after then-captain Salman Butt was jailed along with Amir, the 40-year-old has had to lead a team in exile, root out corruption and confront a chaotic administration, making a bad day for England’s Alastair Cook look easy. 

Oborne is a little too ready to absolve Pakistan’s cricketers of responsibility for the messes they have found themselves in. Practically every controversy in the book is the fault of a hostile — even racist — British press, and while Oborne may be right that Pakistan have been an underappreciated force in world cricket, their cricketers have not always helped themselves. But Wounded Tiger is a labour of love — trips to every corner of Pakistan, meticulous footnotes, and acknowledgments given to librarians in far-flung institutions like the Lahore Gymkhana — so we can forgive Oborne his rose-tinted spectacles.  

Even at the worst of times, it is difficult to tear yourself away from Pakistan’s mercurial team. The country has produced some of the most exciting and innovative players cricket has seen and Wounded Tiger is at its most enjoyable when Oborne is explaining how reverse swing transformed fast bowling and crediting the underrated Abdul Qadir with reinventing spin in the 1980s, turning the sedate into the terrifying. 

Wounded Tiger makes it clear that Ian Botham was being too narrow-minded in his tongue-in-cheek tribute: “Pakistan is the sort of place every man should send his mother-in-law to, for a month, all expenses paid.”

For all the challenges Pakistan faces today, there exists an admirable national pride, of which the nation’s embattled cricket team is a healthy and unifying expression.

The post Down But Not Out appeared first on Standpoint.

The Compleat Angler, reprinted in a new edition edited by Marjorie Swann (OUP, £14.99), does contain some fairly gruesome passages — how best to skewer live bait, including frogs and de-limbed grasshoppers; how to farm maggots in the corpse of a fly-blown cat — but this 350-year-old book, ostensibly a fishing manual, is also a paean to the English riverside. Hazlitt called it “the best pastoral in the language”; Wordsworth, “fairer than life itself”.

The majority of the book is comprised of a dialogue between Piscator, the fisherman, and Venator, the hunter, in which the former attempts to persuade the latter of the practical and spiritual merits of angling. Piscator reminds Venator that Saints Peter, Paul and John “were all Fishers” before quoting verses from other keen anglers: Montaigne, George Herbert and John Donne. The conversation takes place over several days on a fishing trip in the Lea Valley, during which they journey from Tottenham to Ware in Hertfordshire.

Last year a few friends and I did this walk. Three hundred and fifty years later the River Lea is still an active waterway, but bucolic it is not. A study in 2011 found that the river in the lower Lea Valley has such a low oxygen content that most aquatic life shouldn’t survive. Effluence from Deephams Sewage Treatment Works in Edmonton flows into the river, as does a good deal of East London’s wastewater, and pollutants are often washed into this tributary of the Thames from the roads that adjoin it — in July 2012 road run-off consisting of heavy metals, washed oils, dirt and dust saw thousands of dead fish wash up on the Lea’s banks.

When Piscator reaches Tottenham Cross he exclaims at its beauty: “And pray let us now rest ourselves in this sweet shady arbour, which Nature herself has woven with her own fine fingers; it is such a contexture of woodbines, sweet-briars, jessamine, and myrtle.” The High Cross monument that Walton would have known is still extant, but the trees have gone, replaced by betting shops, Turkish cafés and a car park. Two hundred yards away is Tottenham Hale retail park, site of the first night of looting in the 2011 London riots.

The fishermen spend the night at Bleak Hall, “an honest ale-house, where might be found a cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and…a hostess both cleanly, and handsome, and civil.” Bleak Hall survived into the 19th century, but in its place now stands the titanic Edmonton Solid Waste Incineration Plant.

North of Edmonton is an edgelands of nearly-countryside: the hum of pylons follows the river; semi-feral horses roam the boggy expanses of green opposite go-kart tracks, travellers’ camps and pumping stations. But once you cross Enfield Lock and pass under the M25 you reach something like Walton country. On our walk we spotted sparrowhawks, herons, a pair of muntjac deer and, finally, some anglers. Not quite the “Hony-suckle-Hedg’d” utopia that Piscator deems “too pleasant to be look’d on, but only on Holy-days”, but rewardingly pleasant.

The Compleat Angler‘s enduring popularity — it is the second most frequently reprinted book in the English language, after the Bible — stems from its celebration of nature, indeed almost its divination. Charles Lamb wrote that “it would sweeten a man’s temper at any time to read it”. Except Byron’s, that is.

The post In Walton’s Footsteps appeared first on Standpoint.

Tired stereotypes about Jews and sports have existed for as long as the sports themselves. Jewish boxers were “crafty” rather than powerful. Jewish basketball players were “cunning”. The shortest Soviet joke was always “Jewish athlete”.

A new collection of essays, Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox History (Twelve Books USA, $26.99) disproves some of the old myths, but, as the reader delights in discovering, it includes a cast of wonderfully oddball characters, some of whom were not even successful, others who were not really athletes at all: Renée Richards (née Richard Raskind), tennis’s first transsexual player; Don Lerman, the competitive eater who still holds the world record for amount of butter consumed in five minutes; wrestler Bill Goldberg-famous for his deadly “Jackhammer” finishing move-who refused an Anglicised name and went on to become the first undefeated WWE champion (who cares if it’s all faked?); and a wonderful essay by Howard Jacobson on Marty Reisman details ping-pong’s greatest showman’s 60-year campaign to get rid of the sponge in table-tennis bats.

The collection of essays, whose authors include Simon Schama, Steven Pinker, David Remnick and Deborah Lipstadt, reads like a Good, the Bad and the Ugly of the Jewish sports world, except directed by Woody Allen. (Indeed, two of the Jewish jocks in the book have acted in Allen’s movies, including the late loudmouth sports pundit Howard Cosell, who commentated in his inimitable style on a sex scene in Bananas: “I have never seen action like this . . . That’s it . . . it’s . . . all . . . over!”)

The good are the real stars: Mark Spitz, with his seven gold medals at an Olympic Games overshadowed by the murder of 11 members of the Israeli national team in the 1972 Munich massacre. Or Hank Greenberg, the “Hebrew Hammer”, one of baseball’s all-time greats, who famously refused to play on Yom Kippur. Or Red Auerbach, whose colourblindness as coach of the Boston Celtics helped to integrate basketball: he drafted the first African-American player in the league’s history and sent out the first all-black starting line-up in 1964.

The bad include Jack Molinas, a prodigious basketball talent who fell in with a set of Bronx bookies and started throwing games. He played only 29 games in the NBA, was caught and banned for life. The irascible and misanthropic Al Davis (slogan: “Just win, baby”), head coach of a vicious, yet victorious, Oakland Raiders American Football team who specialised in injuring opponents, is presented somewhere between anti-hero and anti-villain. 

The ugly is reflected in Jonathan Safran Foer’s essay on Bobby Fischer’s visceral anti-Semitism, a racism Safran Foer struggles to explain, but which he refuses to divorce from the chess player’s genius: “Perhaps chess is an inherently paranoid game, and anti-Semitism is the paradigm of paranoids.”

Although an American collection focused mainly on US athletes, this non-Jewish, British reader found Jewish Jocks both addictive and a brilliant and idiosyncratic refutation of the Soviet joke. But as its editors point out, Jewish Jocks is itself a Jewish joke. As well as featuring real-life he-menschen, it celebrates Jewish identity in all its ping-pong-bat-obsessing, choke-slamming, butter-eating glory.

The post Jocks Away appeared first on Standpoint.

But the usual debate failed to materialise during this year’s Olympics. Or rather, it took on a different form: not so much navel-gazing about identity as a debate about performance — one which could well influence German politics this autumn.

Among the cheery crowds of London 2012, Germans experienced an underwhelming start to the games. The self-styled “Sportnation” seemed to have been shut out. In the end Germany came fifth in the total medal count and sixth in gold medals, thus not only trailing behind the United States, China and Russia, but also behind Britain and South Korea. Most German commentators put the British success down to Britain’s home advantage or extraordinary triumphs such as that of Mo Farah. In any case, Britain’s array of gold and silver medals wasn’t seen as a sign of a new competitive spirit or ethos of high performance, as it probably would have been interpreted had it been Germany’s success. 

On the German side, however, what was striking was the longing for any form of visible strength, with much marvelling at athletic bodies. Colleagues kept asking me to write up a neat little cultural theory about one particularly well-toned male torso, just because they had had fun watching, say, synchronised swimming. A friend called it a “Riefenstahl-trauma”, after Hitler’s favourite director Leni Riefenstahl, who notoriously filmed the 1936 Berlin Olympics. 

Meanwhile, sport got mixed up with German politics in a very different and altogether less intellectual fashion. News emerged of the neo-Nazi past of Michael Fischer, boyfriend of the Olympic rower Nadja Drygalla, who subsequently left the team. Fischer was a former leading member of the National Socialists in Rostock in the north-east of Germany and a regional parliamentary candidate for the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) last year, but claimed he’d quit the scene before the Olympics, having decided to “stop being a neo-Nazi”. Only weeks later, during a visit to London, he posted a comment on Facebook stating he was taking the right steps towards “international understanding” by sitting “next to blacks and Pakis on the train”.

The case triggered a debate over whether Nadja Drygalla was being unfairly persecuted and subjected to guilt by association, with the Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière defending the young rower, saying her personal life had been intruded on. Others argued she should not have been allowed to compete in the first place because she evidently tolerated her boyfriend’s activities enough to share her life with him, making her unsuited to represent her country. Now, anyone who is familiar with this peculiar milieu in the deprived north-east of Germany, formerly part of the GDR, won’t be too shocked by this story. It is shocking, however, that Fischer’s activities went unnoticed for so long.

The real issue that ties this all together is the insecurity that lies behind it: desperately longing for medals as a kind of validation while rebuffing that very same idea as anachronistic, at odds with a newer, more relaxed patriotism that Germans are meant to have discovered. When it comes to sport, it seems, Germans still indulge in their never-ending quest for identity. Recent events call into question this 21st-century patriotism, which seems strangely contingent upon sporting success and unable to shake free of traces of the older, nastier variety.

“Britain is a country where nothing ever works properly,” a German who teaches at Cambridge University remarked grimly when talking about the London Olympics, “but the British just seem to have got tired of being losers.” In fact, it is fair to say that quite a few Germans were surprised at how London rose to the occasion. 

Maybe there’s an insight into the nature of enlightened patriotism here: tying a nation’s self-image to sporting success is not the same as freeing oneself from the burden of history. Whether Britain comes out as a loser or a winner at a sporting event (or the  export statistics) has perhaps the same short-term effect on the national mood as it does in Germany, but the impact on the deeper sense of self of the two nations seems to be quite different. How long would the new German patriotism survive if we Germans were to see ourselves as losers once more?

The post Olympian Angst appeared first on Standpoint.

The South African Test cricketers of that era — and only whites could be considered for the team — were often deeply unhappy about segregated cricket. They wanted to play India and Pakistan and they enormously admired the great West Indies teams of the time. Men like Trevor Goddard — an opening bat and seam bowler, one of the greatest all-rounders of the day — quite publicly made clear their wish to play multiracial cricket, while Clive van Ryneveld, who captained South Africa in their drawn series against Peter May’s MCC touring side in 1956-57, became an MP for Helen Suzman’s Progressive Party, dedicated to the abolition of racial discrimination, and publicly urged the case for a South Africa cricket team selected on merit. (There was pointed comment in the press about the fact that no Springbok rugby players followed suit.) Naturally, many great players such as Richards and Procter played English county cricket with all races: Richards, indeed, was famous for his opening partnerships for Hampshire with two West Indians, Roy Marshall and Gordon Greenidge. In each case this was the most potent opening partnership in the world.

“None of those men got any credit for their stand against apartheid,” says Ray White, formerly President of the United Cricket Board of SA, the sport’s governing body. “Many of them have since fallen on evil times. Poor old Neil Adcock, once the world’s fastest bowler, was recently ejected from hospital (he has cancer) because he couldn’t pay the bills. Remember that they were all amateurs and usually only had humble jobs to return to. In addition, some were bad at handling money. Sportsmen are often naive. They don’t know much about either politics or money. Someone like Barry [Richards] was always careful and shrewd but his team-mate, Eddie [Barlow], was far more typical, dying in penury. There have even been some suicides. But the most unfair thing is the way that Cricket South Africa under Gerald Majola showed real spite towards them.” (Gerald Majola, the first black head of CSA, has now been suspended for awarding himself large unauthorised bonuses and spending substantial amounts of cricket money to fly his family around the world. His suspension came after all its major sponsors refused to continue to support the national team until the Majola affair was cleared up.)

Bruce Murray, the Witwatersrand academic who has co-authored the key history of South African cricket, Caught Behind, says: “One has to be careful here. There were individual voices raised against apartheid even in the early days but there were also a fair number of dyed-in-the-wool racists in the team. The (then) South African Cricket Association was run by men who were politically timid and some were even racists. They actively collaborated with the Vorster government in the effort to prevent the selection of Basil d’Oliveira for the English cricket team due to tour South Africa in 1970. It was only when the team as a whole grasped the fact that they might get excluded from world cricket that they became really strongly anti-apartheid. This culminated in the famous occasion in 1971 when all the players walked off the Newlands pitch in protest after Vorster prevented them from including two black players in their Springbok team to tour Australia. The whole tour was then called off. Mind you, the Springbok rugby team never came close to a similar protest against apartheid.”

But the issue of the scurvy treatment of old sporting heroes is the emotive one today. Ray Gripper, who opened the batting for Zimbabwe for many years, supported this view. “I saw Roy     Maclean not long before he died in 2007,” he said. “It was always customary for past Test cricketers — and Roy was one of his country’s greatest-ever batsmen — to be invited with their wives to any Test in their home town so they could meet the tourists and chat to their successors in the national team. Roy loved this. Then he was told his wife couldn’t have a ticket. He queried this and was basically told that people like himself were now beyond the pale. He was absolutely livid and never attended the Test.” The same phrases keep recurring: under Majola the players of that era were “an embarrassment”, “were almost punished for being white”, “were held personally responsible for apartheid” and so on. Lee Irvine, a former Springbok wicketkeeper-batsman, confirmed that his privileges such as free seats at Tests had also been removed. But what upsets the old Springboks most is that their offers of help are refused. Jimmy Cook and Kevin McKenzie went to Majola to offer their help and were just told: “It’s our time now.” Irvine similarly offered to coach, speak or mentor the young and was told: “We don’t need you.” Others have similar stories.

Irvine says: “What upsets me is that there really ought to be a Barry Richards stand and a Graeme Pollock stand, just as other countries commemorate their great cricketers of the past. It’s sad for us who were Springboks that even that name has been discarded now [for the Proteas]. And I can tell you of that 1970 team there wasn’t a single man in the team who voted for the Nats and apartheid. In 1973 I found a loophole in the law and we staged a multiracial double wicket competition, which hardly pleased the authorities. But of course as soon as we began doing that sort of thing the ANC changed its stance to say, ‘You can’t have normal sport in an abnormal society’. They wanted a way of keeping the boycott going even if we went multiracial.”

A baneful political influence is still felt in South African cricket. When it was recently proposed that a stand at Newlands cricket ground in Cape Town be named after Basil d’Oliveira this was vetoed on the grounds that d’Oliveira had refused to follow the ANC party line.

As usual with cricketers, it’s the symbolic things that count. In the corridor leading to the Long Room at the Wanderers ground in Johannesburg, effectively the headquarters of South African cricket, there was a famous Honours Board on which the names of all the Transvaal players to be selected for their country were inscribed.  Alongside there hung photographs of famous home and touring teams of the past. Once Majola took over CSA the official view taken was that none of the past South African teams had been properly representative, since blacks had been excluded, and that therefore all those teams and all their games had been illegitimate. So the Honours Board and all the old photographs were taken down and vanished. This happened at all the major grounds. 

This insult was more than many could bear. Graeme Pollock remonstrated with Majola about the hurt done to many who had simply been sportsmen doing their best for their country. In front of several old members Majola dismissed him with the words: “You guys had your day. Now get lost.” This was made no easier to bear when Majola had South Africa’s national schools’ cricket week renamed after his own brother who, he claimed, might have played for his country but for his colour. Majola followed that up by going to Lord’s to ask (in vain) that all previous Tests involving an all-white South African team be expunged from the records, an act which outraged many old Test players. Majola kept lobbying Lord’s on this issue for two years but was finally told: “We can’t pretend those Test matches didn’t happen.” 

“Part of the problem,” says Ray White, “is that if after 1992 anyone said, ‘We ought to look after our old Test cricketers’, others would, quite reasonably, say, ‘What about the black cricketers of that era who ought to have been in the team but weren’t picked because of apartheid?’ There was no way to settle that. How do you decide retrospectively who might have been picked decades before? It made everything rather insoluble, so it was just easier to draw a line and forget about the former era and its greats.” 

Yet the oddity always was that cricketers usually got along as cricketers. “When I first came across Basil d’Oliveira I thought he might dislike me on principle,” says Irvine, who was playing for Essex at the time. “I would even have understood that. But he was much too nice a man. Dolly and I became great pals.”

It is certainly very striking that none of the greats of that era — not even the incomparable Barry Richards and Graeme Pollock — has ever been asked to coach or advise the current teams in any way — a bit like Australia ostracising Bradman. Similarly, the great fast bowler Allan Donald (“White Lightning”) was long ignored as a bowling coach and got the South African job only after he had been offered that post by both England and New Zealand. This ostracism extends even into the media. Supersport, the main TV sports channel, got rid of Richards as a commentator after he was said to have spoken out of turn on the vexed subject of racial quotas in the team. Similarly, the SABC got rid of Irvine as a commentator, replacing him with someone with no experience of first-class cricket. “I have no doubt that political influence was brought to bear,” says Irvine. Richards says much the same of his arbitrary banning from the airwaves. Instead, broadcasters now rely on Mike Haysman (ex-Australia) and Robin Jackman (ex-England), even though the latter played in the sanctions-busting “pirate” cricket tours of the apartheid era. Kepler Wessels is allowed his say, although he also played for Australia, because he was still captain of South Africa when the team re-entered world cricket in 1992. Clive Rice, perhaps the world’s greatest all-rounder in the 1970s and 1980s, has effectively been banned from all South African media because he is a vocal opponent of affirmative action in cricket. This is a completely taboo subject on South African radio and TV commentary although everyone knows it has been a major factor in team selection. The result is sometimes comic, as when a visiting foreign commentator like Geoffrey Boycott brings the subject up on air, only to be met by a steely silence from his colleagues. Rice has, typically, made some withering comments about this political censorship of cricket commentary.

Not all the old Springbok cricketers are bitter. Trevor Goddard says: “I refuse to get upset. You get knocks in life and being treated as we are now is one of those knocks but you can’t dwell on that. We played as amateurs and now they make lots of money but you know I think we had the best of it. We had a great sense of fellowship with one another and I sometimes think that gets lost amidst the money. In any case we were all made Life Members of Lord’s and they can’t take that away from us.”

Barry Richards is more indignant. “Not once have I ever been invited to a South African cricket function and they have even taken our numbers away from us [every player gets a number when first selected]. They just started the numbers from one all over again in 1992, which is to say we are no longer recognised as having played for our country. And the fact is that there’s nothing that annoys the present administrators so much as the kudos of that great 1970 team. SAB-Miller, one of the key sponsors, are always trying to involve people like me and Graeme [Pollock] and Procky [Procter] but the administrators won’t have it: they even threaten SAB that they’d call for a boycott of their products if they went ahead and invited us. It’s just absolute revenge. I’m entirely in sympathy with disadvantaged cricketers but our guys were disadvantaged in their prime by not being allowed to play the West Indies, India and Pakistan and we’re sure as hell disadvantaged again now.”

This certainly seems to be true. Mike Procter took off for England for this summer’s  Proteas tour in the hope of picking up speaking engagements and other commitments. “I have to seek work there because no one will offer me work at home,” he says. Graeme Pollock is in the same boat, negotiating to go to India to do speaking functions at much lower rates than those taken for granted by the likes of the top Indian batsmen Sashin Tendulkar or Rahul Dravid. Pollock, now 68, faces an uncertain financial future in old age. It is an amazing situation: in all Test cricket history only two men average over 60-Bradman and Pollock, iconic status which, one would have thought, would guarantee financial security. But the problem is, again, that he played in the apartheid era. “Naas Botha, the rugby player, wanted to start a Hall of Fame for Springbok sportsmen but Cricket South Africa would have nothing to do with it because it would have meant commemorating us,” he says. “The fact that we used to argue for selection on merit, not on racial grounds, doesn’t matter. The current players would, I know, like to have people like Barry [Richards] and Mike [Procter] involved but they have to be careful too: their political situation is still difficult. So it’s best that they just concentrate on making runs and taking wickets. I entirely accept that. The real tragedy is that all South African cricketers have been walking a political tightrope for 50 years and they still are.”

For the last few years South African cricket has been paralysed by the Majola affair — and even now Majola insists that his supension is temporary and that he will be back. Much of the trouble derives from the fact that there’s serious money in cricket these days. Back in the apartheid era Dr Ali Bacher, for long the South African Cricket Union supremo, made famously liberal use of his chequebook to bring “pirate” foreign teams to play in South Africa, effectively a sort of sanctions-busting campaign. Even now, some bitterness lingers over the pirate tours: Viv Richards, for example, said he would die sooner than accept Bacher’s money (which meant that Ian Botham quickly said the same) while West Indian players like Alvin Kallicharran, who did accept Bacher’s money, have still not been fully forgiven either in the West Indies or black South Africa. As with so many others, Bacher did a quick 180-degree somersault when the politics changed and became an outspoken advocate of picking more than half the national team from blacks. Indeed, Bacher was so determined to win political applause with such promises that he left his successors an impossible job. Although many mixed-race Coloureds and several Asians have made it into the team, interest and participation in cricket by black South Africans has grown far more slowly.

South Africa’s return to international cricket in 1992 coincided with the game’s increasing professionalism and commercialisation. Almost immediately South Africa became one of the world’s top teams and its players began to earn the sort of money that those from the previous era could only have dreamed of. Such money brought its own problems. Sure enough, before long cricketing South Africa was horrified to find the national captain, Hansie Cronje, owning up tearfully to taking bribes and match-fixing. The trouble had begun on a tour of India during which bookmakers had offered Cronje a fortune for his compliance. He put the matter to a team vote, to the utter fury of the manager, Bob Woolmer, who only discovered this later. “Bob was old school,” says Dr Tim Noakes, director of Cape Town’s Sports Science Institute, a co-author and close friend of Woolmer’s. “Mention bribes or match-fixing to him and he would see red. To him it was sacrilege against the game he loved.”

When the Cronje affair broke many wondered how high the rot had gone and whether Cronje had really been the sole sinner. Dr Bacher quickly issued a statement saying how horrified he was and that this was the first time he had ever heard about attempted match-fixing. “Bob was livid,” says Noakes. “He was always careful to send in a full report of any tour he managed and he had certainly reported in full on how upset he’d been about Cronje and the match-fixing incident. So he went tearing off to Wanderers to check the archives for that report. And of course, that report alone was missing.” When Cronje confessed, the prosecution wanted further details about exactly which matches had been affected. Cronje’s lawyers said enough was enough: he had confessed. When the prosecution insisted, Cronje’s lawyers said that if he was forced to testify further he would implicate people mucher higher up in the game. The prosecution immediately desisted. There are many in South African cricket who do not believe Cronje’s death in a flying accident soon after was an accident at all, and nor do they believe that Woolmer’s subsequent death in the West Indies was accidental either. All manner of allegations have been made, involving bookmakers and corrupt officials.

No one doubts that the money washing round the game was the key to the Majola affair, which centred on illegal bonuses Majola and others had awarded themselves after helping the Indian Premier League arrange its Twenty20 games in South Africa. But the very fact of this money makes the plight of the older cricketing generation harder to bear. Men like Ray White feel strongly that the game ought to look after its own and that those good enough to represent their country in any era should qualify. But the problem is that in South Africa the sport has not only changed professionally, commercially and in the amount of one-day cricket played. The cricketers themselves have kept up with those changes. But in South Africa the game has also changed, racially and politically. There has been much naiveté, greed and cynicism. Neither side in these changes has covered itself with glory.

The post The Silencing of South Africa’s Greatest Cricket Side appeared first on Standpoint.

This was not always so. Between 1976 and 1982 BBC2 ran a series called The Master Game, a chess tournament held especially for the viewers, with the results kept secret — rather like University Challenge. Some of the world’s leading players took part, including Anatoly Karpov and other giants of the game such as Viktor Korchnoi and Bent Larsen. It was highly innovative, with the players recording their thoughts after the game, which were then broadcast as the moves were “played” on an illuminated board — in fact, old — style BBC ingenuity involving fairy lights, mirrors and puppetry techniques, since this was before the digital age.

After such trailblazing, the BBC abandoned chess, and although both it and Channel 4 ran programmes covering the 1993 London world championship match between Garry Kasparov and Nigel Short, no British broadcaster showed the slightest interest when London again hosted the world championship in 2000 — when Kasparov lost his title to Vladimir Kramnik. The fact that there was no British participant had something to do with that abject lack of commitment; but it’s no wonder that Malcolm Pein, the chief executive of Chess in Schools and Communities, has spoken furiously of “the cretinous collective that comprise the BBC controllers [who] for the best part of 20 years have rejected virtually every programme proposal on a game played by millions”.

That Pein was not overstating the grass roots popularity of chess has been made clear by research by YouGov. In August it published the result of a unique global survey, which showed that no fewer than 12 per cent of the adult British population currently play chess (15 per cent of men and 10 per cent of women). That equates to a potential domestic audience of 6 million — not taking children into account — who understand and enjoy the game, even before the effort is made to attract those who do not play regularly but could be enthused if someone came up with the kind of innovative presentation that the BBC managed a generation ago.

That is now the mission of a most unusual entrepreneur, Andrew Paulson, who funded the YouGov poll. Paulson is an American former fashion photographer who made a sizeable publishing fortune in Russia. Earlier this year Paulson somehow managed to persuade the normally indecisive official world chess organisation FIDE to sell him the commercial and organisational rights for the world chess championship and associated events. 

Perhaps because Paulson himself is now based in London (he is a partner of Alexander Mamut, the Russian owner of Waterstones bookshops) the city which has just held the Olympics will also become the hub of world chess. On September 21 the first event of the next cycle of World Chess Grand Prix, involving 12 of the world’s strongest grandmasters, will be held at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand. This is a wonderful homage by the highly cultured Paulson to the history of the game. In the 19th century Simpson’s Divan was for chess what Wimbledon is for tennis or Lord’s for cricket. The leading players of the day would there take on all comers, while Simpson’s also held some of the era’s greatest tournaments, including the first-ever women’s international in 1897.

Paulson also plans to be an innovator, contracting the designers Pentagram to create a purpose-built “cockpit” so that the players will compete almost in the style of boxers or sumo wrestlers; and he has taken on the former Director of Interactive Design at the BBC, Vibeke Hansen, to — as Paulson enthusiastically put it to me over a good bottle of wine at his club, the Garrick — “transform chess into a spectator sport”.

Much has been made of the social benefits of holding the Olympics in London — that a generation of youngsters will want to emulate the determination and competitiveness of our sporting champions, whether on the running track or on two wheels. Physical fitness is obviously desirable in the young and competitive sport in schools is to be encouraged; but the argument for proselytising on behalf of chess is if anything stronger. It not only harnesses the competitive spirit, but has universally acknowledged benefits in teaching children the value of patience, planning and perseverance — the attributes most valued by employers in a developed world where manual labour is increasingly redundant and intellectual powers are in ever greater demand. Paulson recognises this, of course, and at the world championship candidates match he has scheduled for London next March, he will invite more than 200 promising youngsters to participate in tournaments and instruction before the official games begin.

Yet if no mainstream TV company deigns to broadcast or even follow the event, then Paulson’s hopes of creating a breakthrough in the appreciation of chess by young people are most unlikely to be realised. A generation ago, such hopes were dashed by the broadcasting unions: the 1982-83 series of The Master Game was never screened because of their industrial action. This was especially bitter for British chess, because that final BBC tournament was won by Tony Miles, who beat the then world champion Anatoly Karpov in their individual encounter with black. Here is that game, a truly tumultuous struggle. 1.e4 c6 2.d4 d5 3.Nd2 dxe4 4.Nxe4 Nf6 5.Nxf6+ gxf6 (Miles liked to play this variation against Karpov: it is positionally suspect but allows Black rapid development) 6.Nf3 Bf5 7.Bf4 Nd7 8.c3 Qb6 9.b4 e5 10.Bg3 0-0-0 11.Be2 h5 12.0-0 Be4 13.Nd2 Bd5 14.Bxh5 exd4 15.c4 Be6 16.a3 Ne5 17.Re1 d3 18.c5 Qb5 19.Rb1 Bh6 20.a4 Qa6 21.f4 Nc4 22.b5 cxb5 23.Rb5 Na3 24.Rb2 Nc2 25.Bf3 Bd5 26.Re7 Bf8 27.Bxd5 Rxd5 28.Rbxb7? (The wrong rook — Karpov blunders!) Bxe7 29.Rxe7 Qc6 30.Rxf7 Rxc5? (f5! would have been better) 31. Qg4+ f5 32.Qg7? (Uncharacteristically, Karpov panics while short of time: 32.Rxf5 would have kept good chances) Re8 33.h4 Ne3 34.Bf2 Rc1+ 35.Kh2 Ng4+ 36.Kg3 Nxf2 37.Nf3 (If 37.Kxf2 Re2+ and then Qxg2 mate) Ne4+ 38.Kh2 d2 39.Nxd2 Nxd2 and here, in a totally hopeless position, the world champion’s clock flag fell. But this drama was never broadcast. 

The post Going Mainstream appeared first on Standpoint.

In 1980 the Olympics ceased to be what they had been for most of their modern history and even remained a little in Montreal in 1976, which was a great festival of amateur sport intimately linked to the grass roots of sport and became a curious combination of the Soviet and the commercial. Since then they have failed to fit either of the two justifiable models of modern games because they are neither amateur activity done for the love of it nor are they entertainment organised commercially. The overwhelming majority of Olympic sports have no spectator following of any substance and in the case of those which do (such as tennis, basketball and football) the event is peripheral and a nuisance to the normal calendar. Olympians are no longer the outsiders who make it in their own way — as Harold Abrahams was or Don Thompson who won a walking medal in 1960 training on his own, using his own methods. Nor are they genuinely commercial stars like Lewis Hamilton or Didier Drogba. They are Soviet-style, state-subsidised creatures, competing for the benefit of their political masters: “Team GB” with the PM as skipper.

So what is in it for politicians and for the state? The Third Reich, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China are only the most notable examples of states which have abandoned an initial hostility to the Olympic movement in favour of trying to succeed within it. If David Cameron is looking for a “feel-good factor” from the 2012 games, which he surely is, he treads in the footsteps of Nazis and Communists. There is a kind of mirrored perception factor which can be generated either by winning a lot of medals or by holding a successful games because these things generate a national perception that one is admired elsewhere. They let you strut on the global village green. And this effect comes pretty cheap. The USSR chose the Olympics rather than the development of a world-beating F1 car or football team because it offered soft targets: not very many Western women felt a mission to emulate the likes of Tamara Press, the great Soviet shot putter. In the past I have calculated that a sports programme could deliver medals at around £100,000 each — currently three days pay for a top-class Premier League footballer like Wayne Rooney. Subsidising sport in the Soviet style has allowed China to rise to the top of the medals table without much in the way of sporting culture, tradition or infrastructure. And it has allowed the UK to go from one gold medal (+ 14 others) at Atlanta in 1996 to 19 gold (+ 28 others) at Beijing in 2008. And that was during a period in which participation in sport has declined steadily.

But even if one is happy with the idea of creating athletes for the purposes of state propaganda, there are plenty of other reasons why a sportsman — or any citizen — should be sceptical about the Olympic movement. It has been, historically, extremely corrupt in the classic manner of international organisations. There has been corruption in the allocation of games, in the covering up of breaches of rules (including doping) and in the judging of events. The latter includes marking cartels to rival those of the Eurovision Song Contest. I won’t dwell on the idea that £12 billion spent on hosting the games is a ridiculous way of spending money, much of it taken from sources that would have gone to grass roots sport and from places that needed money a lot more than London did. Also the “beneficial legacy” argument doesn’t really get off the ground in terms of historical examples: the Athens site from 2004 is already derelict and the Barcelona site from 1992, which is considered the most successful and which I visited a few weeks ago, is a minor tourist attraction, but essentially a white elephant. Unless used for other sports, the core problem here is that a stadium with an athletics track is something for which there is demand only three weeks in every four years. There may be some hope that the legacy of London 2012 will be better than that of predecessors, but there isn’t much to beat.

All of these criticisms of the games seem to me, at least, rational and informed, but rationality and information have little to do with reality. What is real is what the American sports sociologist Rick Gruneau calls “fairy dust”, which turns dross into glamour. The overwhelming majority of people would not normally cross the road to watch gymnastics, weight-lifting or synchronised swimming if they were free — and even track and field athletics is essentially a small and declining sport, but give them the Olympic magic and there is a scramble for tickets, a longing for the chance to say “I was there”. It is live attendance that matters; during previous games I have sat with cricket teams many a time in pubs when there has been Olympic sport on television and, although everybody present was interested in sport, nobody even bothered to turn their head to watch. Since this is the first Olympics in England in the television age it will be interesting to see the pattern of viewing figures.

In this context we should attribute a touch of genius and perhaps a bit of luck to the founder of the modern games, Pierre de Coubertin, who insisted on the Olympiad, but eschewed Olympia. Often accused of “Anglomania”, he originally wanted his world games to be a tribute to the English public school system. The classical Greek reference proved to be a strong selling point, but it also threatened a kind of ownership by the modern Greeks, whom de Coubertin didn’t much like. So after the opening games in Athens in 1896 one of his firmest principles was that they should circulate, even if that meant the games were fairly marginalised as they were, in different ways, in Paris in 1900 and St Louis in 1904. The Greeks held their own (now unacknowledged) games in Athens in 1906. Every four years in a different city means that most people have one chance a lifetime to attend an Olympics.

The Greek project for a permanent site for the games would have made much more economic sense than the system of circulating the games. When the IOC was essentially bankrupt after Montreal in 1976 and lacking potential hosts the Greek version was right back on the agenda. As envisaged by Constantin Karamanlis, then Greek Prime Minister, it would have involved an international sovereign territory with analogies to the Vatican and the United Nations. But in the end Peter Ueberroth’s “free enterprise games” in Los Angeles in 1984 proved to be a decisive change of direction. Samaranch embraced the commercial and media potential of the games and now the world’s leading cities compete to host and subsidise the games.

But fairy dust is not just a naturally-produced cultural substance. A good deal of effort goes into its manufacture. The BBC may be a balanced broadcaster interested in wide and challenging debate on some issues, but in its proud role of “the Olympic Broadcaster” it is anything but. The rest of our communicators aren’t much better. We’re all to become Soviet citizens now, if we aren’t already, proud to see our men and women up on that podium, symbolising the superiority of our way of life. But though fairy dust is powerful magic, it does not last forever. The question is not what we will make of London 2012 in 2012, but what we will make of it in 2013 and thereafter.

The post Online Only: The Great Olympic Sham appeared first on Standpoint.

But how to persuade Cubans to swap bases for stumps and catchers for wicketkeepers? For this the Foreign Office turned to Tom Rodwell, whose new book, Third Man in Havana (Corinthian, £14.99) — Rodwell apologises to Graham Greene, who hated cricket — documents his failed attempt to win the Cubans round as well as other unlikely adventures with bat and ball. His trips to Israel, Panama, New York, Sierra Leone and elsewhere make Rodwell a cricketing missionary, packing his pads wherever he goes to do good with cricket.

Rodwell was as ill-suited to his Cuban mission as Mr Wormold, the vacuum cleaner salesman-cum-spy of Greene’s Our Man in Havana. The Spanish translation of the MCC’s Laws of the Game, he soon discovered, was written by someone who knew plenty of Spanish but little about the sport. A game in Guantánamo (the town, not the nearby US naval base) ended prematurely when Stalin, a stubborn fast-bowler from Havana, had an lbw appeal turned down; and unsurprisingly Rodwell failed to persuade a baseball bat manufacturer that cricket bats would be a more lucrative trade.

Another cricketing adventurer is Oli Broom, who demonstrated his dedication to the game when he cycled around the world from Lord’s in London to the Gabba stadium in Brisbane in time for the start of the 2010 Ashes. In a 14-month trip he pedalled through 23 countries, playing cricket in all but three of them and raising money for the Lord’s Taverners, a cricket charity. 

Broom’s latest project is to raise the £400,000 needed to build a cricket ground in Rwanda. Despite increasing interest in the sport, the country has just one shabby pitch. When Rwanda joined the Commonwealth in 2009, it was the first country without any former British colonial links to do so. When Tony Blair backed their admission, he quipped, “Well, they play cricket, don’t they?”

The Rwandans will doubtless take heart from the rise of the Afghanistan cricket team, a story told by Tim Albone in his film and book Out of the Ashes (Virgin, £11.99). In 1987, the Afghan Cricket Club was founded in a refugee camp in Pakistan. This year, the national team will take part in the Twenty20 World Cup, competing against the best in the world. 

With corrupt Pakistani cricketers behind bars and the gaudy, money-soaked Indian Premier League on the rise, cricket needs good-news stories. Fortunately, there are still plenty to choose from. 

The post Bowled Over appeared first on Standpoint.

Why did this adjective resonate so? The word had a period sheen to it. It was an insult bandied about by our fathers’ generation. It became less frequent with the rise of the metrosexual (a realm of which we might suppose Lord Mandelson to be the king, or queen) and, in an age when it is considered appalling for a man not to have a feminine side that is permanently on display, the word is considered irrelevant. Indeed, to be called “manly” now might be interpreted by quite a lot of chaps as downright abusive in itself.

Yet there was a straightforwardness in Mr Follett’s use of the term that betokened no cruelty in the insult, but merely an aggrieved statement of fact. Men like him — and me — grew up in the postwar generation believing there were certain rules for the way a man behaved. It did not include some of the circuitous conduct for which Lord Mandelson, in his long and distinguished career, became famed.

The word is called to mind by an enormously jolly, and jolly interesting, book that has just been published by Max Davidson, one of our best and most underrated comic writers. From the book’s title — We’ll Get ’em in Sequins (Wisden Sporting Books, £18.99) — it might be thought Mr Davidson has written a book of jokes. It is not so, and the subtitle gives us a pointer to his real mission: Manliness, Yorkshire Cricket, and the Century that Changed Everything. As well as not being a comic book (though it has some marvellous jokes in it) it is not simply a book about cricket: it is a book about life, seen — and why not? — through the prism of the nation’s greatest sport.

You do not need to be a cricket buff to be aware of the legendary place of Yorkshire in the English game. From the 1880s until the end of the 1960s they were one of the most formidable teams on the planet. Mr Davidson chooses various legendary Yorkshiremen to display the idea of manliness and, indeed, its decline. The title itself may need some explanation. At the Oval in August 1902 England were playing Australia. They had needed 263 to win in the fourth innings and at one stage the game appeared lost, with England at 48 for 5. However, Gilbert Jessop came in and scored 104 in one of the great pyrotechnic innings seen in test cricket, and put England in sight of victory.

Yet the ninth wicket fell at 248. England needed 15 to win. Two Yorkshiremen were at the crease, and were all that stood between Australia and triumph. One was George Hirst, England’s leading all-rounder. The other was the young Wilfred Rhodes, a slow bowler of immense talent who would within a few years become a magnificent opening batsman, but in this game was at number 11. It was a moment of high tension: but Hirst allegedly went up to his younger comrade and said: “We’ll get ’em in singles.” As it turned out they didn’t: though they did get them. It was an ultimate display of manliness. A moment’s panic or lapse in concentration, the slightest feeling of fear, and the game would be lost.

Mr Davidson appraises the manly quality of George Hirst. He had all the hallmarks of a professional. As well as his cricketing skills, which were considerable, he was reliable, understated, modest, straightforward and bluff. Although he presented a formidable exterior, he was kind and decent. In those days of gentlemen and players he would never have captained Yorkshire, but he had great skills of leadership. Had he been a fraction younger he would have served in, and perhaps been killed in, the Great War. Hirst displayed the untroubled, self-effacing stoicism of so many men who did. He was of the same generation as Captain Scott, to whom the author also refers, and would have exhibited the same sort of heroism had it been asked of him. (A worthy successor was Hedley Verity, the great Yorkshire and England left-arm spin bowler, who died a hero in the Italian campaign in 1943.)

The Edwardian era is seen by Mr Davidson as some sort of high watermark of manliness — not just because of Scott and indeed Captain Oates, whose sacrifice for the sake of his comrades must count as one of the manliest acts of all time, but because of the other self-conscious attributes of manly conduct that were expected then: the moustache, the lack of effeminate grooming products, above all the determination not to display emotion. However, the next 100 years were to show great changes in the conception of manliness, and nowhere would they be better shown than in the Yorkshire dressing-room.

Slowly, manliness began to lose some of its key trappings. Herbert Sutcliffe, the great opening bat of the interwar years, wore silks and brilliantined his hair. Fred Trueman not only used Brylcreem, he was also flash and boastful, though he had much to boast about, the soi-disant greatest bloody fast bowler that ever drew breath. He made up for it by being a man’s man, which entailed projecting the image of a man who liked a pint and told it like it was. Geoffrey Boycott boasted, wore spectacles — an obvious sign of effeminacy — had difficult relations with women and was incredibly rude. Manliness had been sorely compromised.

It couldn’t get worse, but it did. Michael Vaughan burst into tears at a press conference when giving up the England captaincy. By contrast, Bob Appleyard, a Yorkshire cricketer of the 1940s and 1950s, had come home one day to find his entire family had gassed themselves, and didn’t feel the need to mention this tragedy to anybody. Then Darren Gough, the Yorkshire fast bowler, wore sequins on Strictly Come Dancing — and had ear studs. Public displays of emotion, wearing nancy boy’s clothes — I’d say they’d be taking paternity leave next, but they already have.

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