Set for a fall
Britons aren’t altogether rubbish at sport
This may sound perverse, but having considered the matter carefully I remain unconvinced that Britain is absolutely rubbish at sport. Allow me to explain, with deference to the wise majority who for years have expressed hurt and frustration whenever British sportsmen and women take part in international competitions.
In the mid-80s, one British newspaper flagged its concern about the England team’s World Cup prospects in this headline: “Don’t let them laugh at us.” Over nearly two decades since then, football managers, cricket captains, and chairmen of other sporting bodies have ignored this advice, to such an extent that now we routinely laugh at ourselves instead. Last summer, when England was knocked out of the World Cup, one British commentator glumly proposed that, “The England goalie will now be the butt of endless jokes” – and for good measure provided an example, alluding to David Seaman’s inadequate performance in goal – “although most of them will go right over his head.”
The jokes will be cracked again shortly as the world’s attention turns to Wimbledon, only to witness once more the deficiencies of our native talent. At some point in the coming fortnight – sooner rather than later – when Tim Henman inevitably tumbles out of the tournament, cruel sportswriters will suggest that the only substantial trophy Henman is likely ever to hold aloft is the one he can currently be seen with on the side of bus-stops, in posters promoting a brand of washing detergent.
This type of self-deprecating commentary, rarely encountered in proud and successful nations such as the US, is freely available in pubs, smoking rooms, and any other venue where thoughtful Britons congregate to exchange intelligence. But those who are offended by the existence of so many well-paid and ineffectual sportsmen should enjoy while they can the availability of such targets for their critical talents; because after heaping scorn on them, the logical next step is to get rid of them altogether.
Most successful sportsmen and women based in this country, it is true, are not British. But native players soak up substantial amounts of money from sponsors and government. This might better be spent on students of hairdressing and interior design, would-be popstars and TV presenters, or other potential ornaments to the nation. And if we eliminate professional sport – the argument might go – then amateur sport will die away too. We could stop wasting so many hours each week on physical exercise and training, and convert the magnificent structures currently occupied by sports clubs into venues for clubbing, multiplex cinemas and all-night superstores.
Unconvinced, I would like respectfully to submit a defence of our oppressed exponents of athletic and tactical nous. I will not argue that Britons are best at all sports, at all times – but that we could be.
It doesn’t help that we spread ourselves so thin. Unlike the Australians, who put everything into swimming, rugby and cricket, Britons go in for a huge assortment of sports, both well known and obscure. We also divide ourselves by region, so that in some sports the United Kingdom as a whole does not get the chance to show its combined strength. Even so, our various national soccer teams have been hugely successful. (If you ignore Wales.) France, which has a population much the same size as the UK’s – and much more space for training grounds – is no match for us. France did, it’s true, win the World Cup more recently than any British side (in 1998). But England and Scotland both progressed further than France in last year’s tournament; and England actually won the cup (in 1966) long before the French got close. (Incidentally, England didn’t even enter the World Cup, a French innovation of the 1930s, until the 1950s.) What’s more, if the UK is unable to claim the greatest individual player or team, we do have – at the time of writing – the world’s most photographed soccer player, David Beckham, and the team that sells the most replica shirts, Manchester United. Neither of these facts should be disregarded out of hand.
Along with soccer, Victorian Britain pioneered or promoted many of the sports that now dominate the world: rugby, tennis, athletics. Other nations embraced these games. Even the most unlikely have attracted surprising enthusiasm. Given the choice of throwing a large stick into the air just once or whacking a ball with a smaller stick for mile after mile, people might be expected to choose the first. In fact, the second of these Scottish inventions (golf) has enjoyed greater success, worldwide, than the first (tossing the caber). But both these British games – more specifically, Scottish – can be found in the most unlikely places. You can play golf amid the deserts of the Middle East, or toss the caber at Highland Games in Seattle.
Compare with this the world’s indifference towards sports championed by the US. American football, as its name suggests, has made little progress outside North America. And teams from the US and just one other nation, Canada, contest baseball’s “World Series”.
Another proud British invention was soccer hooliganism, which has a longer tradition than many people realise, according to the International Journal of the History of Sport. An article in the journal recently devoted itself to a critique of “Football hooliganism in England before 1914”. The editor of the journal is professor JA Mangan of De Montfort University. When I telephone him to ask for help in boosting the cause of British sport, the professor first asks whether he will be paid for this assistance. On discovering that he won’t, he agrees to talk so long as I promise to put his name in the newspaper; quickly plugs his book, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal; and then rattles off a few sentences about English public schools of the 1850s, with a rousing call for the “middle-class virtues of decency and fair play”.
More helpful even than this is a colleague who made the mistake of sitting beside me in the Financial Times canteen while I was drafting this manifesto. Gautam Malkani points out that Britons tend to do best in those sports that do not involve interference from living opponents.
This is not as ridiculous as it may sound. Ellen Macarthur, Britain’s heroic young round-the-world sailor, navigates the high seas confident that rivals will not actually attempt to sink her. Steve Redgrave, the rower, has won innumerable gold medals safe in the same belief. In darts, nothing comes between the sportsman and his or her target except air and dust. With the addition of snow, and a steep incline, little else troubled the British-organised expedition that successfully conquered Everest 50 years ago. Snooker players, many of the most accomplished of them British, can in theory play entire frames without their opponent taking a shot; the other player will sit quietly sipping water rather than charging around after them with a sharp cue. Even golfers, though they travel from one hole to the next in close proximity to their opponents, usually make it round the course unmolested, and without having the ball whacked back at them.
So this is what we must do. First: stop making jokes about how hopeless we are. Second, find an inventive Brit to devise a new form of tennis, enabling Tim Henman to play against no human opponent. If we keep the basics to ourselves – or even provide details only to Canada – he might even win the World Series.
THE BEST OF BRITISH
The greatest all-rounder in British sport was Charles Burgess Fry. Though best known as a cricketer, he was also an outstanding athlete (holder for 21 years of the world record for long jump), played soccer for England and rugby for the Barbarians. He once scored 100 runs for Sussex just two days after playing in the FA Cup final. He only scored two centuries for England, but made up for that with 92 centuries for his county. Off the field, Fry was no slouch either: he wrote a novel and an autobiography, launched a magazine, stood for parliament and, most bizarrely, was offered the throne of Albania after representatives of that country identified his statesmanlike demeanour.
Then there is Daley Thompson, the world’s greatest decathlete – the definitive all-rounder – who in addition to breaking four world records and winning several major championships won the Olympic gold twice in a row. The tennis player, Lottie Dod, was the youngest champion at Wimbledon, aged 15 years and 285 days and won five titles in all. Abandoning tennis at the grand old age of 21, she went on to represent Britain at hockey, golf, skating and on the Cresta run.
Though somewhat overshadowed by these three, another outstanding all-rounder is Chris Hallam. Two days before competing in the Welsh national swimming trials, he was paralysed below the chest in a motorcycle accident. So he relaunched himself as a disabled athlete, winning medals in the pool and breaking records on the athletics track.
For many years, Britain’s greatest sporting heroes were amateurs. The poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, close friends in the early 1800s, both enthusiastically conformed to this type. Byron, despite being troubled with a clubfoot, swam the Hellespont between Europe and Asia, across the mouth of the Tagus river in Lisbon, and from the Lido to the Rialto bridge in Venice. He was also a keen pugilist, frequently hanging out at the Bond Street gym run by “Gentleman” John Jackson. Shelley, an enthusiastic sailor, was less successful than Byron, and drowned in a storm off the Italian coast.
Several individuals have contributed to British fashion. David Beckham’s input, as a designer of garments for Marks & Spencer and a clotheshorse for even better designers than himself, is the best known. Among others worth mentioning is Fred Perry, the Wimbledon champion who gave his name to a type of sports shirt. Less well known for his contribution than either of these, but equally deserving, is Fran Cotton, the 17-stone Rugby player from Wigan. In 1980, he was stretchered off the pitch after a heart attack. He bravely returned the following year, but a leg injury put an end to his career – so he set up his own company, Cotton Traders, which sells sportswear around the world.
Even today, despite the widespread coverage devoted to it, not everybody is interested in soccer. Most of us have some interest in pedestrianism – but few remember the great pedestrians in our sporting heritage. Of them all, the most successful were three eighteenth-century gents: “Captain” Robert Barclay walked a mile every hour for 1,000 consecutive hours, or nearly six weeks; Foster Powell routinely walked from London to York and back; and George Wilson bought his way out of debtor’s prison by wagering successfully that he could walk 50 miles in 12 hours in the exercise yard.
Their efforts provide a great example to many other dogged exponents of endurance sports. Of these, it is worth mentioning Matthew Webb, who swam across the Channel in 22 hours, dressed in a leotard and covered in porpoise grease; Henry Taylor, an impoverished Olympian who trained in the industrial canals of Lancashire and on “dirty water day” at the local pool; and, most recently, the multiple-medal winner Steve Redgrave, who made clear his contempt for the sport at which he excels by asking that he be shot if anybody catches him rowing again.
21 June 03