Compiled by NIALL KIELY
Blowing whistle on refs
THE FINAL STRAW: FINALLY, ELLIPSICALLY . . . here comes the Heineken. Not my tipple, but a great tournament.
It will remind us once again that so many rugby games still come down to three big things: a pack that’ll perform and a frontrow that’ll platform; a kicker that gets 80-90 per cent from 50 metres in, and refereeing.
Reffing is inconsistent across the board now: South Africa were crucified against Scotland; Argentina were hard done by against Ireland. And some ‘performers’ in the Magners are beyond dreadful.
Just watch, and hope the key bits go our way, this weekend: props, penalties and phwistles.
It was ever thus.
World Cup in Russia makes perfect sense
NOW THAT the outraged clamour of English complaints has faded to pathetic susurrus, let’s look at underlying attitudes towards the successful soccer World Cup venues, Russia and Qatar.
There seems more than a smidgen of begrudging Old Empiricism in the London response to the Russkies’ success. How dare they best us? And Johnny Foreigner simply must’ve cheated, of course.
Even allowing for some adverse Fifa reaction to revelations on BBC (bless its journalistic cotton socks) on corruption within Fifa, it still seemed difficult for some Little Englanders to credit a World Cup for Russia makes every sort of sense to the non-partisan.
As that beacon of common sense, goalkeeper David James, pointed out in last weekend’s Observer, Russia’s a world power with a developing and huge economy, it’s a vast country with a remarkable cultural history. It’s fascinating to wonder what kind of World Cup Vladimir Putin will conjure up; and you just know the stadiums and facilities will be completed on deadline.
Are memories of South Africa so dulled that “Outraged, Tunbridge Wells” cannot recall the joy and fun an African venue created for spectators, teams and television viewers (droning vuvuzelas apart)? Admittedly the medium to long-term sporting benefits for South Africa and the continent may be feeble (that’s Fifa for ya!), but the process of preparing and delivering a successful soccerfest will have left a variety of social and economic marks on the host country.
(As we bitch and moan about relatively mild cutbacks in these environs, let us remember that stadium construction workers in RSA had an average hourly wage of less than €1.50 until a strike last year got them an increase of 12 per cent.)
And as David James pointed out – the memory of his own stimulating adventures in South Africa still fresh – what a bloody great adventure Russia 2018 will be for those who make the trip! There was plenty of incipient racism, too, at the time of the Commonwealth Games in India, with lurid tales of poor plumbing, deadly snakes and crumbling infrastructure: nobody died; the games were a success.
There was dire prognosticating at the time also that Brazil would struggle to meet its looming commitments to international sport. (At the time, I reflected, at least we PIGS-pots could not be accused of calling BRIC kettles black.*)
And as for Qatar! The splutterati knew few bounds in their scathing comment. It all but sank to levels of questioning the entitlement of camel-shaggers to hijack the 2022 World Cup.
As always, watch the business pages. News, politics, sport and cutting-edge affairs all coalesce there. The markets got skittish this week as rumours burgeoned again that J Sainsbury might be taken over. Its share price was around the 370p mark, and the bid was mooted as high as 450p per share. The bidder? The Qatar Investment Authority.
Bad enough that Yankee money snared venerable Cadburys. Barbarians and Bedouins are queuing at every gate.
*Portugal Ireland Greece Spain/Brazil Russia India China.
Stark Michelin reading for French
WE SHOULD be very and depressingly familiar with events in Portugal right now. The Prime Minister, José Sócrates, a decent man and a Socialist, has brokered a savage budget with the opposition centre-right Social Democrats that he insists will save the nation and the day.
The country’s broke, the sado-monetarists of the international bond markets are pricing Portuguese debt to unsustainable levels, the politicians insist no bailout will be necessary, and nobody believes a word of it; the IMF’s gunboats are plotting a course for Tagus bay.
The Portuguese, I hear, are now turning to Fernando Pessoa, dead 75 years last month, and a poet so spectacularly glum that he made pessimism an art form – a useful recourse in a country now in the grip of a national melancholy so bone-deep that it prompted artists to proclaim last month a Manifesto Against the State of General Sadness.
The centre cannot hold. At a time when Brit criminal gangs have moved on from stealing manhole covers, lead-roofing and copperwire (there’s been a slide in Chinese commodities’ demand, doncha know) to rustling sheep in the Yorkshire Dales, Lancashire and remote Cumbrian hillsides, you’d wonder if anything remains sacred.
Now comes news that cuisine in France – where the precious Academie Francaise, defender of the cultural faith, in recent years ran a campaign to save the semi-colon – is again under pressure.
The 2011 Michelin has revealed that Japan now has as many three-star restaurants as La Belle. And this followed on the heels of Unesco’s declaration that the formal French meal constitutes part of humanity’s intangible cultural heritage; Frog-bashers and Francophobes have been having a field day.
This despite the fact that in every French town, it’s still possible to find a medium-priced brasserie or cafe serving decent food: try to find likewise in most Irish or British conurbations.
But we remembered this week, as the Heineken hits its mid-season apogee, when Brive were a power in the 1990s and served up a pre-pool match menu that included foie gras, perch, duck, sorbet, diverse desserts, a terrorisation of cheeses and many wines. And cognac. Rugby reporters still remember bits of the game that followed.
Have you heard the one about the little piggy?
A PORCINE theme ran through sports pages this past week.
The almost impeccable (and athletic, yet!) fielding of England in Australia has been a revelation, and it has underlined the value of having the right specialised skills coaches in what sometimes seem to be bloated retinues of camp followers.
Step forward Richard Halsall, whose influence on the England camp was evident when it was he and not batting coach Graham Gooch who stood in for supremo Andy Flower when the latter was hospitalised with a malignant skin growth near his eye.
It’s all some distance from the 1980s when English fielding was so slow and bumbling that a piglet was once led onto the outfield, emblazoned with the name of the (at the time) distinctly porky Ian Botham.
As we savoured El Clásico last week, Michel Salgado, now of Blackburn, but a veteran of many Real Madrid games against Barcelona, recalled playing in one with Luís Figo, himself late of Barca.
"They threw a pig's head, a bottle of whiskey and even a knife," Salgado told the Guardian's Andy Hunter. "After seeing a knife flying past, I said to Figo: 'No more short corners tonight, just put it in the box'."
Sad if Morgan fails to feature in Ashes series
THERE’S BEEN nothing but fun in the Ashes thus far, and it’s been worth dozy days to rise early for the early morning drama Down Under. First Test at The Gabba was a fine aperitif, yawing hither and yon, and Adelaide was the very morphology of cricketing main-course perfection: bat, bowl, field, tactic and teamwork. (Or else the Australian class of 2010 is truly awful.)
Two worries present themselves now. The England middle-order is batting so well and meshing so effectively in partnerships that north Co Dublin’s finest, Eoin Morgan, looks unlikely to feature unless there’s an injury. The other fear is that Australia look close to hopeless: could it be a rout?
The most startling development has been the transformation of Kevin Pietersen into the embodiment of a personal synecdoche, the epitome of gemeinschaft. The South African-born batsman has in the past been so far up his own fundamental orifice that the Aussies four years ago coined an acronym to describe him: FIGJAM, the latter quintuple of which stood for I’m Good, Just Ask Me. Now he’s Mr Team.
My own parochial interest is selfish. Ed Joyce of Bray fell just short of Test level when his opportunity came.
Morgan seems much more likely to make it, and it would be sad if the five Tests were to pass without him getting a crack at the Oz bowlers and the Kookaburra ball, reckoned to swing much less than the Dukes product used in England.
