(9)

Here is a photo I took in March of this year, which I have been meaning to feature here for ages:

We shall see.

One of the many annoying things about the Olympic Games is how little clutches of contractors and workers, doing vital things, know that they can, during the frantic run-up to the Olympics, demand a hugely exorbitant price for merely doing their job, even if they had earlier sworn blind that they would not behave like this. I imagine that's a very widespread Olympic phenomenon generally, which adds hugely to the final bill, and is just one more reason why I wish the damn things had gone to Paris and never come back, ever.

I surmise – no speculation of this sort could easily be proved – that if any such demand becomes just too demanding, the means used by the State to settle such demands are not confined to bribery. If I was the State, I'd also now be issuing threats. I'd send people round to knock on doors to explain, ever so politely (perhaps over a friendly cup of tea), to such persons as trade unionists and building contractors, just how nasty the State is now capable of being, to individual people whom it has taken against. The State knows where you live. The State decides how much tax you owe it. And so on. And it could get even nastier. So, don't push your luck too far, there's a good fellow.

This is all pure speculation on my part. I have zero inside knowledge of any such negotiations. It's just that if that were now happening, I would not be surprised, whereas if it wasn't, I would be very surprised indeed.

Another way of responding to such last minute demands is to say: Okay, if you don't finish it in time, you don't finish it in time and it doesn't get finished in time. Pity, but there you go. And once the Olympic Games are over, we can then sack the damn lot of you and take our time. While keeping all your names on a Black List, for you to be suitably punished at our leisure.

This seems to be the approach being adopted in the matter of the Greenwich Cable Car. I am particularly interested in this New London Thing because, when finally finished and open for business, it will be another fine photo-op for me, to add to my London list of places like this.

Yes, says Mayor Boris, we do indeed hope that the Emirates Airline will be ready in time for the Olympics, as another way to get people back and forth across the river, to and from all that Olympicism. But if it isn't ready by then, so be it. This is not an "Olympic Project", or it only will be if it is ready for the Olympics.

Very wise.

I recall that the London Eye was supposed to be ready for the Millennium, but that, perhaps for the kind of reasons speculated about above, it wasn't. Who now cares?

Pity you can't take that line with such things as velodromes and swimming pools. Which is why I suspect that other means of persuasion are also now being deployed.

(27)

The Ministry of Defense wants to put surface to air missiles in residential areas as part of security measures for the Olympics. This is highly irregular. They are to be used against...

...all manner of airborne attacks from the 9/11 style assault to a smaller “low and slow” attack from a single light aircraft.

I would be surprised to see hijacked airliners ever again. A light aircraft attack sounds plausible, but shot down aircraft wreckage landing on London might still be considered a win for the terrorist.

There are also to be army troops, fighter jets and naval ships at the ready. The MOD are certainly preparing for more than a kid with a bomb strapped to his chest.

(31)

Indeed. I'm watching it on telly now. Someone, a youngish man by the look of him, swam across the course, in front of the boats, and both boats had to stop. They will have a restart, at the approximate point where the race was interrupted. Which will turn the event into two sprints laid end to end, instead of something more like a middle distance event.

The commentators are saying that it was some kind of demo. They are now showing the bloke narrowly missing being decapitated by the oars of one of the boats. It seemed like a very deliberate disruption. They are calling him "a protester", and they are now reporting that he "has a big smile on his face", and that he has clearly accomplished what he wanted.

So what do you suppose he was on about? Any bets? Maybe in times gone by, the message being pushed by this demo, if message there was, could have been entirely suppressed by the powers that be, in the event that they wanted it suppressed. These days, no chance.

This is not something that usually happens in the Boat Race. (Yes, yes, there are indeed many other boat races. This one is the Boat Race.) "This has never happened before in the Boat Race", says an expert talking head.

The race will soon start again. At the time the race was interrupted, the two boats were both very close together. Oxford were apparently heavy favourites at the start. Now, not so much. It was turning into a very good race. How will this affect the result, and be judged to have affected it?

The Boat Race is usually, frankly, a very dull affair, or so I think. Often the race is won and lost within the first half a minute, and the rest of it is a tedious procession. This kind of thing livens it up, in many eyes.

But best of all is when the finish is, as is extremely rare, very close. This one could still end like that, but it's very unlikely.

I see that in that earlier piece, dated 2003, I wrote this:

I overheard another interesting titbit in among the preparatory waffling. Apparently 90% of these oarsmen go into "banking", by which I think they meant "merchant" banking. I don't know what this proves. It could be that rowing is a fine preparation for financial titans. Or it could be that the financial services industry contains a lot of people with more ex-brawn than current brain. A bit of both, I should guess. They don't get paid anything to be in this race, but it seems that they clean up afterwards. Investment in networking. Speculate to accumulate. Apparently they were racing for the "Aberdeen Asset Management Trophy". It figures.

So this latest little drama is the kind of thing that Instapundit flags up under the heading of: "metaphor alert".

And: they're off!

Again.

Oh my god! An Oxford rower has lost the whole end of his oar. It's just a stick! The race continues, because the umpire reckons it was Oxford's fault, following a clash of oars. It's a procession. Another metaphor alert! The sure fire winner is now doomed!

If you care, this is all terrible. But for me it's more a case of LOL. Whether that's right is an argument, but that, for me, is how it was.

(4)

"There is nothing original in the reflection that football has a frightening capacity to make shocking hypocrites of us all."

So writes Matthew Norman, apropos the recent changing circumstances of a player who at one point was on the verge of being fired and shamed for refusing to play, and is now regarded as a great guy for his recent performances.

What all this tells us is that sports fans, like others who have a tribal loyalty to an institution, can convince themselves of contradictory views with ease. On the positive side, if sport allows people to channel their atavistic urges in a vaguely harmless way, all well and good. Alas, the absurdities of the situation do become quite irritating particularly in cases where a sportsman is a villain one minute for allegedly saying or doing something nasty, and is treated as a god the next for being able to, say, kick a ball accurately over 50 yards.

George Orwell, by the way, was very harsh on team sports, particularly when national alliegances were involved, but the same on a smaller scale applies to clubs within the same nation. Here is a quote:

I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield.

Set against all this, it has to be said that it is heartening to see what appears to be mostly genuine sympathy for a Bolton footballer who had a heart attack during a match a few days' ago. He's very lucky to be alive. I do wonder if one problem with football these days is that in the English Premiership particularly, it is played at a helter-skelter pace. If you look at a match of, say, 40 years ago when the likes of George Best or Jimmy Greaves were strutting their stuff, the game seemed to be a bit slower. Just a thought.

(10)

Whatever the tax rate, there will be some businesses that will fail, but that would survive if the tax rate was slightly lower. Football clubs are no exception. Rangers has gone into administration because it can not pay its tax bill.

Mr Clark said: "HMRC have been working closely with the club in recent months to achieve a solution to the club's difficulties. However, this has not been possible due to ongoing losses and increased tax liabilities that cannot be sustained."

On the radio I heard all this explained, and the member of the public interviewed for opinion blamed it on the high wages of the footballers. Sometimes people can not see what is right in front of their faces. I imagine this will be blamed on everything but excessive taxation. In any case, Tim Worstall explains that footballers' wages are high because clubs can charge high admissions prices, not the other way around.

(15)

From a Cricinfo piece by George Dobell, about the one day cricket international between Afghanistan and Pakistan, played in the United Arab Emirates yesterday:

A spokesman for the Taliban contacted the Afghanistan Cricket Board on the morning of the game to wish the team well and assure them they would be remembered in their prayers.

Pakistan won at a canter, but the Afghans did not disgrace themselves, in their first ODI against a top ranked, Full Member, test playing nation.

Afghan minister of finance Dr Omar Zakhilwal:

"The event appears to have united the entire country. … There is nothing that can touch cricket in popularity or as a force for good in Afghanistan. There is absolutely nothing else that mobilises our society in the same way. Not politics, political events or reconstruction."

Cricket, says Dobell, is booming in Afghanistan:

Not only is the international team now full time, but there are league teams in 28 of the 34 provinces ...

However, Dobell goes on to report that:

... the sport will be made compulsory as part of the school curriculum.

And you get the definite feeling that Dobell thinks that's good. I am a rabid cricket fan, but I say that nothing puts many people off a sport more completely than being made to play it against their will. For sport, read: anything.

I remember school contemporaries who would have preferred being in the Taliban to playing bloody cricket.

(0)

Newcastle did not beat Manchester United today, because the long term trend is for Manchester United to beat Newcastle.

- Bishop Hill's quote of the day today. He found it here. This is the game being referred to.

(11)

Don't worry, I don't mean the Indian economy or anything like that. Just their cricket team. Indulge me. Or just skip this. I promise you that this posting is pure cricket, and that it will shed no light whatever on Real Life.

Australia are already one up in their four match series, at home against India, and game two just began in Sydney, late last night London time. India lost two earlier wickets, and then nearly lost another when former Australian captain and batting legend Ricky Ponting dropped a sitter, which had he held it would have seen the back of Virendar Sehwag, an Indian batsman of almost equal renown.

At which juncture, someone called Christian was quoted on Cricinfo, saying this:

I have a feeling Ponting just made his decision to retire - seriously. Adam Gilchrist made his decision in similar circumstances (dropping a sitter) and most athletes make their decision when they have that feeling that they just aren't up to it anymore.

For non-cricketophiles, dropping a sitter means you made a bad mistake. But no worries. At lunch, India were 72-4, Ponting's error having soon been corrected by Aussie wicketkeeper Haddin, who didn't drop his sitter.

Cricinfo again:

To state the bleeding obvious, this was Australia's session all the way.

Australian quick bowler James Pattinson, only twenty one, and only playing in his fourth test match, already has three wickets. A bowling legend of the future? In general, the new crop of Aussie quick bowlers are looking good, and they have other good ones not playing in this game. For India's aging batting stars, on the other hand, there seem to be few obvious replacements. Now, one of those potential replacements, Virat Kohli, has also been got out. Tendulkar, though, is still batting. For months now Tendulkar has been trying to get that elusive hundredth international hundred. Now would be a good time.

Not everything in the world is improving just now. But, along with such things as escalators, my ability to track interesting international cricket games between two interesting sides neither of which is England just gets better by the year.

Tendulkar is now out. Pattinson gets the big one. India 125-6. Says Cricinfo:

It's like the Australia of the late 90s and 2000s. Unstoppable.

Certainly unstoppable by India, in their present away form.

(14)

As I head to London's Heathrow Airport en route to Malta for the holidays, I see this item during a spot of web-surfing. It is a piece by Gerard Baker, in the Wall Street Journal. Baker has spent a fair while in the US, and clearly, he's been infected:

"But I discovered football when I first came to New York in the late 1980s and my prejudices melted away. It was the era of New York Giants greatness and I was hooked instantly: Lawrence Taylor, Phil Simms, Mark Bavaro, Jeff Hostetler. Yes, I did just say Jeff Hostetler. That should tell you how hooked I was."

"In its energy and complexity, football captures the spirit of America better than any other cultural creation on this continent, and I don't mean because it features long breaks in which advertisers get to sell beer and treatments for erectile dysfunction. It sits at the intersection of pioneering aggression and impossibly complex strategic planning. It is a collision of Hobbes and Locke; violent, primal force tempered by the most complex set of rules, regulations, procedures and systems ever conceived in an athletic framework. Soccer is called the beautiful game. But football is chess, played with real pieces that try to knock each other's brains out. It doesn't get any more beautiful than that."

I must say that "soccer", at least in how it is played these days in the English Premiership, tests my loyalty due to the real and alleged antics of the players as much as anything. Further afield, I am still spellbound by such players as Barcelona's residing genius, Lionel Messi, but in general, I am not as much interested in soccer as I used to be. As a result of my general soccer fatigue, I have become more interested in following rugby union and cricket (it helps that England is playing good cricket at the moment; not so the rugby guys). As for American football, I have never really watched it much (I went to a game in Texas in 2004 but that was about it).

As for other sports and events, I can admire the courage and physical endurance of those taking part, such as horse racing jockeys, Tour de France cyclists and the downhill skiers. I can admire a gladiatorial game of tennis between such giants as Federer and Nadal, or, for that matter, watch nervously as a great golfer slugs it out on the greens against a rival. And non-PC though it is, a great boxing match can hold me in its thrall. For me, there are a whole group of sports that I like, and for different reasons. I like watching certain motor sports, but that is more a "spectacle" where the whole event - scenery, noise, colour and adrenalin - come together (as in Le Mans, which I attended this year with a bunch of friends).

(5)

I know I sometimes rather overdo the cricket here, but this, from one of the Cricinfo blogs, really is quite amusing:

Now that the man’s gone, the name may soon follow. The Punjab Olympic Association has asked the provincial chief minister to rename the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore, in keeping with increasing public opinion against associating the historic venue with the former Libyan dictator. The ground was originally called Lahore Stadium but was renamed following Gaddafi’s visit to Pakistan in 1974. Now it’s time to change things back, says association secretary Idrees Haider Khawaja. “I don’t think his profile is inspirational enough to link with our cricket stadium’s identity,” Khawaja told ESPNcricinfo.

No, I guess it's not, any more. I further guess that they called it the Gaddafi Stadium because they were inspired by a flow of money from Gaddafi, to such persons as those who took it in turns to be Punjab's provincial chief minister, and that this source of inspiration has now dried up, what with Gaddafi being killed and all.

In other words, the reason he Gaddafi Stadium won't be the Gaddafi Stadium any more is the same reason that the Oval, just across the Thames from where I live in London, was called the Brit Oval, but is now not. In the case of the Oval, it was all out in the open. In Lahore, the arrangement was, I surmise, somewhat more hidden. Which puts news like this, about bent Pakistani cricketers being jailed, into its national context. (I wrote about that here (good comments on that one also) when that story first emerged.)

It will be interesting to see what they decide to call the Gaddafi Stadium next.

(9)

In London right now, it is an hour or more past 9 am. But in Cape Town, South Africa, just over an hour ago, it was 11:11 am, on the 11/11/11 (November 11th 2011), and South Africa needed 111 runs to win the international cricket match that they were playing against Australia. South Africa, sadly, were not 111-1, chasing 222. They were 126-1, chasing 236. So, time and date oddities aside, a cricket match is drawing to a calm, even predictable end. Right? Well, yes. But yesterday, 10/11/11 or 11/10/11 or whatever you call yesterday, it was very different.

Those baffled and/or repulsed by cricket and its arithmetically obsessed followers like me should probably skip the next few paragraphs. Summary: this has been one weird test match. But now, skip down to where it says: "Okay, here is my serious Samizdata-type point."

Okay cricket nutters, on we go with the story. Here is the sort of thing that was happening in Cape Town yesterday:

W W . 4 . . | W . . . . . | . . W . . . | . . . 4 . W | 1 1 . W

At the end of the first day of this test match, Australia had reached a rather meagre 214-8, but on the morning of the second day, yesterday, they did better, getting to 284 all out, thanks to more excellent batting by their new captain, Michael Clarke, who was last out for 151. South Africa then progressed to 49-1 at lunch. So far so normal.

About an hour later South Africa were all out for 96 having only just avoided the follow-on, the above WW stuff being a slice of that action. Australia then went into bat, and at the tea interval were themselves struggling on 13-3. Then, in no time at all after tea, they had slumped to a truly catastrophic 21-9. They then recovered, if that's the right word, to the dizzy heights of 47 all out. Another action slice:

W . . 3 . . | . . . W . . | . W . W

The South African Vernon Philander, playing in his first test, took five wickets for fifteen runs, bringing his total for the match to eight. Quite a start. Earlier Shane Watson had taken five for seventeen for Australia.

A Cricinfo commenter suggested that Australia should declare at tea time, setting South Africa two hundred to win in very adverse conditions. He didn't say, an hour later, that Australia should have declared at tea time. He said it at tea time, when Australia were 13-3. And they probably should have! Australia having batted successfully in the morning, South Africa began their second innings and ended this bizarre day with similar batting success, reaching 81-1 by the close. Today, they began needing only a further 155 to win. If South Africa do win, they'll be thanking their last wicket pair, Dale Steyn and Imran Tahir, who added thirteen and saved that follow-on. Take away that stand, and South Africa might have lost by an innings by now. As it now stands, and given that they have made a fine start this morning, South Africa now look sure to win.

If, despite being a cricketphobe, you read all that and would like to know approximately what it means, think of it as the cricketing equivalent of a world cup soccer quarter-final match between, say, Italy and Germany, where the scorecard after half and hour was 0-0, but by half time it was Italy 6 Germany 0, and then about fifteen minutes later it was Germany 8 Italy 6, followed by twenty entirely goalless minutes with Germany looking favourites to play out time and win it, 8-6. Calm, mayhem, even greater mayhem in the opposite direction, calm. Bizarre, right? I'll say.

Okay, here is my serious Samizdata-type point. (Welcome back, normals.)

My point is that the internet is uniting the world into one huge ultra-high-density global super-city. Not a global village, because that would suggest that everyone knows what everyone else is talking about, and, as the above few paragraphs illustrate very adequately, that is not at all what is happening. Most of us are baffled by most of what goes on in our Global Super-City, most of the time. But the thing is, cricket fans like me can now tune into the fine detail of matches which we would never before have been able to find out about. And you can likewise easliy tune into the fine detail of whatever it is that gets you excited and has you interrupting your normal daily routine.

When I was a kid, the British mainstream media (the only media we had so we didn't then call them "mainstream") enabled me only to pay attention to local cricket games between English counties, and international games between England and whoever England were playing. Following games like this one that is finishing up today, between South Africa and Australia, was something I could not do, in earlier decades. And when cricket got pushed off the British sports pages by soccer (as I had better call it here), life got even harder for what we would now call a "virtual" cricket fan like me. But then, the internet changed everything. It took me a while to realise how much things had changed, but now, I lend a fraction of an eye and ear to pretty much all international cricket matches, and sometimes, as yesterday, my day is severely deranged by events that just demand to be attended to.

Now, like I say, search and destroy the word "cricket" from the above couple of paragraphs, insert instead whatever you care about that happens all over the world, often involving total foreigners on both or all sides. Replace my incomprehensible cricket blather with your own preferred incomprehensible blather. You can now pay attention to that, in a way that you probably never could before. We can all now do this.

This results in a world not so much of geographically separated national cultures, but of globe-spanning and intersecting communities, uniting people from all over the planet into a tightly woven ball made of countless different strands of different coloured and different textured string and wool and twine.

That is an exaggeration. All prophecies of the death of the nation state for as long as the nation state has existed have been exaggerations, and this one is no different. As far as cricket is concerned, the internet doesn't just plug me into faraway international matches between Not-England and Not-England; it also enables me to track English county cricket in far greater detail than I ever could in earlier decades, even when I was a kid and cricket still vied with soccer as our national game. Nevertheless, the biggest change of the last decade, for me as a cricket nut, has not been that I see my local cricket foreground better, although I definitely do. It is that I see the once far distant world beyond my own country, which in the past I couldn't not ignore, in the exact same detail.

Similar things have happened in politics. More and more, our various "national" political rulers now also have their own globe-spanning communities of shared interest, and they now increasingly seem to feel more fondness and loyalty towards one another than they do to anyone who merely lives in their country, whom they merely "lead" or "represent", and it is a different world. Am I the only one who now regards David Cameron not so much as our Prime Minister, but as the local District Commissioner? For part of his day he represents Us to Them, but from where we sit, he seems to spend a great deal more of his time and energy representing Them (he being one of Them) to Us, imposing Their interests on top of Our interests. To me, it all feels rather Medieval, by which I mean that local considerations still matter, but that our rulers are not really members of our various local clubs. They merely own them. They have their own club.

And actually, this has been going on for quite a while, because unlike the rest of us, the world's rulers have for many decades now had their own email and internet equivalents. They have long been able to afford international phone calls and international telegrams. They flitted around the world, before the rest of us did. The internet has changed the politics of the world not by turning it global, but by causing the rest of us finally to notice that it has been global for quite some time.

That, in my opinion, is a pretty good way to understand the Twentieth Century and its numerous dramas and disasters and mysteries. This was not just a time of national war and national contention. It was a time of global civil war, hot and then cold, in which members of that global club wrestled with one another, using the rest of us as their cannons and cannon fodder, to determine what sort of global club they would all end up members of, and which of them would be the senior members of it. Then, our parents and grandparents found it hard to see this. Now, we can all see it. (Don't forget that the internet also contains lots of history, much of it different from the national histories that dominated the past.)

South Africa now coasting. 214-1, needing only another 22 runs. Hashim Amla finally out for 112. South Africa 222-2, still needing another 14. Not long to go now. And … South Africa win by eight wickets, with their captain Smith reaching his century off the last ball of the game? It looks that way. Dot. Dot. Dot. One. No, Smith 100, but scores even and South Africa still need another one. Dot. New over. Dot. One, and that's it.

(15)

NFL stands for National Football League, and the football in question is of the American sort. British TV has been showing American football games for the last three decades or so, games which I sometimes watch, either as they happen (during the small and not-so-small hours of the morning), or (which never seems nearly such fun) from a recording I have made the night before, the following evening, or even later than that.

There are quite a few American football fans on this side of the Atlantic, as a result of this TV coverage, and also because Europe has contained quite a few Americans during the last few decades, doing this and that, and also playing and spreading enthusiasm for their version of football. Not so long ago there was even an American Football European League. They couldn't make it stick, but it has all helped to spread the word.

Last weekend, many of the more devoted of these fans descended on London, to attend a Fan Rally in Trafalgar Square last Saturday, and then on the Sunday to watch the Chicago Bears play the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, at Wembley Stadium, no less. Part of the point of this posting is to provide me with an excuse to link to these fan shirt photos which I took last Saturday in Trafalgar Square. Further snaps of this event that I took, which show what the event looked like as a whole, here.

The better to excuse this blatant ego-linkage, what I really wanted next was a Samizdata-friendly hook on which to hang an NFL-related posting, and right on cue, the NFL has recently been obliging. For the NFL is, right now, offering the world a truly exquisite example of that all too familiar circumstance, the unintended consequence that results from a perverse incentive. You didn't intend to incentivise this or that bad thing. But, perversely, you did.

Unintended consequences and perverse incentives feature here at Samizdata quite a lot, on acount of them being a characteristic perpetration of politicians, a tribe notorious the world over for their eagerness to be seen to be doing something about whatever is the crisis of the moment, but for being far less concerned about how the various measures they impose, so hastily and so thoughtlessly, work out in practise, and especially how they work in the longer run rather than just immediately. Throwing laws, regulations and above all money at whatever politicians decide is a problem, rather than the politicians just letting people solve the problem or problems in question as best they can, being characteristic politician (and voter) reflexes of our era. You have only to consider the recent turmoil in the banking business.

Or consider welfare spending. Earlier this week, BBC2 TV featured one of those investigation-with-argument "documentary" shows, in which British political reporter and interviewer John Humphrys was lamenting how the British Welfare State, founded to help a few people temporarily down on their luck who needed tiding over, has degenerated over the decades into a vastly expensive machine for encouraging - in fact downright purchasing - mass unemployment, destroying the inclination to work amongst a truly enormous swathe of Britain's population. This perverse outcome, said Humphrys, was absolutely not what was intended by the people who started the British Welfare State in its modern form, just after World War 2. But it is what has happened.

So anyway, back to the NFL. The NFL doesn't have promotion and relegation, from or to a lower league, in the manner of England's soccer Premier League. What it has is a fixed set of franchises, and the ups and downs of American life register on these franchises when one of them gets moved from one American city to another.

The NFL also tries to make the contests between the different teams reasonably even, by jigging the rules in favour of weaker teams,so that weaker teams can bounce back up from failure. And as soon as I put that, you can already feel those unintended consequences resulting from perverse incentives creeping towards you, can't you?

What the NFL is trying to avoid is a circumstance of the sort that prevails in the English soccer Premier League, where a small handful of teams (for the last decade or so it's been Manchester United, Liverpool, Aresenal and Chelsea) have tended to dominate, year after year. True, if super-rich owners buy up a hitherto lesser club, the dominant handful can alter somewhat. Arsenal and Liverpool (particularly Liverpool) now appear to be slipping, and Tottenham and Manchester City (particularly Manchester City) are on the up-and-up. But, the NFL does have a point. It is rather boring the way the same old English soccer teams always seem to be up at the top of the League come the end of the season, scrapping with each other for the title. A lowly team sometimes makes a brilliant start to the season, but with seeming inevitability it falls back to mid-table or worse by the time the title is being decided.

One of the ways that the NFL tries to even things up between the strong teams and the weaker teams is to have a "salary cap", which places an upper limit on the total wage bill for each team, assuming I understand that rule approximately right. That way, super-rich owners willing to turn their large fortunes into small fortunes by buying sporting success, can't.

Another NFL contrivance is to give weaker teams the first pick from amongst the new players, come the start of the following season. This "draft" doesn't sound good to a European soccer fan, because it sounds like these drafted players get no say about which city they are going to ply their trade. And, if I understand things right, that is indeed the case, at least to start with, yes? But, I believe I'm correct in thinking that players can be traded, and that in fact a player can have a decisive influence over where he ends up playing for the bulk of his career, assuming he manages to achieve a career. This whiff of highly paid serfdom aside, the draft system works okay and achieves the outcome it is intended to achieve, a competitive and unpredictable NFL each year.

All goes well enough, if the new players coming up from the schools and colleges are all much of a muchness in terms of quality, to the point where it is a matter of opinion who is the best, and definitely a matter of individual preference which sort of player (quarterback, running back, offensive line, etc.) each team needs to fill its biggest biggest gaps. Everyone then gets their share of the new talent.

But, what if one individual new player is truly outstanding, way ahead of all the rest? What if, in other words, this outstanding individual is so outstanding that there will be a huge reward for whichever team finishes bottom of the league this year? Then what?

Well, we will soon see, because next season's draft now looks like posing exactly this question to the NFL teams towards the bottom end of the race this season. Andrew Luck is a once-in-a-generation quarterback talent, of the sort that every team in the NFL is now itching to get its hands on, regardless of how good its current quarterback might be.

To give you an idea (bear with me please, Americans) of just how important a good quarterback can be to an NFL team, one of the very best of this breed now operating is a certain Peyton Manning of the Indianapolis Colts. With Manning at the helm, the Indianapolis Colts are a huge force. But, Manning is now out injured, and the Colts, having pretty much built their entire team and their entire way of playing around Manning and his particular ways of doing things, are now an embarrassing shadow of their usual selves. To the point where they might well finish bottom. And get their hands on Andrew Luck.

All of which was explained by expat NFL expert in Britain Mike Carlson, early last Tuesday morning British time, when Channel 4 TV showed the game between the Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints. The Colts lost this game 62-7, which is a truly horrible margin.

Would the Colts really want Luck, given that they already have Manning? Well, maybe, yes. First, Luck really is that good, or so everyone says. Second, Manning is not as young as he was, and can only last a few more years. What if his recent injury is the start of a pattern? That can often happen with the more elderly sort of sportsmen, in all sorts of sports. A decade of injury free accomplishment is, time and again, followed by a half decade of frustration, during which injury after injury strikes our former hero down, before eventually he gives in and gives up. What if something like that now happens to Peyton Manning?

Second, even if Manning stays fit, the Colts might still want to pick Luck. I admit, however, that I am confused about this. Mike Carlson was saying last Tuesday morning that the Colts might still draft Luck, but then immediately trade him and use the proceeds to beef up the rest of their team. Others seem to be saying that, given that they have Manning, they wouldn't pick Luck, with no mention of immediately trading Luck. No doubt American commenters can help me out on that.

Meanwhile, for other teams there is no such dilemma. Well, not so much for the teams, more for some of the fans. Here is a report of how Miami Dolphins tight end Anthony Fasano feels about all this Suck for Luck talk:

Fasano, in an interview with WFAN in New York, ripped Dolphins fans who are rooting for the team to lose and nab Andrew Luck, calling them "sick."

"It’s sick actually," Fasano said, via SportsRadioInterviews.com. "I can’t even fathom those thoughts of those people that conjure up that stuff. They have never played sports and pretty much aren’t really our loyal fans. I can’t really put any weight into that and I know the players don’t listen to it. It’s a shame, but people are going to talk and we just have to block that out."

Fasano's right - real fans don't root for a team to lose just in the hopes of getting a particular player in the draft. The upside of a terrible season might be a good pick, but hoping the team fails to produce week after week isn't being a fan.

Well, maybe not, but it all leaves a rather nasty stink around the place, doesn't it? Even the slightest suggestion that a team might, shall we say, not be busting its guts quite as gut-bustingly as normal, on account of the ignominy of yet another defeat being counterbalanced by that little stroke of Luck (sorry) that beckons come next season, is … not what you want. An incentive which even hints are turning American footballers into deliberate losers, like so many British welfare addicts, is about as perverse as an incentive can get.

I freely admit that, as catastrophes go, the perverse incentive unleashed upon NFL football teams and their fans by Andrew Luck doesn't register very high on the catastrophe scale, and certainly not compared to something like the British Welfare State. But, this Luck story does have the virtue of illustrating the general principle, of how rules that look good when you decide on them but then turn around and bite you, very nicely, to a very wide potential audience. The Luck story gives libertarians like me, always on the look-out for perverse incentives and the harm they can do, something else to talk about.

Interestingly, and relatedly, there is now talk of the English Premier League switching from a promotion-relegation model to a franchise model, like the NFL. After all, where's the sense in town after English town building a huge new stadium in the hope of future glory, but then sinking back into the lower leagues, leaving the stadium empty for every game? Old School Tottenham manager Harry Redknapp is about as pleased by that suggestion as Mr Fasano is by the idea of NFL teams throwing games to get the best draft pick player next year. But this story illustrates another significant real world principle with reverberations well beyond sport, in the form of the principle that people owning stuff actually counts, or should count. If foreigners, including in particular Americans who also own NFL teams, own England's Premier League clubs, and if they all want a franchise system rather than a promotion and relegation system, then guess what. They are likely to get their way. "Ownership" doesn't just mean being separated from a billion quid to pay for new players. It also means control.

In other sporting news, England and India have been playing cricket matches against each other, again. In England, over the summer, England won every game against India. But in India, the tables have been entirely turned, with India winning the recently concluded one day series with a 5-0 whitewash. It would appear that home advantage, when it comes to England India games, is everything.

Maybe the answer, for at least some of the future games between these two countries, is to seek out neutral territory. How about them playing their games in, say, New York. Or Chicago. Or Tampa Bay. It would even things out, and it would spread the word about cricket in a place not now very familiar with it. There could be cricket fan rallies in the centre of town, on the day before the games. Just a thought.

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"The ideal French response might have involved close-formation shrugging, smoking in a pointed manner, farting in the Kiwis’ general direction or perhaps setting fire to a sheep and laying it on the 10-metre line, but the ridiculous namby-pambyisation of modern rugby forbids such incendiary techniques."

Alan Tyers, writing about the recent match between France and New Zealand.

I don't see why the French should not be able to treat the Haka with contempt. If a bunch of guys with tattoos did a war dance in front of me, sticking their tongues out and generally carrying on, the correct response, surely, is a look of utter contempt, married with a suitably powerful array of rude gestures, farting, belching and, in extremis, a fully automatic weapon with the safety catch taken off. Just imagine if the French rugby captain said: "Now try this for size, you noisy fuckers!".

Sport, how we love it.

(21)

I slept very badly last night, and didn't watch Wales v Australia in the Rugby World Cup play-off for third place, this morning London time, as it happened. But my recording machine had been set and I now have watched the game. Sadly, in the middle of watching it, I blundered upon the result (an Australian win by 21-18) while looking for something completely different in the www. Pity.

The last try by Wales didn't stop Australia winning, but it at least ensured that the Northern Hemisphere as a whole was that much less seriously beaten in this tournament than it might well have been, and might still be. Ditto that earlier Ireland win against Australia. After that Ireland win, commentators said: This reflects well on the Northern Hemisphere. But commentators also said: This makes things easier for a Northern Hemisphere side to get to the final. Which gave the game away. What they meant was: As opposed to the Southern Hemisphere monopolising the final stages, which is probably what would have happened had there been Southerners in both halves of the draw, instead of the final stages being neatly divided, North and South.

The sad thing about rugby is how much injuries influence matters. Dan Carter, the New Zealand All Blacks first choice fly half (the rugby equivalent of a quarterback), is already out of it. The Welsh first choice fly half also missed the last two Welsh games, both of which they lost narrowly. Partly as a result of such mishaps, this tournament has, for me, been rather an anti-climax, and not just because England never turned up, as they say. The France Wales semi-final was disappointing because of the unsatisfactory way that France squeaked through, without ever playing as they can. Wales lost partly because the Welsh captain was sent off early on, and partly because Wales, who later scored the only try of the game, missed so many penalty kicks.

In general, this tournament has somewhat lacked dazzle, I think, of the sort that France Wales matches used to supply in abundance, way back when. Shane Williams scoring a try for Wales against Australia in this latest game epitomised the problem. Instead of creating a piece of video to treasure for ever, with a searing run and several dazzling side-steps, Williams scored his try with a forward pass to him, followed by him kicking it forwards some more, and him then catching the lucky bounce and plonking it carefully down over the line. Not the stuff of legend. Watching a TV show the other night about the 1971 Lions tour of New Zealand really brought home what's been missing, for me. Had the sublime Barry John played in this tournament, he'd have gone out injured after the group games. (When I tried googling for barry john lions, I got a lot of stuff about John Barry, and his music for The Lion in Winter. But rugby fans will know exactly who I mean.)

The early stages of this tournament at least had lots of games day after day, and variety, and fun when minor teams threatened to do well against major ones. The later rounds, with those long, tedious gaps between fixtures and self-cancelling defences, weren't nearly such fun. I know what you're going to say: it's always like that. No, it isn't. There have been some great quarter-finals and semi-finals in earlier World Cups. France Australia semi final, in the very first World Cup. Ireland nearly beating Australia, some time around then. Rob Andrew last gasp drop goal for England against Australia, and then England getting trampled all over by Lomu. France All Blacks Twickenham 1999 with 33 unanswered second half French points in the space of about half an hour. The pick of the later games this time was probably Australia beating South Africa, simply because Australia were on the back foot for the whole game - tackling, tackling, tackling - and it was so improbable.

So, what of the final? Who knows? If France beat the All Blacks on Sunday, that would certainly make this World Cup climactic enough for anyone.

What most people now seem to expect is that France, who always seem to manage one decent performance in each World Cup campaign, will try to supply such a performance now, in the final. But, it is further expected that such a French effort, although maybe good, won't be good enough, and just as in the previous World Cup South Africa rather narrowly but nevertheless firmly beat an England side that they had earlier annihilated in a group game, so too, this time, New Zealand will be too strong for France.

In that last World Cup the England players pulled themselves together, apparently despite their uninspiring coaches. In this one, the French players are now said to be doing something similar, despite their barking mad coach.

But the French never do what is expected of them. Accordingly, I predict one of the following two results.

Either: yet another amazing, bewildering, French win over the All Blacks, lucky bounces, forward (scoring) passes, choking All Blacks and all.

Or: France will be utterly, totally, completely, ripped to tiny pieces, by the biggest margin of victory ever in a World Cup Final. All that All Black rage at not winning one of these things since 1987, despite everyone agreeing that they're always by far the best team in between times, will erupt, and it will be a slaughter.

Meanwhile, France coach Marc Lièvremont's strategy, insofar as he can be said to have had one, seems to have been to try to contrive the exact circumstances which have now transpired, which is that France have now arrived in the final without once having given a great performance. Lièvremont has contrived this by swapping the French team around relentlessly, never allowing them to settle, for year after year after year before the tournament, and during the tournament by such cunning devices as picking a totally untested fly half against the All Blacks. In a word, Lièvremont has been not so much a coach as a saboteur, worried not about France peaking, but about France peaking too soon. What he most wanted to avoid was his team playing an early game brilliantly, and then saying: "Right, that'll do, that was brilliant, that's what everyone will remember. Who the hell cares what happens in the final? Hand me that bucket of wine."

At all costs, a brilliant win against the All Blacks in that earlier group game had to be avoided, for that would have ended France's chances of winning this tournament. They'd all have said: Well, aren't we wonderful? And they'd then have lost their next game and gone home, still feeling smug about having beaten the probable eventual winners. Instead, France lost to both the All Blacks and to lowly Tonga, while nevertheless getting through. Then, they played just well enough to beat a lacklustre England, and then they limped luckily past Wales. Everyone now thinks they're rubbish and that they don't deserve to have got anywhere near the final. Parfait.

Meanwhile, Lievremont has cunningly made himself look like a total ass, by doing things like moan about his players in public and then apologise about it. That way, the French players will now be believing that if they win this thing, it will be them that wins it, not their coach. Since all sports tournaments do in fact have to be won by the players in the winning team, with the coach powerless to add anything significant once the game starts and not that much before that, this is good psychology. It gets all the French players thinking in exactly the right way to win.

So, the upshot is now a French team that is not only in the final, but which actually wants to win the final with their one and only brilliant performance in this tournament. There is a distinct chance, I would say, that the French team will do exactly this. Lièvremont will then say: "They did it despite me. I am a plonkair." Or maybe: "My cunning plan has worked. You are all fools to have doubted me. Fools." Either way the journos will have a bit of a think and after a few days will all say what I have said, and Lièvremont will get whatever a knighthood is in France.

Or, as I say, the French team could just collapse, thinking, once they start to lose, about how they'll blame Lièvremont for everything instead of about how to turn the game around.

But, like I say, who knows? I will definitely be watching this one live, on Sunday morning, no matter how badly I have slept beforehand.

(5)

I am now, as if regular readers of my recent stuff here need to be told, paying at least as much attention to the final game, which began this morning, in the England India test match cricket series as I am to such things What To Do About The Deficit. England are already 3-0 up, and are now looking to make it a 4-0 thrashing. This morning England, batting first, made another good start. But then it rained for the rest of the day.

Which meant that the radio commentators and their various guests had to talk amongst themselves, rather than commentate on the mostly non-existent action. And one of the things they talked about was the contrast between the general demeanour and attitude of the two teams, as illustrated by how they both warmed up at the start of the game. Compared to the quasi-military drill in perfectly matching attire that was the England warm-up, India looked, they said, like a rabble, and have done all series. The biggest recent change in how the Indians actually play, they all agreed, is that the Indian fast bowlers are now significantly slower than they were two or three years ago, and several inches fatter.

Why the contrast? Well, it seems that the top Indian cricketers now play too much cricket of the wrong kind – limited overs slogging basically, which encourages run-restricting rather than wicket-taking bowling, and careless, twist-or-bust batting. And they play not enough cricket of the right kind. Hence their arrival in England in a state combining lack of preparation with apparent exhaustion and general lack of fitness. But, you can't really blame them, said the commentators. The Indian Premier League now pays its players more in a month than cricketers of an earlier generation would ever see in their entire careers.

The reason I mention all this, apart from the fact that I personally find it all very interesting, is that, in among all this cricket chat, somebody said something very Samizdata-friendly that I thought I would pass on. Former England cricketer, now cricket journalist and pundit, Derek Pringle, threw in the following, concerning the impact of the Indian Premier League on the attitude and physical preparedness of the top Indian players:

The IPL has become a bit of a welfare state for them.

You might reckon it odd to compare the predicament of men who are being paid rather lavishly to do too much work, but of the wrong sort, with the very different circumstances of people who are being paid very little by comparison to do next to nothing, beyond go through the motions of looking for work without actually doing it. You might also want to ask whether limited overs slog-fests really are "wrong". After all, if that's the sort of cricket that people generally, and Indians in particular, will now pay most readily to watch, what is so wrong about it?

Good points both, but not the point I want to make now. What my point is about the above soundbite is that Derek Pringle was simply assuming, when he said it, that state welfare makes you fatter and lazier and less industrious than you otherwise might have been. Pringle, famously inclined to being a bit of a fatty himself, just knew that we all knew what he was getting at. It didn't have to be spelt out. Simply: state welfare rots the body and the mind and the soul. Anything else which, arguably, resembles state welfare in its financial impact upon the individuals concerned is likely to do similarly debilitating and demoralising things to those individuals also. If you are one of those eccentrics who still thinks otherwise, the burden of proof is entirely on you to explain your bizarre and contrarian opinions.

The argument that state welfare corrupts - physically, mentally and morally - is not, to put it mildly, new. When the modern British welfare state got under way after World War 2 this argument about the potential impact on its recipients of state money was already centuries old, and it was duly re-presented in opposition to the new welfare arrangements. But, the old argument was dismissed, with scorn, and also with, I believe, much genuine sincerity. These were the days, remember, when the masses of the British people were at a unique summit of mass moral excellence. (Thousands upon thousands of them used to turn up to watch county cricket, in other words the kind of cricket those cricket commentators are saying the Indian cricketers haven't been playing enough of.) Are you seriously saying, asked the welfare statists, that a bit of help when times are bad is going to turn these good people (good people who had just won the war, don't forget) into barbarians? Not, as Americans now say, going to happen. Yet, as a crude first approximation, this is what did happen, if not to them then to a horrifying proportion of their descendants.

And before any anti-immigration commenters pitch in, let me answer them with two questions and my two answers. Given the same welfare arrangements but no mass immigration, would there now be similar barbarism? I strongly believe so, even if maybe not on the same scale. Given the same mass immigration but no state welfare to speak of, would there now be similar barbarism? Much less, I think.

Realising that state welfare corrupts is one thing. Taking state welfare away from the millions of people whose entire lives are now organised around the assumption that state welfare will continue indefinitely is quite another, which is why this radical change of opinion has been somewhat subterranean. So far it has had little practical effect. But, as Derek Pringle's casual aside illustrates, this changed opinion is now well in place, and sooner or later this will surely have consequences.

(23)

At lunchtime yesterday, the BBC's Test Match Special radio commentators held a most entertaining Q&A with former top cricket umpire John Holder, who was asked questions like: "If a batsman hits the ball, it hits the batsman at the other end, bounces off the teeth of the bowler onto the wicket and the stricken batsman is still out of his ground, is that batsman run out?" (yes); or: "If the batsman hits the ball into the air, and a bag blows across the ground and the ball goes into the bag, and a fielder catches hold of the bag before anything hits the ground, is the batsman out?" (yes again). "If the batsman hits the ball and it strikes the branches of a tree …?" "If a dog gets on the pitch …?" "If a passing bird of prey catches the ball …?" You get the idea. Ho ho, chuckle chuckle. Holder answered everything with utter confidence. Not once could anyone, as the cricket metaphor goes, stump him.

But, about two hours later, right at the very end of the immediately following session of test cricket between England and India, at Trent Bridge Nottingham, a question of just this complicated kind arose for real.

If a batsman hits the ball towards the boundary, and if the fielder stops the ball going to the boundary, but thinks he failed to stop it, and if the fielder then picks the ball up in a relaxed, casual manner, for all the world making it clear that he thinks it was a four, and if the fielders in the middle of the pitch receive the ball in the manner of people who also think that the ball went for four, but if then, as an afterthought, one of the fielders takes the ball and flicks off the bails, with no sense of celebration, just on the off chance, because the umpires haven't signalled a four, or said that it's now tea time, but nevertheless, one of the England batsmen has already concluded that it is tea time, and is walking off the pitch, and is thus out of his ground, the fielder who has removed the bails having appealed in a quietly interrogative rather than exultant manner … is the batsman out? That's what happened, for real. The umpires asked the Indian captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, whether he was withdrawing his appeal. No, said Dhoni. Out, said the umpires. Ian Bell run out 137, off the last ball before tea. Bell bewildered and angry. The England team, and the crowd … not happy.

Where, the commentators were all saying to one another during their frantic tea interval attempts to explain it all to us listeners, is John Holder when you need him?

But meanwhile, the two Andrews, Flower and Strauss, coach and captain of England, dropped by the Indian dressing room and asked the Indian team if they would withdraw their appeal, and India did. Boos turned to cheers and applause when the umpires (boo!), the Indian team (boo!!), and then … Ian Bell all emerged from the pavilion after the tea break. Hurrah!!!

We now live in an age when all sports fans and all players come to that, rather than just the official salaried commentators and newspaper hacks, can immediately say what is on their (our) minds. This fact may not yet have had very much impact on global politics, the banking system, etc., but it has already changed the atmosphere that surrounds international sport.

So who do I think was right? Were the Indians gents, or suckers? Spirit of the game, or letter of the law?

I personally incline, ever more strongly the more I think about it, towards the suckers side of the still ongoing argument. Nor do I consider the Andrews to have been very gentlemanly either. Not cheats, you understand, any more than the Indians were, just tryers of it on. I agree with the likes of Geoff Boycott and Ravi Shastri who have said that Bell made a very careless mistake, the laws were correctly applied by the umpires, no Indian did anything remotely like cheating, so … out. These things happen. Nobody says a batsmen should be left off if he plays a silly shot and someone catches it. So, why should Bell, who made a different sort of silly mistake, have been any luckier?

I have since heard it argued that the umpires were wrong to accept the withdrawal by the Indians of their appeal. According to someone but I forget who, once they all walked off the pitch at the start of the tea interval, the decision was, or should have been, irreversible.

If Bell had stayed out, and if the England team and the crowd had seethed for a couple of hours until they could all sleep on it and realise the justice of what had happened, so what? Fecal matter transpires. If the England team had continued to gripe days later, then that would just have proved that they are not ready to be considered the true cricket Number Ones, whatever it may say in the ratings. Top teams blow off steam (in the manner of England's Matt Prior chucking his bat around in the dressing room after getting stupidly run out in an earlier game this summer) and then move on. All of which is hypothetical. But I am enough of an admirer of this England cricket side to be convinced that they would have got over such an episode pretty much immediately.

I and Geoff Boycott are by no means the only Englishmen who think that the Indians not only would have been within their rights, but should have (politely) told the Andrews to take a hike and that the decision would stand. Contrariwise, many Indians agreed with the Indian team that Bell's dismissal had a bad feeling about it, and that if something like that had happened to one of their top batters they wouldn't have liked it, so it was right to withdraw the appeal. I respect such arguments, especially when you consider that it was the deeply-to-be-respected Rahul Dravid who was the designated putter of the argument yesterday evening on behalf of the Indian team, but I don't agree, and I was already coming to this conclusion during the tea interval yesterday. I know this, because when Bell got out for a mere twenty two more runs than I now think he should have got, I was pleased rather than disappointed. I am glad that England are now playing like they'd have won this game by a mile, whatever had happened during the tea interval yesterday.

Here, interestingly, is an argument that is cutting through national divides rather than being confined by them. Rather than two simplistically nationalist positions being entirely defined by a handful of tabloid journalists whose stock in trade is goading people into insulting one another, this argument has quickly become not a nationalistic horror story, but a disagreement among friends about, well, sporting philosophy. (Will England soon decide that they need a sports philosophy coach to add to all their other coaches?)

And how do I know that this is not a nationalistic horror story? For that, I and the rest of the cricket-o-sphere can all of us thank the new social media. We can all now blog and tweet and comment about this little contretemps to our heart's content. We are not now being told what we all think by lowest-common-denominator newspapers. We can hear and read what lots of others are thinking, and learn that the argument lines in this thing are not national battle lines.

When I write about sport here, I like to find angles on it that reach out from sport to beyond sport. I want not just to see sport, but to see the world through sport. The above paragraphs pass that test, I think.

As to the game itself, well, India are now certain, bar a total miracle, to go two down with two to play in this four match series. In the face of a Himalayan last innings target, they have already, as I finish this, lost six (that word kept having to be retyped) wickets. This series is not turning into the ferocious contest that we were all looking forward to, but instead more into a one-sided exhibition of the England team's ferocious determination to be the top dogs, by utterly destroying an aging and ailing Indian team, now past its peak. In a week's time that could all change, of course, but that's how things now look.

Sachin Tendulkar is still batting away and battling away. An hour ago he was batting like there was no tomorrow, which there now almost certainly won't be, but since then he has slowed down, as the wickets tumbled at the other end. I bet I'm not the only Englishman who would love to see him, today, get that hundredth international hundred.

(2)

The first match fixture to be drawn for the 2014 soccer world cup. One of the manifestations of globalization that will go largely unnoticed for a couple of years.

UPDATE: With North Korea and Syria in the same qualifying group of four teams, it looked like we could have a different sort of "Group of Death" than usual, but FIFA chickened out and put Iran and China in other groups.

MORE: Guatemala and Belize. The former's government claims ownership of the latter. Football correspondent with war zone reporting experience required?

On a more pleasant note, the job I want is covering CONCACAF Group B: Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana, Barbados and the Bahamas. Well, someone has got to go there and report on the beaches, I mean football matches...

EVEN MORE: "In consideration of the delicate political situation between Russia and Georgia, FIFA has agreed to a UEFA request that these two teams not be drawn together." [From the news feed here]

(12)

There is a great piece up at Cricinfo in which Suresh Menon remembers cricket dramas past, and reflects on how memory plays tricks.

Particularly fascinating was this, about this match played at Old Trafford in 1936:

India's captain the Maharajkumar of Vizianagram (the only active cricketer to be knighted, we must remember, although it was not for services to cricket - he didn't serve cricket till he gave it up altogether as player, captain, selector and broadcaster) called his opening batsman Mushtaq Ali aside for last-minute instructions. Vizzy had been worried about the growing stature of Vijay Merchant, and instructed Mushtaq to run him out. Mushtaq told Merchant, they had a good laugh, and put on 203 for the first wicket.

What a selfish, self-important bastard, and what a great punishment. I'm guessing that the Maharajkumar of Vizianagram was totally bought and paid for by the British (hence the knighthood), and that when Mushtaq and Merchant disobeyed him they felt that they were also defying the very Empire itself. You can see from the scorecard that "Vizzy" batted at number nine, scoring a grand total of six runs, and did not bowl, even though seven other Indians did. Talk about a non-playing captain.

What a joy for cricket fans like me that India used cricket to defy Britain, rather than defying Britain by dumping cricket and taking up - I don't know - baseball, or something similar.

More Indian anti-Imperial defiance is reported here (my thanks to Antoine Clarke for the link). I think it's a sign of how strong the Indian presence in the world generally now is that people feel relaxed about taking the piss out of Indians, and out of the non-Indians who now grovel to Indians. We couldn't comfortably do that when Indians were nothing but the Starving Millions, and when, cricket-wise, they were mostly Ghandi clones who could only bowl slow and bat slow and play for draws.

I have been following the current England India cricket series with fascinated delight. This already feels like the best series here since 2005, which it will definitely be if the Indians come back hard, as is their recent habit, after their poor first test at Lord's. At Lord's, legendary Indian batsmen like V.V.S. Laxman and Sachin Tendulkar looked a bit like ancient monuments rather than current threats. Tendulkar's mere participation in the game turned its last day from a fine occasion into a great one, but his actual batting was a disappointment. Of the three surviving members of the Big Four (the now retired Saurav Ganguly being the other), only Rahul Dravid made his presence truly felt. But Tendulkar is not old, he was merely ill. And if he in particular does some great things in the later games, what a series this could be.

By the way, I have been getting it wrong about England being already ranked number two in the test match rankings. Now that I have actually consulted the relevant website, I see that England are only at three, behind South Africa (India being top). My apologies. But, England will go to at least two if they beat India in the current series, and they will indeed go top if they beat India by a clear two games. That last bit, I definitely got right.

Game two starts tomorrow.

(2)

A few days ago, I mentioned that England were 127 for 2 at the end of the first day of the first (five day) test match (I'm talking cricket – again) between England and India (numbers two and one respectively in the test match rankings), at Lord's, the world's most famous cricket ground. Now we approach lunch on the final day, and it has become a truly fantastic occasion. Even the weather has obliged. Earlier in the game, the weather was threatening to spoil the end of the game, but on Saturday the forecasts turned good for the duration, and so it has proved.

The reason I keep going on about how important it is that India and England are numbers one and two in the test match rankings is that, well, it is important. In the matter of the test match ranking system, here is one of those delicious times when I can confidently say: I told you so. Nobody else in the world will remember this, but I do. The test ranking system gives this series a whole extra dimension. This is especially the case now that Australia are past their McGrath/Warne peak (McGrath was a great bowler and Warne was a transcendentally great bowler), which meant that the recent Ashes series in Australia had the feel of something that Australia had lost by getting worse rather than that England had won by getting better.

India are now trying to save the game on the final day, but lost two important top order wickets just before lunch, and at lunch are now 142 for 4. If and when they lose ten wickets, that's it, England win, which they will be desperate to do, having got into this winning position. The Indians will get better as the series goes on and as they get used to English conditions, because they always do. They have got better during this game. In the first England innings, the top Indian bowler Zaheer Khan picked up an injury and is probably out of the series, and the other bowlers were poor. But in the second innings, the other Indian bowlers found their form and had England struggling to add to their huge first innings lead. But Zaheer's absence told in the end, because well as they had bowled in the morning, the also-rans got tired, and England built a big stand and were able to declare, setting India an impossible target. Last night, India made a determined start, but did lose one wicket.

The great Sachin Tendulkar is now at the crease, and everyone wants him to get a hundred, because that would be his hundredth hundred in international (i.e. test and one day together) cricket. What a day that would make it. England supporters want Tendulkar to get a hundred but England to win despite that. Indian supporters, lots of whom are present at the ground, want Tendulkar to get a hundred and for India to save the game, and if India do save the game it will feel like a win for them.

One of the frustrating things about cricket is how great finishes often attract such small crowds. This is because fans like to plan their attendance at cricket matches and you just cannot rely on the end of a test match being very interesting. It might end in a tame draw. Worse, what with the one-day-cricket-influenced attacking habits of modern batsmen, the game is all too likely to have ended on day four or even day three. So it is that the final day of a test match, if the game lasts that long, can either be a horrible anti-climax watched by almost nobody, or a great opportunity for non-regular cricket fans to turn up on the final morning and get in for a knock down price, to watch a great day of cricket. This game is a fine example of the second sort of game, although those who got in this way today had to queue very early. If you turned up a mere half an hour before the start of play, you would have had no chance. I toyed with the notion of doing exactly that, and just as well I didn't bother.

The most bizarre kind of last day happens when it looks certain to be a draw, everybody buggers off home, nobody else local gives the game the time of day, and then it suddenly springs to life when the batting side that thought they were relaxedly batting out time suddenly loses a huge clatter of wickets and loses. This was exactly what happened when England, much to everyone's amazement, beat Sri Lanka earlier this year in Cardiff, watched by, approximately speaking, two Welshmen and a Welsh sheepdog. I had a bath that afternoon. When I got into the bath, Sri Lanka had one wicket down. By the time I got out of my bath they were about eight down. Something like that. Like I say, bizarre. What the hell kind of game stages a great finish like that, which nobody is there to see? It's circumstances like that, perhaps even more than the boring draws, that have people saying that test cricket is doomed.

But test cricket has been doomed for as long as I can remember. During great five day cricketing contests like this one between England and India (or during a great series like the one here against Australia in 2005), you find yourself saying: every game should be this doomed. They're now back playing. I just had an incoming phone call and missed it, but apparently Tendulkar has just had an LBW escape, LBW being, minus all the refinements, when it hits your padded legs and would have hit the stumps, which would mean you are out. The umpire gave him not out. LBW machines, which the Indians have vetoed for this series, would have given him out. Tense. Very tense. Tendulkar stuck on eleven, but still there.

I suspect that the illness which had him off the field yesterday may still be affecting him. I suspect he's not quite himself. All over the world, people like me are listening in on the radio, and they're reading out emails from such people, the latest one being from a lady in Switzerland saying she hopes (reprise) that Tendulkar gets a hundred but England win. Michael J tells me that Australians aren't so fond of Tendulkar, because of his habit of skipping the more irksome foreign tours, like the one the Indians did in the West Indies, just before coming here.

But … Tendulkar out!!! LBW (see above) to James Anderson, who has now taken three wickets. Glad I don't now have to explain that. I promise you I put in that bit about Tendulkar not being at his best before he got out.

Later: India still resisting hard, past 200, still only for 5. India's captain, the redoubtable Mahendra Singh Dhoni is now batting. The second new ball (new balls do more in the air and are more threatening to batsmen) will probably decide this thing. It's due in four overs (i.e. twenty four more deliveries). If England don't then get wickets ...

What a game. Am I talking about cricket itself, or merely this game? Both.

LATER: No Tendulkar century, but England win by 196 runs.

(9)

Guido reports that various opposition unworthies were at Lord's today, watching England v India, "while Rome burns", as he put it. Ed Balls, Charlie Whelan, and someone equally important called Kevin whom I do recognise from the picture and whose name I do know but have forgotten. MacGuire, is it?

But it was far worse than that in the fiddling while Rome burns department. As soon as it started raining, they had no less a personage than Sir Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, talking on the radio, with BBC cricket commentating supremo Jonathan Agnew. I know this, because I was listening. Is this not, I thought, rather an odd day for Governor King not to be at his desk?

Sir Mervyn talked a lot about the Chance to Shine initiative which encourages school kids to play cricket. He has an interest in cricket and its organisation that goes way back, it would seem. It all sounded very encouraging for England cricket fans like me, provided we were able to set aside details like the world's financial system going into melt-down.

Sure enough, towards the end of their chat Aggers asked King about "events in Europe today". Had he not done this it would have been even more surreal. King blocked all these queries with straight-batted cliches about how he and his various banking opposite numbers were in constant touch with each other, getting on top of the crisis, blah blah. If only.

Geoff Boycott (scroll down here (17:23) for a report) had a go at King for bailing out failed banks. Boycott didn't talk to King face to face, which I am sure they took very good care to prevent. But he did send a note, which Aggers read out:

Free enterprise doesn't work when private companies take the profits yet we the public pay for their loses. How is that right? I say put them all in jail. Geoff Boycott

King didn't lose his cool, but he definitely sounded rather ambushed. Basically, his answer was: "When you are the BBC's economic correspondent, I'll answer your questions. I'm here to talk about cricket."

Was King doing that central banker thing of deliberately not cancelling irrelevant engagements, to give the impression of business as usual, no panic, steady as she goes and all that? If so, does he seriously think anyone will be fooled?

Come to think of it, do you suppose that this is what the Emperor Nero himself thought he was doing, when he played on his instrument all those years ago? Fire? What fire? No no, just a little local difficulty. Soon blow over. Relax. Everything under control.

Maybe Nero was just doing music so he could ignore awkward incoming phone calls.

England are 127-2, this having been the somewhat disappointing (because cut short by rain) first day of a potentially very absorbing four match series. I'm watching the highlights now on the telly. India and England are, in that order, now to two top ranked test playing international cricket teams. If England can win this four match series by a margin of two matches or more, they will go top. England have a definite chance of doing that.

As for the chance that Mervyn King and his various opposite numbers will manage to stop that financial crisis from getting any worse, well, that I wouldn't rate quite so highly.

(7)

Sport, especially when it gets big and successful and financially significant, is incurably political. This is because, when it gets big and successful and financially significant, it can't be run like the car industry or the computer chip industry. If you think the current range of cars or computer chips on sale are rubbish, you can go into business on your own, and make better cars or computer chips, or you can import better cars or computer chips, or you can make what you reckon to be better car components or better chip designs and then try to sell them to the various car or chip companies, and if one car or chip company won't buy them, you can try the others.

Car and computer chip companies can also get very political, but at least there is a decent chance that they will be run approximately like real businesses, competing with each other, and in a form which allows malcontents to express their discontents commercially rather than politically.

But, if you don't like how your sport is run, you and your friends walking out of the AGM in a huff and starting your own version of that same sport is not any sort of solution. That, actually, is a pretty good one line description of the fundamental problem. (Consider what happened to rugby, when it split into rugby league and rugby "union" (hah!). Think what rugby, league and union, now is. Think what it might have been.)

Everyone who wants to be part of running their favourite sport is stuck with each other. All must somehow agree on the same set of detailed rules. All must cooperate to contrive competitions of the kind they all want, or at least are all ready to live with. All must submit to the same "governing" body. When a car company competes with another car company, they don't need to communicate at all. When a sports team competes, in the sporting sense, with a rival sports team, there has to be a minimum of civility involved, otherwise they'd never be able to fix a time, a place, or officials to adjudicate. Sporting fixtures need fixing, cooperatively.

Sports only compete in the purely commercial sense, uncontaminated by the need for any "politics", in that an entire sport competes with other entire sports. In new and small sports, everyone is in a very basic sense on the same side. But when things start to go really well, there start to be fights within the sport, about the rules and for the spoils. Small sports tend to be run well and amicably. It's only when they get big that the trouble starts.

My particular favourite sport happens to be cricket, and cricket, now as always, is riddled with political problems.

In the course of giving a lecture recently at Lord's, the highly respected former captain and still current Sri Lankan player Kumar Sangakkara, identified the moment when things started to go wrong for cricket administration in his country:

Sangakkara pinpointed the country's most powerful moment of national unity - the World Cup final victory over Australia in 1996 - as the moment the sport's administration changed "from a volunteer-led organisation run by well-meaning men of integrity into a multimillion-dollar organisation that has been in turmoil ever since".

Precisely.

The other way that sports administration can go horribly wrong is when the politics of the country itself goes so horribly wrong that it screws up everything in the country, sport included. This happened in recent years in Zimbabwe, and Pakistan cricket is a constant source of worry to cricket people everywhere for those kinds of reasons.

It would be tempting, then, for a devotedly anti-politics libertarian like me to crow with joy at a report like this, which is about how the world governing body of cricket is telling national governing bodies of cricket that they must be free from political interference.

However, in this report, we read this:

The change is something the ICC has been keen on for some time, to try and bring governance of cricket in line with other global sporting bodies such as FIFA and the IOC.

The ICC is the cricket governing body, FIFA the soccer governing body, and the IOC the Olympic Games governing body. The latter two are constantly in the news because of political turmoil and because of thoroughly well-founded allegations of corruption. And yet here are cricket administrators, without any apparent sense of irony, putting these two bodies forward as models to be emulated, to create a cricket world free from "politics". Where, as a Samizdata commenter might say, do you start?

I'll start with that horrible word "governance", a euphemism regularly perpetrated nowadays by politicians to describe politics, but without calling it "politics" because politics sounds too sordid and nasty. Talk of "governance" at once tells us that global cricket administration remains what it has always been, a zone of political bullshit rather than any kind of new nirvana of enitrely prudent and totally stress-free sports administration. Only the nature of the bullshit changes. It used to be imperial and British-flavoured; now, as the new money of the Indian middle classes floods into cricket, the bullshit is more Indian-flavoured and commercialised. (See, for instance, what another former international cricket captain, Ian Chappell, has to say about the ICC.)

The truth is that this is not an argument about whether cricket should be political, merely about what sort of politics, national or global, should make the running, in the running of cricket.

In this respect, cricket resembles the world, I think.

(21)

Dmitri Medvedev and Igor Smirnov


Sepp Blatter

The British tabloids are this week shocked (shocked) by revelations that FIFA, the international governing body of Association Football, appears to be deeply corrupt. The bizarre decision to give the hosting rights to the 2022 World Cup to Qatar (which has a tiny population of well under 2 million people, no football culture or traditions, no suitable stadiums, and a great deal of political uncertainty) has received particular criticism. Alternative bidders for that 2022 event included the United States, who have facilities in place such that one thinks they could hold the event next week if they wanted to, plus Japan, Korea, and Australia, all of which would require slightly more preparation but who could none the less hold the event without much fuss if they wanted to.

The fine Scottish journalist Andrew Jennings (no relation) has spent much of the last two decades attempting to publicise the corruption and deeply unsavoury connections of FIFA, UEFA, the International Olympic Committee, the motorsport body the FIA, and various other sporting organisations. He has found this to be a deeply thankless task. The trouble with sporting administrators everywhere is that they are allowed to play by different rules to everyone else. Typically, they are arrogant, venal, and often deeply stupid, but the glamour of their product is such that politicians, journalists, and various other people who should know better will flatter them, and will suck up to them in return for their favours. The articles and books and television programs of the aforementioned Jennings have contained very few things that have not ultimately turned out to be true, but in return for this he has been shunned by both the sporting world and much of the world of so called "respectable" sports journalism. Sports journalism is a strange thing. It is pretty much required to be biased, the journalists themselves are always very close to the people they cover, and the narrative that they write is not required to greatly resemble the truth, as long as the narrative is good.

I confess that the only thing I find interesting about the decision to give the 2022 World Cup to Qatar is the level of hubris involved. After holding the 2010 World Cup successfully (although in some ways expensively to FIFA's coffers) in South Africa, FIFA now seems to believe that they can hold the event anywhere. A host nation's lack of preparedness is possibly even an advantage. When preparations go wrong, FIFA can take over the running of the event, and provide expensive "consultants" that it pays for with its own money. If a lot of construction is required, this is good. Construction industries are often corrupt. The opportunities for graft and corruption are greater. The less prepared the host nation, the more of this can happen.

So Qatar appears to make perfect sense to me. Once you figure out that FIFA officials like to be heavily bribed while being treated like medieval feudal monarchs, and you then ask the question as to which potential host country is best at treating them this way, and you accept that the decision as to who would host the 2022 World Cup was made solely on this criteria, things become entirely uninteresting.

What is actually more troubling is the decision to give the 2018 World Cup to Russia. This decision has received less disdain in the English press in the last week (despite the fact that one of the countries that lost out to Russia was England) possibly due to the decision being not quite so obviously absurd as Qatar 2022. Russia is after all a large country. Russia does have a little of a football tradition - their national side is a second ranking European side that sometimes qualifies for big events and sometimes doesn't, and their clubs are good enough to be competitive in the UEFA Cup/Europa League (ie the second division of intra-European competition) without being quite good enough to be competitive in the Champions League (the genuine first division). And Russia is a big, somewhat belligerent country that is perceived to be powerful. Russian money already influences football further west - from Russian ownership of English club Chelsea, to a surprising number of shirts with "Gazprom" written on them in Germany and other clubs further East.

Once again though, from the point of view of what might have actually been the best bid, the decision to give the World Cup to Russia was absurd. Of the other bidders, both England and Spain/Portugal were in the category of bidders who could have probably hosted the tournament this time next week. Given the tournament to either of these bidders would have seen the tournament hosted by the most famous and storied stadiums in the footballing world, run by organisers who are used to hosting capacity crowds approximately once a week. The combined bid of Belgium/Netherlands was not quite as good, but was still much better. Russia on the other hand requires a lot of new stadiums in what is (despite the brash glamour of Moscow) a country with baroque bureaucracy and crumbling, second rate infrastructure. Moscow may appear flash, but visitors to some of the secondary venues may find them less so

At this point, I am going to digress to somewhere that may initially seem tangential and irrelevant. I hope my readers will forgive this for a moment. There is method in my madness.

Last August, I visited the Republic of Transnistria, which is a breakaway region of the Republic of Moldova. Moldova is principally Romanian speaking, but is an ethnically complicated place. (Romania is also an ethnically complicated place, but in not quite the same way). Approximately, during the second World War, the Soviet Union (disgustingly and immorally) annexed the easternmost portion of Romania, which it combined with a sliver of territory it already held east of the Dniester river to form the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. As with most places in the USSR populated by non-Russians and particularly by non-Slavs, the Soviets attempted to settle Moldova with ethnic Russians. They had been at it in that eastern region over the Dniester for longer, so that portion of the Republic of Moldova was by the late 1980s pretty much exclusively Russian (not even Ukrainian). Moldova proper appears today to be ruled by a political elite of Romanian speakers mixed with a business elite of Russian speaking mafioso types.

In any event, upon the dissolution of the USSR at the end of 1991, and after a short but bloody war the Russian speaking region east of the Dniester river seceded from Moldova with the aid of the Russian army to become the Republic of Transnistria. The Russian Army is present in Transnistria to this day. The Russians like having an outpost this far West. Transnistria borders the pro-Russian region of the Ukraine near Odessa. Transnistria became the personal fiefdom of a dictator with a gloriously Bond-villain sounding name: Igor Smirnov. Transnistria is a rather grim and depressing place, at least partly because it retains the symbols of the former Soviet Union: hammers and sickles, ostentatious military parades and monuments, other dubious stuff. Transnistria's independence is recognised by no generally recognised states - not even Russia. (It is recognised by other breakaway regions of former Soviet republics: South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and to some extent Nagorno-Karabakh).

When you go to Transnistria and in particular its capital city of Tiraspol, it is not all that clear what is there, beyond weird remnants of communism. The Kvint distillery makes some of the finest spirits in central Europe, but the fact that a country feels the need to put a brandy distillery on its five rouble banknote does tend to suggest that there is a certain sparcity of other legitimate economic activity. There are terrible rumours of arms dealing, drug and human trafficking, the peddling of bodily organs of dubious provenance, and various other activities frowned upon in respectable places.

But, of course, there is the Sheriff factor. There is a logo of a single company on all kinds of businesses: supermarkets, petrol stations (can one say subsidised Russian oil money, by the way?), a mobile phone network (using the CDMA/IS-95 technical standard that unlike GSM family standards does not require registration with the certificate authorities of the ITU, of which Transnistria is not of course a member), a television channel, a construction company, even the aforementioned Kvint brandy distillery. Basically, a single conglomerate controls pretty much the entire Transnistrian economy. It has two main managers and shareholders, former KGB agents Viktor Gushan and Ilya Kazmaly, and it has all kinds of special privileges in Transnistria that no other companies are allowed. (Most notably, Sheriff is the only company in Transnistria that is allowed to trade in foreign currencies directly). These privileges were granted by Igor Smirnov's son Vladimir Smirnov, the head of the Transnistrian customs service Despite occasional public spats with Gushan and Kazmaly, it is fairly widely acknowledged that Sheriff is a front through which Igor Smirnov controls, profits from, or at least plunders the Transnistrian econony.

Dedicated football fans might just be starting to understand the purpose of this digression, as a team named Sheriff Tiraspol have been seen in European football recently, in the previously mentioned Europa league. Although Transnistria claims to be a separate country from Moldova, its football teams compete in the Moldovan league. The Moldovans presumably originally tolerated this because this was originally a de-facto acknowledgement that Transnistria was in fact part of Moldova, and expelling Transnistrian teams from the league would have suggested this was not so. Or possibly they were pressured by Russia, and by Russia's friend's in FIFA and UEFA, or by the Russian mafiosa who rule Moldova in concert with the Romain speaking politicians. Or something.

In any event, approximately 15 years ago, the omniscient Transnistrian Sheriff corporation founded a football team, named FC Sheriff Tiraspol. With money that came from somewhere or other, that corporation recruited players from Africa and Latin America, and it rapidly became the dominant team in Moldova. And when I say dominant, I mean dominant. Sheriff have won every Moldovan league since 2000. In European competition, they are good enough to at times qualify for the group stage of the UEFA Cup/Europa League. This tends to imply they are about as good as a middling first division Dutch club, perhaps.

Moldova is perhaps the poorest country in Europe. Transnistria appears bleak next to Moldova. However, the one non-bleak place in Tiraspol is Sheriff Stadium, which is a beautiful 15,000 seat football stadium built to the highest standards. (There is a Mercedes Benz dealership in the same building as the stadium, incidentally. This franchise also belongs to Sheriff corporation, incidentally. Throughout the Russian sphere of influence, one finds German companies doing business in places where the English or the French fear to tread). This appears to have cost around $200 million to build. This is of the same magnitude as Transnistria's annual GDP. Lord only knows where the money came from. (That is a lot of black market organ transplants of illicit AK-47s). I make no connection, but the phrase "Russian oil money" has appeared earlier in this post).

One of the interesting things about FIFA and UEFA is the interpretation of regulations. Theoretically, for a certain level of international match, a certain standard of stadium is required. The only stadium in Moldova that satisfies the standards necessary for international matches is Sheriff stadium in Tiraspol. Thus, the Moldovan national team has been required to play its home matches in Tiraspol in Transnistria. This has not gone down well with actual Romanian speaking Moldovans, who have stayed away from the matches in droves. On the other hand, Sheriff Tiraspol have been playing in Europe, and have made the rest of the Moldovan league irrelevant, and have become the host of Moldovan national matches. FIFA president Sepp Blatter has attended at least one match at Sheriff Stadium, and said the facilities were "wonderful".

The Transnistrians lack of international recognition would prevent them from joining UEFA and FIFA in their own right, and yet they have somehow managed a reverse takeover of Moldova's membership of these organisations. The feeling in Transnistria is that this grants them certain legitimacy that they would not have otherwise. UEFA and FIFA have gone along with this, and have supported this. Once can only speculate as to why, and who exactly is friends with who, and who exactly else is involved. And where exactly the money goes.

One might compare the situation with another State of limited recognition, the Republic of Kosovo in the former Yugoslavia. The Kosovars love their football as much as anyone. (This is not entirely a positive - football teams and nationalist movements are mixed up in the Balkans in ways that are not always savory). However, their teams have long been excluded from Serbian leagues and the world. The option of playing in the league of a neighboring country (whether or not they then take it over) is not open to them. FIFA and UEFA's rules apply here in a different way. One sort of thinks this might have something to do with their having the wrong friends.

Correction: Unfortunately, a couple of paragraphs describing the doings of Sheriff corporation in Transnistria were omitted due to a badly placed tag when this piece was originallly posted. This has now been fixed.

(41)

The Daily Telegraph - which in my view continues to go downhill as a newspaper - has this decidedly mixed quality article by Jim White about the alleged evils of a large sporting institution being owned not by its "local community" but, horror of horrors, by a US family living in the sleazy state of Florida, no less. Words such as "leeches" are used. We are talking about the Glazer family, owner of Manchester United. Perhaps someone at that newspaper might gently remind Mr White that the Glazers are of Jewish origin, and that it is not terribly clever to use words such as "leeches", given the historical demonisation of Jewish speculators as "bloodsuckers". To be fair to White, I am sure nothing untoward was involved and he got carried away. Even so, this paragraph should have set off some editorial alarm bells:

"I believe United’s success has arrived in spite of the Glazers, not thanks to them. Rather than astute custodians, they are merely monumental leeches, blessed, in their endless requirement for blood, to be attached to such a healthy host body."

Mr White struggles to lay out how awful it is that the club, purchased earlier in the 'Noughties in a leveraged buyout, is now a privately held firm with a large debt interest bill. Indeed, it does seem eye-watering that since the day of purchase, interest charges of around £300 million have been paid on the debt, financed through things like rising ticket prices and the like. And yes, the days when factory workers could watch the likes of Duncan Edwards or George Best in the 50s and 60s for a relative puny sum have gone. There are even software engineers and financiers watching football these days (how vulgar!). But surely, the Glazers bought the club in a free market - no gun was held to anyone's head when that transaction was made.

Mr White does not, as he could have done, argue that the tax rules could be changed so that equity financing is put on a level playing field (excuse the pun) with debt; arguably, some of the more foolish-looking leveraged buyouts that arose just before the credit market debacle of 2008 were encouraged by favourable tax treatment of debt. But he should realise that had ManU remainded a listed business, then the shareholders would want to see return on equity and for those returns to increase. They also want a dividend occasionally. This growth has to come from somewhere. With many sporting institutions, that growth requires things like rising ticket revenues, sponsorship, and the like. I personally think that outside of a few very big sporting institutions, such capital growth is questionable and that sport is subject to all manner of vagaries that make it an unappealing investment, in my view.

Now, if Mr White wants to make the case that the state should somehow decide and regulate the ownership of sporting institutions, then he should have the courage of his convictions and argue for sport to be run on socialist principles. Let's see how far he can go with that.

I don't like much of the modern professional footballing world, and yes, the lure of big money has made some players behave with particular foolishness in recent years. But Mr White should remember that if people really detest the vulgarity of modern sport as much as he claims they do, there is a simple solution. Don't go to matches and do something more edifying instead. Or even play some football with your kids in the back yard.

(13)

This has nothing really much to do with some sort of grand political idea or anything, but sport is part of life - however much that upsets anti-sports folk or the plain uninterested - and this man, more than most, enhanced the life of anyone who follows the maddening and beguiling game of golf.

Seve Ballesteros, RIP.

(15)

England are certainly contributing mightily to the enjoyability of the Cricket World Cup. Their first game, against the Netherlands, stayed interesting almost to the end, on account of the slogging inflicted on England by Ryan ten Doeschate. As a result of that, England had to make nearly three hundred. They did this, but had to bat very well. You kept thinking they might collapse and lose. That was the first really fun game of the tournament, all the previous games having been tediously one-sided demolitions of lesser teams by big teams.

Next up, England played India. India belted 338, and that looked beyond England, but at one stage England looked to be cruising it, until they lost two big wickets in two balls. Then they lost more wickets and looked well beaten. But then, the England tail wagged, and what do you suppose happened then? Only a tie!

And now, now, a true upset is in the offing, because Ireland, chasing England's satisfactory but not stellar total of 327, and having at one stage been 111-5 (for Americans – that's bad) are now, get this, 272-5 with all of nine overs left. For Americans – that's good, really good. Ireland are now odds on to win this!

And the blogger's curse strikes! Ireland have lost a wicket. A run out!

But this is not over yet, because the batsman who got out, Cusack, has most definitely been the junior partner in the huge stand of 162 that has just ended. At the other end, still batting, is a certain Kevin O'Brien and he is 101 not out, having smashed the record for the fastest (measured in deliveries faced) century in the history of the Cricket World Cup. O'Brien has hit six sixes, including the biggest one of the tournament so far.

WOW says my computer screen. Actually this was an advert for Weightwatchers, but for once an annoyingly interruptive advert hit the nail on the head.

The run rate has now fallen, and it is all getting even more tense. A few more big shots from O'Brien and Ireland will win this, but a close finish plays havoc with the mental equilibrium of even the best players. But, they've had a couple of streaky, snicky boundaries and need 34 from 29 balls, with four wickets left.

The funny thing is, even if England lose, they will probably make their way through to the quarter finals. Not a huge amount is at stake. But, if Ireland win, it will be, as they say, what the World Cup is all about!

32 from 26. Ireland now 300-6. Somebody called Mooney is now joining in, with a couple of great boundaries. 23 from 21. 20 from 18. 18 from 16. O'Brien is taking a breather, before what I am sure he hopes will be a triumphant assault, probably in the next over rather than the last one. Ireland won't want to leave this to the very end. 16 from 13. Bosh! Mooney again! That really hurts England. 12 from 12, still with four wickets left. Even a hectic wicket strewn shambles by Ireland will still probably win this!

Now O'Brien is run out! He scored 113 from 63 deliveries. It's anybody's now. Now they're showing the replay of the O'Brien run out. He had simply run out of puff, poor fellow. No wonder.

And somebody called Johnston hits his first ball, a full toss, to the boundary. Ireland need 7 from 10, and are right back to being hot favourites. 2 more to Johnston! 5 wanted from 8. Ireland 323-7. 4 from 7. One boundary does it. 3 to win from the last over. Mooney, 29 not out, on strike.

Ireland win. Biggest successful run chase at the World Cup, ever.

I was going to do serious things this afternoon. Oh well.

(36)

The commentary soundbite of the night so far, from the BBC's coverage of Super Bowl XLV, from Tiki Barber:

Do not go to bed. Work is not as important as this game.

It's Pittsburgh 25 Green Bay 28, in the fourth quarter, after Pittsburgh managed what I believe is called a "safety" "two-point conversion" (see comments), Pittsburgh having earlier in the game been down by 18 points. Nobody's ever won a Super Bowl having been that far behind, but this looks to be anyone's.

Mike Carlson, Britain's ubiquitous American Football expert, commentates for whichever channel has the games, be it Channel 4, Channel 5, or, as now, BBC 1, and so he's with the BBC tonight, as he has been throughout the play-offs. I seem to recall complaining here about the snide little political digs that Carlson has in the past indulged in, when commentating for Channels 4 or 5. The BBC seem to have told him to cut it out. Usually, whenever any player is called Bush (I seem to recall there being a Reggie Bush) Carlson calls him "the Bush you can support". (Yes, I mention this in the comments here, in connection with something Carlson said during last year's Superbowl.) George W. Bush himself is actually watching this game, as is Condoleeza Rice, or that's who it looked like to me. They showed a whole row of such people. Whatever Carlson may have wanted to say about that he kept to himself.

Green Bay win the Vince Lombardi trophy, 31-25. The grandstand finish that Tiki Barber had been saying might, if earlier games were anything to go by, be contrived by Pittsburgh's hobbling miracle worker of a quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, never happened, and it ended rather tamely, as American football games sometimes do, with guys kneeling down, and then … it was ... over.

Now they're saying that a play called Lombardi, about the great Green Bay coach of yesteryear that they now name the Super Bowl trophy after, just opened on Broadway. Blog and learn.

The Green Bay Packers are the "world champions". Yeah. But now they are making a good point, which is that the Super Bowl has no exact parallel in British soccer. That has the FA Cup Final, but also the Premier League, and also a couple of European titles to shoot for. Every other year there's either a European national tournament, or the World Cup. Only in the American version of football does the winner of the one big game win absolutely everything.

(5)

My fellow Samizdatista and cricket fan (but Aussie) Michael Jennings has been accusing me of not celebrating enough when England have done well in the recently concluded Ashes cricket series. My message throughout the series, to anyone who would listen, has indeed been: wait for it, wait for it. Both England fans exulting and Aussies wanting to pitch straight into their speculations about why Australia is now a failed state, I have been saying throughout, needed to wait until the crushing England win that looked ever more likely as the series proceeded was actually achieved. Or not, as the case might have been.

But now that England have indeed achieved their 3-1 (away) victory (there first away win at five-day cricket against Australia for nearly a quarter of a century, which included three innings victories which trust me is crushing), I am now celebrating, with a long posting last night at my personal blog. Well, really it's about ten blog postings - with handily placed asterisks to enable you to skip to the next one, should you be inclined to.

Topics include: Jimmy Anderson's girlie-man wicket celebrations, Alastair Cook sounding like Noel Fielding, the role of and nature of luck in sport (and in life generally), the inverse relationships between good individual bowling figures and team success (well, that's mostly in the first and only comment so far, also by me) and between national economic and national sporting success. Plus, the fascinating contribution made to cricket folklore by the Radio Four shipping forecast, which, amazingly, caused Radio Four listeners to miss the final moments of all three England wins.

If you're the sort that enjoys that kind of thing, enjoy.

(11)

As has already recently been noted here by Michael Jennings, Australia is just now doing rather badly at cricket. The first day of the recently concluded Melbourne game was, for Australia, particularly calamitous. Australia all out 98, England 157 for no wicket. That, trust me, was very bad indeed for Australia. Bear in mind that this was not just any old bad day; this was Boxing Day at the MCG, against England, one of the great days of the Australian sporting calendar, like Derby Day or Grand National day in England or Superbowl Sunday in the USA. After that first day disaster, there looked to be no way back in this particular game for the Australians, and so it proved. England, having won the Ashes back in 2009 in England, will now keep them. If I am optimistic about England's chances of avoiding a deeply disappointing 2-2 draw in the series in the forthcoming final test at Sydney, it is because I believe that the leaders of the England team agree with me that if they lose in Sydney that will seriously take the shine off their entire campaign.

Okay, sport hurrah! Blah blah blah. But last night, as I settled down to watch the televised highlights of the final spasms of that Melbourne game on ITV4, I realised something else that was, for me, new and different, besides England thrashing Australia in Australia at cricket. Someone else was suffering, if my behaviour was anything to go by, besides Aussie cricketers and cricket fans.

In the past, when a major sports team that I am fond of (usually either the England cricket team or the England rugby team) has done really well, I go out and buy an armful of newspapers and have a good wallow, with newspaper pages spread out all over my living room floor. I know, I know, the internet has been with us for at least a decade. But the habit of newspaper buying has been a hard one for me entirely to break, especially at times like these. Well, now, finally, I seem to be cured of it. I made no conscious "decision". I simply, I now realise, didn't buy any newspapers. Never even thought about it.

It seems that I have learned enough about surfing the internet to no longer want newspapers even for sporting excitements, even when I would actually enjoy reading about a quarter of what is in them, and might learn all kinds of other things if I at least glanced through the rest of them. Recent newspaper purchases, made for this or that forgotten reason, have only resulted in them being almost totally unread.

It also helped that, this time around, I now have a brand spanking new computer, with several tons more RAM than before, and quick as lightning compared to anything I've ever had until now.

It seems that I am not the only one now thinking like this about newspapers, and more to the point buying (as in not buying) like this. (My thanks for that link to Guido Fawkes.)

If one newspaper puts itself behind a paywall, well, there are plenty of others who have yet to do this. If they all, sometime soonish, go behind a paywall, well, I'll deal with that problem when it happens. Meanwhile, plenty of verbiage is now given away on big sports dramas, and I can now find all I want about England cricket successes for nothing, and in a paperlessly calm manner. Personally, I don't believe that there ever will be any great lack of good free-to-read stuff about cricket, even if the "professional" journalists do all end up requiring payment to be read (as well they might). The amateurs will happily step forward, I say, in fact I'm pretty sure that they already have. It's just that for as long as the old school media mostly give their cricket stuff away, I haven't bothered to find out which new websites and blogs I could go to. I'd welcome suggestions as to where else I might be reading about cricket, besides Cricinfo and the big newspaper websites of the cricketing world.

Part of my point here is: although these kinds of changes are absolute in nature, and very abrupt in historic time, at the time they happen they are often experienced as oddly gradual, and even preventable should you happen to want them prevented. What is later clear to have been a total wipe-out happens at the time as single figure percentage drops. This particular bit of writing has long been on the wall, but it often takes a bit of a while for sufficient numbers to read such writing and to make the long-prophesied on-off switch actually do its switch. For one thing, the hardware often needs to evolve, speed up, get easier and nicer, and so on. In this case, gradually, they (we) are, and it is. And in this case, the phrase "writing on the wall" seems peculiarly apt, even if the wall in question is virtual and electronic rather than literal.

What seems to be happening is that many are now willing to pay pennies to read professional media stuff, on their iPads and iPhones and Google-Android equivalents. How much of a real business this will turn into remains to be seen. Very big but very different from the recent past would be my current guess. I don't believe that Rupert Murdoch has necessarily made a big mistake with his Times paywall decision, by the way. His old regime couldn't last, and had to be changed. He has merely decided which bit of the new internet business he wants the Times to be in. The Times now faces turmoil as it adjusts to its new reality, but that doesn't mean that it won't adjust.

Meanwhile, all those who, like me, want also to write about it (whatever it might be) and to link to other writings about it will continue to want free stuff. It's absolutely not - or not only - that we amateurs are cheap. The key is linkage. If we can't say to everyone reading our own free stuff: hey, have a read of this (no link there because that is my exact point), there is, for us amateur writers, no point in us reading it either.

Another way of putting all this is to say that whereas it used to be that the Mainstream Media were … the mainstream media, while us internetters all lived in our dusty little caves of off-message opinion, gibbering and cursing with only our closest friends, now it is the pay-as-you-read ex-mainstream media who will be the ones living, if not in caves, then at least indoors, so to speak, and hence ever more cut off from "public" opinion. Think: Palace of Versailles. That this switch is already happening explains a lot about the current state of politics, worldwide.

(13)

In 1985, the Australian cricket team was so bad that it lost two test series to New Zealand in the same season. Appalled by this, the powers running Australian cricket set up a comprehensive set of reforms to the way the game and the national team was run. One of these reforms was the establishment in Adelaide of a "Cricket Academy" in which promising, potential future test players could receive coaching and training to complete their development as international cricketers. Good coaches and staff were hired, and the academy was one of the explanations given for the rise of the world beating Australian team of the 1980s and 1990s.

Shortly after this, the local tourist board in Adelaide discovered a curious phenomenon. Visitors to Adelaide would state that they wanted to see "The Cricket Academy". Apparently they expected to see buildings, pitches, nets, and a sign at the gate saying "Australian Institute of Sport: Cricket Academy" or some such. As it happened, there were no such premises. The cricket academy used rented and borrowed nets, grounds, and other facilities. The emphasis was on the training.

However, in 2004, the academy relocated to Brisbane, was renamed as the "Cricket Australia Centre of Excellence", and a new, $26 million dollar headquarters was commissioned: a "state-of-the-art athlete development centre that will integrate science, technology and coaching to enhance both development of athletes and the understanding of skill development and performance in the sport".

All is explained.

(11)

Jim White at the Daily Telegraph has a good piece about the recent unjust - in my view - sacking of Newcastle Utd manager Chris Hughton. Apparently, Hughton's "mistake" was that he was a "nice" person: straight-talking, honourable, considerate towards his players and unwilling to suck up to the owners of the club. White points out that it is silly to suggest that "nice guys" cannot do well in sports management or sports more generally, and cites examples such as Andrew Strauss, the England cricket captain, whom I have met and thought was a very likeable person; tennis gods Rafal Nadal and Roger Federer, two gents who are brilliant players, and for that matter, the late Sir Bobby Robson, football management great and all-round fine man. I hear stories that Sir Alex Ferguson, the gruff-appearing Scotsman who manages Manchester United, takes a fatherly concern for his players, especially the younger ones. Another example of a nice guy doing well in sports management is Harry Redknapp, currently doing great things at Spurs and presiding over a very entertaining team.

I think the same point about decent people able to achieve greatness because, not despite, their niceness applies in the realms of business, too. Generally speaking, some of the best business people in my experience are certainly hardworking and committed, even aggressive, but they are not nasty pieces of work. That is how anti-businesspeople imagine business people should be. Alan Sugar, the front man for The Apprentice TV show, hams it up by coming across as a total monster, which is presumably what the TV producers want. In reality, any businessman who behaved like that would lose a lot of talented staff. Being a tosser is not a great business strategy, as far as I can see, but there obviously exceptions.

In politics and sport, I can, of course, see why aggression, even nastiness, can be a winning strategy given that politics and sports are, in some ways, zero-sum. If politician A achieves office, he or she does so by pushing B out of the way. And that sort of eye-gouging gets worse the greater the stakes are, such as in totalitarian systems. Hence FA Hayek's point, in the Road To Serfdom, about why "the worst get on top".

Anyway, I hope Hughton gets another job in football management from a club that values his qualities. No wonder Newcastle Utd fans are steamed.

(44)

Having been a bit ill and it having been very cold recently by London standards, certainly in November or December, I have been consoling myself by paying more attention than I otherwise might have done to the Ashes, aka the series of five day cricket matches that happens every couple of years or so between England and Australia.

My main feeling about the Ashes just now is that there is an amazing contrast between the score, which now stands at nothing-nothing (as in: nobody has won any of these games yet), and the way many of the commentators are talking. England are great, on top of their game, firing on all cylinders, well organised, etc. etc. Australia are rubbish, a nation in crisis, woe woe woe. You'd think Australia had already been beaten five nothing, like England were last time they came calling. Yes, England saved the first game well, and yes, England are now on top in the second game. But a combination of rain and good Australian batting on a good batting pitch could well leave it nothing-nothing as the third game begins, and who knows what might then happen? Momentum in sport is a funny thing. One team can dominate, and then something (often just a bit of blind luck) can go against them and suddenly a savage negative feedback loop of failure, recrimination at earlier missed opportunities and general frustration can strike them down, along with the agony consequent on them having been too complacent, and now knowing it. Meanwhile their seemingly doomed opponents can bounce back, gripped by an equal-and-opposite positive feedback loop of surging confidence and astonished nothing-to-lose optimism. An almost absurdly one-sided contest can suddenly mutate into a real old dogfight that either team could win. This can happen. This could happen. England have not yet won anything in this series.

But, in opposition to point number one, the England team seem thoroughly to understand all of the above. Everything they have been saying in interviews that I've seen, especially in the ones involving their admirably level-headed captain Andrew Strauss, has been along the lines of: we've a lot of tough cricket ahead, so far it's nothing-nothing, Australia will play better, and ... well, see my previous paragraph. If I thought the England team didn't get what might happen if, to coin a phrase, they were to take their eyes off the ball, then I'd now be full of dread. As it is, I agree with my Australian fellow cricket-nut and fellow-Samizdatista Michael Jennings that England are indeed now favourites to win this thing. Fingers crossed. Success in sport can indeed be almost automatic, but only for teams which assume that winning is never automatic and can only happen if they give it their all.

To switch subjects from a mere game to the somewhat more serious matter of the state of the world, of the USA in particular, one of the things that most impresses me about the USA's Tea Party movement is that they too seem to have exactly this attitude to the tasks they now face. Everything I hear from these people in interviews and blog postings says something very similar to the sentiment I now attribute to the England cricket team. So far, they now say, all we've done is elect a few politicians. We have many years of tough politics ahead of us if we are actually to accomplish anything. Don't, they keep on telling themselves, echoing one of their most significant leaders (who would surely deny that accusation), get cocky. It is this very lack of any assumption on their part that they will automatically have any real world consequences that now most makes me believe that the Tea Party will have real world consequences.

So, am I saying that life is like a game of cricket? I suppose I am. Sometimes, it is.

(4)

A couple of further cricket games between England and Pakistan have now happened. In the first of these, Pakistan surrendered a winning position. Sound familiar? It should. In the second, they never got to a winning position in the first place. England were efficient in both games. I refuse to provide links to mere match reports. Did the Pakistanis lose because they were paid to, or is it merely that they are now utterly demoralised? Probably the latter, but given that one can't now be sure it is hard to care. That Pakistan's cricket bosses had to be bullied into suspending the players revealed as having cheated hasn't helped. Ijaz Butt in particular looks far more like part of the problem that part of any solution.

I'm reading this kind of reaction quite a lot, the one about being shocked, shocked. As in not actually very shocked at all. But the importance of what just happened is not that cricket fans now strongly suspect Pakistan's cricketers of cheating, but that we now know it. The cheaters are still protesting their innocence, and the wheels of justice will, as is proper, grind slowly on, but the market (i.e. the fans) is already now speaking, loud and clear. Guilty:

Stewart Regan, chief executive of Yorkshire County Cricket Club, said: "The phones haven't stopped ringing from people wanting to vent their fury and ask whether they can get refunds.

"I've fielded several calls and we've had numerous enquiries about cancelling tickets. From the club's point of view we can't give refunds simply because of a personal opinion about what's gone on, no matter how much we might agree with them."

"Might" agree. Hah. Now I'm watching the TV highlights of the game earlier this evening. The crowd is tiny, heavily outnumbered by empty seats. Pakistan cricket will not soon be forgiven by the English county clubs now caught up in this mess. They will want someone's blood, and since they cannot expect much satisfaction from Pakistan itself any time soon, they will probably look closer to home.

They won't have far to look. As Michael Jennings said in a comment on this:

Seriously, the judgment of Lord's and the ECB looks consistently bad. Somehow they missed getting properly involved in the IPL and ended up doing a deal with Sir Allen Stanford because they needed the money, and they then did this deal with Pakistan (who were unable to play games at home because terrorists attempted to kill the last foreign team that went there, and who India wanted nothing to do with) because they had empty stadiums and needed someone to play in them. Meanwhile, they were unable to do such things as cooperate sufficiently with the IPL so that English sides can participate in the Champions League. They seem to have made the wrong choice every time.

Indeed they do. Meanwhile, in New Zealand, there are fears that revenue from Pakistan tour could suffer. Indeed it could.

(8)

Further to what I, and Johnathan Pearce, and Natalie Solent, have all being saying here about cricket corruption, and about how this is a story about more than mere cricket corruption, I just noticed this report from a few days ago, at cricinfo.com. Cricinfo is one of my regular haunts, so sorry for not linking to this earlier:

Betting in cricket and other sports should be legalised in India, a Delhi court has said, pointing out that the police have failed to curb illegal betting in the country. Legalising betting, the court said, would help the government keep track of the transfer of funds and even use the revenue generated for public welfare.

"It does not need divine eyes to see that 'satta' in cricket and other games is reaching an alarming situation. The extent of money that it generated is diverted to clandestine and sinister objectives like drug trafficking and terrorist activities," said additional sessions judge Dharmesh Sharma, of a Delhi trial court. "It is high time that our legislature seriously considers legalising the entire system of betting online or otherwise so that enough revenues can be generated to fund various infrastructural requirements for the common man and thus check the lucrative business in organised crime."

Now I will willingly grant you that this is anything but a pure libertarian argument, of the kind that would prevail in Brian-Micklethwait-world. Judge Sharma is emphasising the revenue gathering opportunity inherent in legalisation just as strongly as the anti-crime point. But for what it is worth, I also much prefer a legalised and quite heavily taxed and state-regulated betting regime to total illegality, if those are the only choices I am offered. And they are, given the current state of the world and of its predominant opinions.

(4)

In the previous posting by Brian on the alleged match-fixing scam involving Pakistan's cricket team, one commenter called Jim made the excellent point that gambling is illegal in Pakistan. It is, as the practice is banned under Shariah law - but there is a vast and thriving underground gambling industry there and indeed across the Indian sub-continent.

Now, as we libertarians like to point out, if you ban consenting activities between adults - such as betting on sports - then when such activities are driven underground, criminals get involved, with all the sort of consequences we are now writing about. That is not to say, of course, that if gambling were legalised in Pakistan, that the match-fixer gangsters would hang up their hats and do something else. But it would, in my view, help a great deal to drive some of these scum away.

Americans bored by all this talk of cricket might recall that baseball has had its problems in the past, as have other sports too. This Wikipedia entry is worth reading (and maybe improving).

And there are certain parallels in this issue with insider dealing in financial markets. On one level, I think that it should not be made illegal since it is difficult to work out the difference, sometimes, between a trader who is just quick off the mark to exploit new information and someone who happens to be privy to inside information. Arguablym, distortions caused by insider dealing eventually get arbitraged out by other investors. However, in the case of private stock markets, they are, as private institutions, perfectly entitled to set the rules so that trading is seen to be "fair" and open, if only to encourage investors to buy and sell stocks who might otherwise have been cynical about insiders getting all the best deals. It is like a private sports association setting down rules against things such as use of enhancement drugs, and so on. So long as no-one is forced to compete against their will, no-one can carp about the rules, and the adoption of such rules draws in more people and interest.

Back to the insider dealing point: As more people play in a market if the rules are seen to be fair, then this encourages greater liquidity and reduces the cost of capital. With the match-fixing issue, the costs of not punishing wrongdoers is something similar: it will drive away people from the sport due to greater cynicism, and hence reduce revenues, investment in new grounds and facilities, and so on. Cynicism, whether in sports, business or elsewhere, is a sort of deadweight cost on an activity by driving away fans, investors, etc.

(22)

My original thoughts having been here.

First: The Pakistani tour bosses have been saying that because there has as yet been no decision under British law to prosecute anyone, no wrongdoing has yet been proved. But the legal problem is that there has to be someone who lost a fraudulent bet, and finding such a person may be difficult, even impossible. But just because the British law may do nothing, that doesn't mean that cricket doesn't have any problem. Already, the News of the World has proved to almost everyone's satisfaction (if that suffices as the word) that no balls were bought and paid for, from Asif and Amir, if only to prove that they could be. That Pakistan test match captain Salman Butt and current Pakistan cricket boss Ijaz Butt refuse to acknowledge this only makes them look guilty also.

Second: Kudos to the British tabloid press. Sport often has reason to resent British news hounds. I was reminded recently, when reading this book, that ace Dutch soccer manager Guus Hiddink (who, unlike current England boss Fabio Capello, is fluent in English as well as soccer) turned down the England job that he would otherwise have loved to do, simply because he couldn't face his love life being done over by these ghastly people. But this time, a British tab picked a target truly worthy of its ruthless attentions. They nailed down and publicised beyond doubt, within a few weeks, what all the cricket anti corruption units and police forces of the cricket-o-sphere couldn't in over a decade.

Third: "Innocent until proved guilty" only applies to the legal system. If English cricket fans like me now regard Pakistan cricket as guilty until proved innocent, and most of us now surely do, we can impose our own sentence upon it right now, by refusing to pay to attend any more Pakistan cricket games in our country.

Fourth (the order of these points has now become rather random but I will bash on anyway): It surely doesn't stop at "spot fixing", i.e. at just a few no balls that don't affect the result. Match fixing is surely also involved, still. The Sydney test last winter in Australia, when Pakistan mysteriously threw away a dominant position, and the Lord's test recently concluded where, whatever official England cricket now says, the Pakistanis did the same thing again, both now look bent. Trott and Broad (who shared in a record stand for England), and the England team in general, understandably don't want to think this and have said in public that they don't. But they probably do, just as the rest of us do.

Fifth: England cricket is now busy demonstrating, in concrete and steel, the truth of the Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle, being now deep into a major historic costs swamp. Numerous expensive new stands have recently been built, or at least expensively refurbished, but they mostly can't now be filled at prices that will pay for all the work that's been done. Meaningful cricket games cannot be conjured out of thin air even at the best of times, which these times are not, and demand even for good contests is limited. Thus, to cancel the few remaining one day games fixed between England and Pakistan would, just now, be a particular disaster for English cricket. These games will be a disaster anyway, because they are now pretty much meaningless except as a way for the English press to carry on hammering away at this fiasco, but not as big a disaster as they would be if they had been cancelled, because this would have meant all the ticket money so far gathered for them having to be handed back. But, the Pakistanis should not confuse the deeply insincere welcome they will now get for their remaining games here with a general willingness on the part of England cricket to forgive them, i.e. arrange more games with them, or for them, in the foreseeable future. (Whoops. I nearly put "fix" more games.) If the Pakistanis want to go on playing international cricket with England, or in England against anybody else (which is their current arrangement on account of Pakistan itself being too terrorist-menaced for anyone else to visit), they will have to clean up their act.

Sixth: This ruckus here in England has caused a general raking over of the recent history of Pakistan cricket and its various rows. I have already mentioned how the recent test series in Australia is, as Michael Jennings said in connection with my earlier posting about this, being, as it were, re-evaluated. The same applies to things like the big row at the Oval four years ago, which ended prematurely amidst loud Pakistani protestations of complete innocence, this time of ball tampering. Even that run in all those years ago, between England captain Mike Gatting and that Pakistani umpire, starts to look a bit different. So, more significantly, do all the much more recent rows within the Pakistan camp. Shahid Afridi, the Pakistan one day captain for the remainder of the tour, who is said to be a particular hold-out against corruption, behaved very strangely when he recently (a) played like a loon in earlier games in this tour, and then (b) abruptly resigned as the test match captain. It looked crazy at the time. I now suspect that the true behind-the-scenes story might present Afridi in a rather better light. [Later: see also, as explained in the comments: Bob Woolmer, death of.]

Seventh: I have read recent internet comments from Pakistan fans saying that Pakistan has the best fast bowlers in the world, and that the only reason they are being accused of cheating is because the rest of the world, England cricket fans like me in particular, can't deal with this. Rubbish. If anything, these latest accusations embody the claim that actually, the likes of Asif and Amir are even better than they have recently seemed. They had Australia and England on the ropes recently and could have finished them off. They merely chose not too. How skillful is that?!? Which just goes to show how much is at stake here. A potentially world beating cricket nation, on a par with the West Indies in their pomp towards the end of the last century, and Australia since then until about now, has been brought down from hero to zero by all this.

Eighth: Although the attitude of fans elsewhere in the world, most notably in India, Australia and England, will be very important, the decisive factor in all this will probably now be the attitude of Pakistan's own cricket fans. What they now demand of their cricketers will determine whether Pakistan cricket now embarks upon the painful and difficult climb back towards cricket respectability, or just gets wiped out as a serious cricket force by its inability or refusal to do this. If the "they only say we cheat because we're better than them" school of thought triumphs in Pakistan - if, that is to say, they all bury their stupid heads in the sand - then it's goodnight Pakistan cricket.

On the other hand, England cricket officialdom had hoped that the recent England Pakistan games would attract large numbers of Pakistani fans living in England. But these fans have been notable only for their almost total absence. At the time, commentators said it must have been the prices being charged. But what if Pakistani cricket fans in England, who will have been paying far more attention to their team than I have until very recently, had already concluded that their cricket team was bent as the proverbial nine bob note, and had decided that they simply could not bear to watch it throwing games away any more? It makes sense to me.

Ninth (this has become like that joke about two Oxford philosophers overheard in debate, but never mind): What Michael Atherton said (Times so forget about a link), as flagged up here by Natalie Solent on Monday, about the illegality of betting in large parts of Asia, and the consequent extreme nastiness of the people who run it.

I do not underestimate the difficulties involved in cleaning up Pakistan cricket, and I strongly agree with all those who are saying what a particular tragedy it will be if Amir now has his career taken from him, as will, I think, have to happen. Either Amir will now get banned for long enough to really hurt his career, or they will just prove they aren't serious. But do not for a moment imagine that not cheating, if you are a Pakistan cricketer of talent, is a mere matter of Just Saying No. Threats are involved, not just bribes. If they can't charm and smarm you into doing their bidding, the gangsters are all too likely to try violence, not just against you but against your family. So, it absolutely won't be easy. It just has to be done if cricket in Pakistan cricket is to have much chance of surviving as a force in the world.

Either that, or we will all have to wait for Pakistan to stop being a totally failed nation, full of gangsters, and of religious maniacs who don't have a clue how to stop gangsterism but only make it worse (e.g. by banning all betting) and many of whom are gangsters themselves, and hope that when that has been accomplished (I give it half a century at the absolute minimum), they still remember cricket.

(10)

Two articles. Right next to each other on page 7 of today's Times. I hope you lot are grateful; I can no longer link to the Times so I had to type all these quotes out myself. The first article is by Ashling O'Connor and Andy Stephens and is headed "Call for action against novelty sport bets". The "action" to which it approvingly refers* is that of the government passing more laws to regulate cricket. The article says:

Cricket, with its complex rules and endless permutations makes it an ideal companion of spot-betting. Traditional British bookmakers avoid bets on what might occur during short passages of play and were not affected by the events allegedly manipulated at Lord's on Friday. However, the more arcane aspects of the game attract huge interest in some parts of the world, especially Asia, where betting is unregulated.

The only bookmakers who offer markets on elements of the game open to so-called micro-manipulation are those in India where bookmaking is illegal and designed to avoid tax and service the black market.

Two comments. Firstly, even I know that Mike Atherton has played a little cricket in his time, has mixed with teams from all the cricketing countries, has made a genuinely successful career as a sports writer after his retirement from cricket, and might be presumed to know something about these matters. In contrast the O'Connor/Stephens article appears to have been churned out from a Play-doh Fun Factory using the Quango Calls for More Regulation extruder template. Secondly, they might be right and Atherton wrong even so.

*Dear Lord, what misery has been inflicted upon the world because no one ever looked good issuing a call for inaction.

(12)

A couple of the best players in the Pakistan cricket team, their two best bowlers, have been accused of match fixing by a British newspaper, and the story is now front page news in all of them. What they have been accused of is bowling "no balls" at pre-specified times, concerning which bets were then taken. All concerned have been at pains to insist that the "result of the match was not in any way affected", which is all part of how subtle this particular corruption was.

You can just hear them saying it. "It's nothing, just a few no balls. You get lots of money and look after yourself and your family, and nobody else suffers." Add to all that a dash of menace (perhaps including some peer pressure) concerning what just might happen to you and yours if you don't oblige, and it must be hard to resist. Then, once the bait has been taken, the tempters have got you by the throat, and can move on to more substantial rearrangements of the results of games. That one of the most promising young cricketers in the world, the eighteen year old fast bowler Mohammad Amir, is one of the players in the frame just makes it that much worse.

I know, it's all still at the stage of "allegations", but the accusations are that no balls were demanded at specific times, no balls which duly occurred. It looks very bad.

The Pakistani second innings is disintegrating as I write this, with Mohammad Amir having got out for an ignominious zero, greeted by the Lords crowd with embarrassed silence. England's spinmeister Graeme Swann and swing ace Jimmy Anderson would this morning be a handful for any batting side with their minds wholly applied to resisting them. For the Pakistanis in their present frame of mind they are irresistible, although a bit of meaningless slogging is now happening. And you can't help wondering if the comparable disintegration of the first Pakistani innings yesterday afternoon was similarly influenced by this catastrophe, which they perhaps already knew was about to explode. Nine wickets have already gone, and it can't be long now for this tainted test match.

What next? Will the one day games now fixed between England and Pakistan proceed? Who knows? Worse, who will care? Will anybody want to come?

The general opinion radiating from England's cricket commentary boxes this summer has been that England cricket has done a fine thing providing Pakistan with a second cricket home, what with Pakistan itself having become an impossible place to play international cricket. I wonder if England's cricket's higher-ups are starting to regret their generosity, if that is what it was.

More positively, I also wonder if the rather fiercer legal environment of the UK might serve to administer the necessary clean-up upon Pakistan cricket that Pakistan's own authorities have, over the years (this is by no means the first such drama), proved themselves incapable of imposing. That's probably far too optimistic.

This is not the first time I have here noted allegations of cheating by Pakistani cricketers. A few years back some of their bowlers were accused of ball tampering and they refused to carry on playing. That was pretty bad. This is far worse, and for cricket fans like me, profoundly depressing.

(8)

French cricket, to an Englishman, means a game played with a cricket bat and a tennis ball, where you stand vertically, using your bat to hit the ball and protect your legs, which double up as your stumps. When trying to hit the ball you may not move your legs. A hit equals a run. If you miss, and it then misses your legs, you aren't allowed to change the position of your legs on the ground, so if you miss and it goes behind you, you have to twist around rather than just turn around, which makes it much harder. If you hit, you can then turn around and face where it's coming from, which is from where it lands, so good fielders can get very close, and then defeat you. A catch is, well, a catch. If it hits your legs you're out and it's someone else's turn. I think. It's decades since I've played this ancient English game.

But now comes this:

It's the quintessential English sport, often dismissed as a pastime for eccentrics with its origins dating back centuries, but now cricket is being taken up by one of the most unlikely nations of all: France.

Children across the country are slowly taking up the sport thanks to a government pilot project aiming to introduce the sport to around 200 schools over the next eight years.

Amazing. And it's a Franch government project. Proof if ever you needed it that governments are packs of traitors.

(16)

The North Korean football team has aroused the ire of the Dear Leader.

Early this month the players were summoned to an auditorium at the working people's culture palace in Pyongyang, forced onstage and subjected to a six-hour barrage of criticism for their poor performances in South Africa, according to the US-based Radio Free Asia.

Only Jung Tae-se and An Yong-hak were spared a dressing down as they flew directly to Japan, their country of birth and where they play club football, according to an unnamed Chinese businessman the station cites as its source.

The "grand debate" was reportedly witnessed by 400 athletes and sports students, and the country's sports minister. Ri Dong-kyu, a sports commentator for the North's state-run Korean Central TV, led the reprimands, pointing out the shortcomings of each player, South Korean media said.

In true Stalinist style, the players were then "invited" to mount verbal attacks on their coach, Jung-hun.

The coach was reportedly accused of betraying the leader's son, Kim Jong-un, who is expected to take over from his ailing father as leader of the world's only communist dynasty.

Radio Free Asia quoted the source as saying he had heard that Kim Jung-hun had been sent to work on a building site and there were fears for his safety.

North Korea watchers said the regime had been hoping to attribute the team's success to Kim Jong-un as it attempts to build support among military and workers' party elites for a transfer of power.

(9)

Michael Jennings just emailed me the link to this, "You may have seen this" being the title of his email. No, I hadn't. "This" starts thus:

There was an unusual match between Barbados and Grenada.

I'll say. Read the whole thing. Really, read the whole thing. It's a classic of perverse incentives, showing how the wrong kind of rules can cause everyone to want to do badly. It's about much more than football, in other words.

(7)

Over the next two days, there are two linguistically Spanish versus Portuguese games in the World Cup: Chile plays Brazil this evening, and Spain itself plays Portugal itself tomorrow evening. Brazil and Spain are two of the favourites to win the tournament, Portugal is a good side, although perhaps without the depth of the first two, and Chile have played much more impressively than most people expected in this tournament, but are outsiders. So probably a hard fought but still one-sided game this evening, and a good game tomorrow night. Although one of course never knows.

However, disregarding the actual sport and thinking about bigger things, it seems pretty clear that the governments of the two Latin American countries are rather less profligate and rather less broke than those of the two Latin European countries.

How did we get here?

(16)

It’s full time in Bloemfontein, and England have crashed out of the 2010 World Cup. Meanwhile, at Old Trafford we have a double change with Ryan Harris back into the attack.

- Cricinfo passes on the bad news.

(10)

When a person spends time at high altitude, that person's body reacts to the lesser amount of oxygen in the air by increasing the number of red blood cells. These carry oxygen round the body, and if there are more of them, the body can process similar amounts of oxygen even though there is less of it available. If a person descends after spending days or weeks at high altitude, the higher number of red blood cells persists for a few days. In that period, the body is able to process much larger amounts of oxygen than is normal. This results in tremendous feelings of euphoria, and greater than normal athletic stamina. From personal experience, I can assure you that this feels wonderful. On one occasion, after descending several thousand metres in the Himalayas in several days, I felt like Superman. It was great. It was like being on the right drugs without actually being on drugs.

This effect can of course be duplicated at sea level. One way is to train in enclosed facilities with artificially lowered air pressure. Another, though, is medical. One can have one's own blood removed from your body, the red blood cells filtered out, and these can be transfused back into your body in time for the athletic event. This is "blood doping", and is much used in endurance sports, particularly cycling. It is generally considered to be cheating, but it is a very difficult form of cheating to detect. The fact that it is like being on drugs without the use of actual drugs perhaps gets to the core of the problem. Detecting the presence of drugs is relatively simple. Detecting the presence of the athlete's own blood is simple too, but this doesn't prove anything. As a consequence, athletes in affected sports are subjected to searches of their homes during the competition season in which inspectors look for medical equipment used in the necessary transfusions. (They also look for pharmaceutical supplies of the hormone erythropoietin, which stimulates production of red blood cells in the bone marrow).

Other tests for blood doping involve blood analysis, and involve such things as comparing the number of young red blood cells in a sample with the number of old blood cells, simply registering blood with an excessively high number of such cells as evidence of cheating. Plus they look for that hormone erythropoietin, for which it is apparently possible to tell the difference between the cloned and artificially produced version and the natural version produced in the athlete's kidneys, although this distinction is sometimes controversial.

The trouble with tests of this kind is that they have difficulty distinguishing between people who are cheating (according to the rules) and people who simply have extreme and unusual physiology. To some extent, high level sport is all about identifying people with extreme and unusual physiology. The right kind of extreme and unusual physiology is known as "talent". The aim of much performance enhancing technology is all about mimicking the extreme and unusual physiology that the finest athletes have naturally. Distinguishing between the naturally weird and the artificially weird by testing for weirdness is problematic.

And in the case of blood doping, we have a further problem. Blood can be doped naturally, simply by training at altitude. You cannot simply ban all athletes who live or train at altitude: that would be 'discriminatory'. However, it leads to a situation where an athlete with a high red blood cell count due to altitude is a fine, well trained athlete and a role model for our children. One with a high red blood cell count due to a transfusion at sea level is a cheat and someone to be despised, even though the end result of both techniques are the same. (This makes me think of "organic" food, somehow. Food grown with nitrogen from natural fertilisers is good. Food grown with identical nitrogen from artificial fertilisers is bad).

Governments find it highly prestigious when national athletes win Olympic gold medals, and are often willing to spend money on elite athlete training programs. Two kinds of governments seem to do this. There are totalitarian regimes who wish to demonstrate that their system is superior by producing superior athletes. Classically, we are talking East Germany, the USSR, and more recently China. Such governments seem perfectly willing to break the rules if they think they can get away with it. More recently, though, we have freer, more democratic rich countries doing the same thing. As the state expands, development of the national Olympic team becomes part of its remit. Outright cheating has certainly occurred in such training programs too, but in a democracy it becomes a major scandal if you are caught. Therefore, government funded programs in democracies tend to prefer to remain within the (always very arbitrary) rules, but they will go as close to them as they can without actually breaking them.

If you are going to find a place to train at altitude, for fairly obvious reasons you want a place that is high but not too cold, so you are going to want it to be on a mountain not too close to the poles. You ideally want it to be on an isolated mountain rather than high up a mountain range, so athletes can regularly practice going from high altitude to low and vice versa. You are going to want it to be in an area where the other facilities of an advanced, high technology country are readily available - good hospitals and access to all kinds of medical professions, nice hotels, housing, and restaurants for associated officials, staff, and hangers on, etc etc etc. Basically, you want a high mountain in the desert in a rich country near a significant town.

Once you understand all this, what one finds clinging to the side of a mountain when one approaches the top of the Sierra Nevada in Andalucia in southern Spain (the southernmost high mountain in Europe) becomes perfectly logical: an athletic track and vaguely Orwellian looking training and accommodation centre for athletes.

A little googling indicates that it belongs to the vaguely Orwellian sounding Senior Sports Council of the Ministry of Education and Science of Spain. Amongst the benefits of training there, I find the euphemistically described erythropoietic stimulus, which is entirely different from blood doping. Obviously.

As I said, all perfectly logical. Perfectly.

Oh, who am I kidding? This is the oddest facility I have encountered since the time I went to Hitler's holiday camp.

Hitler would have loved this, too.

(7)

It's becoming an interesting evening of sport on the television, and on the www. A teenager scored a century for Surrey (my team) in their T20 game. (I follow T20 cricket on cricinfo.com.) And Matt Prior scored a century in less than fifteen overs for Sussex, in their game. The USA, who seem to me to have a very good team, topped their group in the soccer World Cup, by beating Algeria with a very late goal, shading England from the top spot and elminating Slovenia, whom England beat, also 1-0. And the USA did this while having what looked like two perfectly good goals disallowed, one in today's game, and one in their game against Slovenia, which might have won that for them. Now Germany are playing Ghana, and if they don't score, they'll be out. Hold that. Germany have just scored. If it stays like that, Germany will, I think, play England in the next round. Yesterday, France were eliminated, when they lost to South Africa. And I've just heard that Australia have beaten Serbia, which means that Ghana also go through.

But I heard nothing else remotely as strange as this:

"If you've just joined us, do not adjust your set. It is indeed fifty five all in the final set."

I had just joined them. It's someone called Isner versus someone called Mahut, at Wimbledon. Goodness knows how it will end. Or when it will end. Or if it will end. It is now fifty six all.

Make that fifty seven all. Now it's fifty eight fifty seven to Isner. Still no breaks of serve in the final set. Apparently someone called Ron Mackintosh is commentating for the BBC. And this is his very first match. Follow this mate. Follow this. Mahut has now served fifty times to stay in the match. I think he is French, by the way, and Isner is American. John McEnroe just said he feels sorry for the umpire.

Fifty eight all. They are taking a break.

LATER: It's fifty nine all, and there's been an appeal against the light. Play is suspended.

The longest tennis match ever played, anywhere in the world. And tomorrow it will go into its third day.

(17)

Disregarding my long standing feelings about Association Football, I have been watching the World Cup. England fans have rapidly gone from optimism after England's excellent qualification campaign to pessimism after two lackluster draws in the first round against the United States and Algeria. From my present location in Spain, I can report that Spanish fans and the Spanish media are even more brittle than those of England: it only took one goal from Switzerland to get from "We are certainties to win this" to "Oh no, not again".

As with most stock market swings, though, the supporters of both teams are guilty of massive overreactions to events, both before and after the games so far.

Firstly, England fans who have decided that their side is crap and that the sooner they are out of their misery the better should consider the performances of each of the five large western European countries:

Spain managed that 1-0 loss to Switzerland.

Germany lost 1-0 to Serbia.

France lost 2-0 to Mexico, a star player has been sent home and the other players are apparently on strike.

Italy were held to a 1-1 draw against New Zealand, and even that was only after being given a slightly dubious penalty. I watched this in a cafe full of Italians, and allowed myself to laugh loudly when the cameras showed utterly stone-faced Italians in the crowd at full time. I wouldn't have allowed myself to do this in a bar full of England fans in similar circumstances if I had wanted to continue living, but this was fine with the Italians, and probably to their credit. On the other hand, my supporting a New Zealand team at anything - I do not think that has ever happened before.

A case can be made that England's 1-1 draw with Algeria is the best result out of that lot. And yet, the claim that none of these sides will make the final stages seems absurd. One or two of those sides will miss the second round. Most likely these will be France and/or Italy, both finalists last time, but generally considered the two weakest of those five sides going into this tournament. And there is a fair chance that one of England, Germany, and Spain will miss out. However, at least two and likely all three will make it, and at that point everything starts again.

The best European side outside that group - and the greatest footballing nation to never win the World Cup - is the Netherlands, and they are looking good and appear to be playing well within themselves. The Dutch produce the best managers in the world, but they are a small country and one doubts they have the depth to actually win. I would be happy if they did, but I am dubious about their ability to do so.

So my feeling is that at least one of England, Spain, and Germany will survive a lackluster first round and get close to winning the tournament. Most likely this will be Germany, not so much because they have a better side than because they are more capable of understanding that the lackluster first round does not matter much. The point of the first round is to make the second round. If you have done that, everything is fine. And everything will be fine for England if they beat Slovenia on Wednesday. At least, fine apart for the fact that Wayne Rooney appears to be a stupid idiot, but we suspected that already, and he still scores goals for Manchester United.

Of the two strongest South American sides, Argentina are looking good but are a touch unpredictable and have a history of looking good early and going down later. On the other hand, this is Lionel Messi's chance to demonstrate he is one of the all time greats. One kind of wonders about the whole Diego Maradona as manager thing, too, although one is also unsure whether he is the person actually running things. Whether or not he is, his presence might be a help if Messi is to do what Maradona did in 1986. Carlos Tevez playing so well is nice, too.

Brazil could only defeat North Korea by one goal, but they are Brazil, they did fine against Ivory Coast, and they look to be cruising at this stage of the tournament. In truth, not much to criticise there. Plus, no European side has ever won the tournament when it was held outside Europe and no Latin American side has ever won it outside Latin America besides Brazil, who have done this three times. Does that matter?

(10)

By "ourselves", of course, I mean supporters of the English football team. Tonight, in the group stages of the World Cup "soccer" tournament, England's not-entirely-convincing team takes on the might of Algeria. The English team failed to beat the USA a few days ago, conceding a soft goal due to a horrendous mistake by our goalkeeper. But England were not as terrible as some media commentaries suggest: some players such as Glenn Johnson, Aaron Lennon and Stevie Gerrard were good, in my view.

So far, I have quite enjoyed watching the tournament. I don't get all that bothered by the endless din of the horns that the South African fans insist on blowing. If it drowns our some of the more moronic chants or even the banalities of the commentators, that is no bad thing. The local fans look as if they are having a great time, although as no doubt Samizdata commentators will point out, they are ultimately also paying for a lot of this razzmatazz. I have not checked all the details, but I assume that the government of South Africa, and hence the taxpayers, are funding some of the cost of all this.

So far, my prediction is that the finalists will probably be drawn from the following: Brazil, Argentina, Germany and possibly England (you're mad, Ed). France lost big last night to Mexico; Spain, which has been considered among the favourites, was stunningly defeated by Switzerland, which brought a gleam to my pro-tax haven eye. Even so, Spain could and should probably progress to later stages.

As for England, all I can hope is that we don't give away possession easily, give plenty of the ball to Wayne Rooney, and hope the goalkeeper remembers the old adage - keep the body behind the ball.

Here is what Brian Micklethwait wrote about the previous World Cup, back in 2006. I don't remember a lot about it as I was getting married at the time.

(5)

Many of the relatively new Docklands Light Railway stations I've passed through, often being situated on old or new viaducts, or part of similarly elevated main line stations, have offered fine views of the eastern parts of London, which is where many of the big towers are. Yesterday afternoon I took my camera with me in search of more such stations with views. I was not disappointed, and the weather, not good of late, was also on my side.

Pretty much by chance, I found myself at this station:

From this quaintly named viewpoint, I saw what I at first thought was some kind of football stadium. But, it seemed not to be finished. What could it be?

Also, other building was going on not too far away, by London standards. I love a good crane cluster:

But what was it all? Then I saw a weird object looking like a giant deep sea fish. This could only mean one thing: an unpopular sport of the kind that Needs Government Help. This wasn't football. Of course! This is where the Olympic Games are going to happen:

All those wires in the sky are because regular trains go past this station, although they don't stop there.

Here's another picture, relevant to those above, this time of the front page of the London Evening Standard from last Friday:

By us, Mayor Boris means me and my fellow Londoners. Here is the story.

I cursed the day that London got these damn games on the day it got them. It looks like all other London taxpayers will soon be doing the same. And I will be very surprised if all other UK taxpayers don't end up agreeing, despite what that "Culture Minister" says.

The "GREED IS GOOD" thing concerns Michael Douglas, pictured in the picture, reprising Gordon Gekko. I dare say we will soon all learn that the entire recent economic meltdown was Gekko's fault. Nothing to do with crazy government monetary policy. But banking, like the Olympic Games, is a nationalised industry, and each is as economically out of control as the other.

(13)

Michael Jennings is probably too classy to rave about this here (although I have been checking just to be sure), so I will do it for him. Well, let the man from Cricinfo.com do the raving for the both of us:

Saeed Ajmal to MEK Hussey, SIX, Australianism prevails! What a great dramatic game this has been. Goose bumps! Michael Hussey has played like a dream. Whaddaplaayaaaa! He finished the game with yet another big hit. This is the Twenty20 innings of his lifetime. He finished it in style. He cleared the front foot and swing the ball over long-on. The while ball disappeared beyond the boundary. The Australian dug out erupted in joy. The Pakistani camp is stunned. U N B E L I E V A B L E. Hussey is mobbed by his team-mates. Clarke envelops him with a hug. The entire squad is out there on the ground.

Paskistan recently toured Australia, and I think (Michael J will know) that they lost every game they played, with varying degrees of embarrassment ranging from quite a lot to total. After the tour, their selectors banned various major players for misconduct. It was the tour from hell. There was no way they were not going to be obliterated by the Aussies in this game. Come to that, how the hell did they get to this semi-final in the first place? Yet as the game turned out, they will be gutted to have lost it. At no point during this entire contest other than during the last three or four balls of it, did Australia look like being within a mile of winning, yet thanks to another Aussie Michael, Michael Hussey, who hit 60 in 24 balls, including six sixes (three of them off the last four balls of the game), they did win, and what is more, with an entire ball to spare.

Sunday, it's Australia v England in the final, of the Twenty Twenty world cup or championship or whatever it is in the West Indies. After they had this scare, you would bet even less against Australia winning the final than you would have done anyway. I don't see Australia getting ambushed by England now, even though England have played out of their skins throughout this tournament. England's best chance was always going to be if the Pakistanis beat the Aussies by playing out of their skins (which they did - right up until the bit when they lost) and then partied so hard that they failed to show up for the final.

But then again, as this game demonstrates, in T20, nothing is impossible.

And especially not if you are Australian. Now the Cricinfo man is quoting the late John Arlott:

"Australianism," wrote Arlott, "means single-minded determination to win - to win within the laws but, if necessary, to the last limit within them. It means where the 'impossible' is within the realm of what the human body can do, there are Australians who believe that they can do it - and who have succeeded often enough to make us wonder if anything is impossible to them. It means they have never lost a match - particularly a Test match - until the last run is scored or their last wicket down."

Indeed. Good luck England on Sunday. They'll need it.

A bit later: slightly calmer Cricinfo match report here. Which I will now go and read.

And a bit later than that: incoming email from Michael J. Nothing in it. Title: "YEEEEEAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!" Copying and pasting of email titles doesn't work with me, so can't swear to the exact spelling there.

(11)

Recently I've been suffering from shingles, hence my silence here in recent weeks. Shingles has been no fun, but it would have been even less fun had it not been for Indian Premier League cricket on the television to take my mind off my discomforts. For the last forty and more days, there's been at least one twenty-overs-each-way slogfest every day, and often, as yesterday, two. The last Brian Micklethwait posting here, written originally for here but then featured here (which cheered me up a bit just when I most needed that – thank you JP), was about the IPL, and about one of the things I most like about the IPL, namely the fact that it involves lots of Indians getting rich and being happy.

I know what people mean when they claim that IPL-type cricket - slam bang, slog slog, all over in three and a half hours - is very unsubtle compared to proper day-after-day first class and test match cricket. I know what they mean when they say it's not real cricket. But for me it's real enough, and I like it, just as I like pop music and classical music. I also like very much that ITV4's IPL coverage is free. I have never subscribed to Sky Sports, because that would mean wasting forty quid a month on a very few sporting events that I care about (mostly test match cricket in my case), and then, even worse, being tempted to waste the rest of my life watching a lot of other sporting nonsense, just so as not to waste all that money. If only I could spend a tenner a month and get all the best cricket, but nothing else.

But there is still a price to be paid for IPL watching, in the form of adverts between overs, advertising logos all over the players' shirts, and constant commercial self-interruptions by the numerous, obviously very well paid and hence thoroughly compliant commentators. Nothing exciting ever happens in IPL without it being described as a "City moment of success", whoever or whatever "City" ("Citi"?) might be. All catches are described as being "carbon" Kemaal (sp?). Actually it's Karbonn – a mobile phone enterprise, I think. And there is a big blimp that hovers above the grounds with "MRF" on it, which is something to do with a fast bowling scheme paid for by a rubber company, that the commentators talk about incessantly for no reason except that they have been commanded to. But I don't care. For me this is all part of the Indians making money angle. And if all the Karbonn City Moment of Success DLF Maximum (a six) Maxx Mobile Time Out (a bigger than usual advertising break) crap gets too annoying, then I wait an hour or two and instead watch my recording of it all, fast forwarding through all the commerce. Which is also a way to waste less of my life. This didn't matter when I was ill. Wasting my life watching cricket games all day long was all I was capable of, other than sleeping and being depressed. But now, as I improve, that's an important consideration.

Meanwhile, I really appreciate being able to see a lot of the world's best cricketers in action, many of whom have until now just been names to me, albeit huge names. Watching Sachin Tendulkar thread fours through the early close-in field placings, or Shane Warne turn a game with his ripping, dipping spinners and control freak captaincy, or Yusuf Pathan destroy a bowling attack with a hundred in less than forty balls (but, amazingly, in a losing cause) have been particular pleasures. After watching him play a number of worse-than-useless limited overs innings for his English county, and then perpetrating another couple of such futile crawls at the start of this IPL, I have found out why such a fuss is made, still, of Saurav Ganguly, the Prince of Kolkata, at least in Kolkata. When the Prince of Kolkata deigns to really bat, he can really bat. And now, even Rahul Dravid has started to do quite well.

I confess that I have also enjoyed watching Matthew Hayden do rather worse than he would have hoped, after enduring his unbelievably pompous and vacuous radio commentary in England last summer. The contrast with Geoff Boycott's no-facts-or-opinions-held-back style was extreme. Talk about role reversal. Boycott was a grindingly dull batsman but is a great commentator, guaranteeing fireworks of insight every other sentence. Hayden, the commanding bully-batsman, was a commentating bore, repeating the same non-insights over and over, despite increasingly desperate prodding from the real commentators as they tried to justify having got Hayden in to commentate alongside them. So how much does the IPL pay you mate? No answer. And now, Hayden can't even bat so well. Heh. But I believe Hayden took a while to turn himself into a big hitting batsman, so maybe he will stick with commentating and get good at it.

Also, having never been happy about the bowling action of the formidably successful Sri Lankan spin bowler Muttiah Muralitharan, I rather enjoyed seeing him getting carted for fifty in four overs and then dropped from his team. "Balance" blah blah. It wasn't balance. He's just not that much of a threat any more.

Despite the relative ineffectiveness now of Hayden and Muralitharan, twenty-twenty is great for cricketing legends of the recent past, because they can still at least reasonably hope to manage the short bursts of high quality effort that are all that twenty-twenty cricket demands, even as the day-after-day grind of test cricket becomes too much for them. So, IPL is a last chance to see oldies but still goldies, rather as you see other sporting legends of the recent past still going through the best motions they can still manage in tennis tournaments at the Royal Albert Hall, and in golf tournaments in Florida that they show on TV channels like ITV4 at about two in the morning. Except than in the IPL these cricketing oldies (Jacques Kallis is another such whom I have enjoyed watching) can still be real forces to reckon with, just as, I believe, Babe Ruth could still hit real home runs in major baseball games when close to physical disintegration.

Just as interesting as watching the great names of the recent past has been watching the new young Indians on the up and up. The latest star Indian batsman, completely new to me until now, is Murali Vijay, who not long back hit 127 not out off 55 balls, which is amazing for such a technically correct and physically un-gigantic player. And then there are the new batch of Indian spinners, most notably Ohja and Mishra, who, along with all the other spinners in this tournament, are licking their lips as the unexpectedly hot weather even by Indian standards is now causing the pitches to slow down and take some serious spin.

Maybe you notice how I am naming the names of individual players, but not teams. Apparently lots of cricket fans respond to IPL like that, wanting favourite individual players to do well, perhaps because they are fellow-countrymen, but being less bothered about which teams do well. As yet, it is all too artificial and top-down and contrived to make me care about the "Kolkata Knight Riders" or the "Bangalore Royal Challengers" or the "Mumbai Indians" or whoever. These are not real teams, in the sense of having been founded in a pub in 1890 or whenever and then having gradually got bigger and better and richer and more famous, like Surrey or Arsenal or the Harlequins. The Kolkata Knight Riders and the rest of them are instantly cobbled together franchises, bought off the shelf by billionaires. Unless you live in Kolkata or Bangalore or Mumbai, it's hard to get excited about these mere subdivisions of the available playing talent, and a bit hard to care, I should guess, even if you actually do live in one of these places. Perhaps sensing this trend, the organisers have arranged lots of ongoing individual competitions, awarding specially coloured caps to the two players with the highest run tally and wicket tally, for example. Not that runs alone are the point. Run rate matters at least as much. And for bowlers, not conceding runs is just as important as taking wickets, the significance of the latter being that it is the best way to achieve the former rather than a mere end in itself. And above it all, there is the ultimate score, not runs, but money!!! Who is making the most of that? That is the question. That guy is the real IPL winner. Presumably, now, it's Lalit Modi, the man who set it up. Top player? Sachin Tendulkar? Warne? M. S. Dhoni, the current and much admired Indian captain? Don't know. But do very much care. I think it is public, so IPL money comments would be welcome.

Perhaps because team loyalty, as opposed to interest in the doings of individual players, is as yet somewhat skin-deep, there is, for the time being anyway, an air in the IPL of fake enthusiasm superimposed upon genuine enthusiasm, at any rate as the IPL appears on TV. Various implausibly good looking women are to be seen at the front of the crowd – Bollywood actresses, I'm guessing - who mostly look as if they are far more concerned about how good they look on camera than about how well "their" team is doing. Also, there is an annoying fake trumpet blast that keeps blasting forth, followed by an equally fake round of applause, both the trumpeting and the applause being identical every time hence their obvious fakeness.

But then again, which is better: somewhat fake enthusiasm, or the entirely authentic tedium that now prevails at English four day long county cricket games? The only surviving economic rational for these bizarre events seems to be that they are try-out games for potential England international players, being mostly paid for these days by the proceeds of the more lucrative of England's test matches, which are still real events that attract crowds and make money. The English county cricket season has just started up again, greeted by a massive and completely honest groundswell of absolute indifference on the part of almost everyone who might have been expected to care. The people who still try to keep old school English county cricket staggering along, rather than sneering at the fakery of the IPL which in any case they are far too desperate and envious of to do, might instead try televising all their damned four day games, free on YouTube, and then applying some faked-up enthusiasm to that. If they tried that, a few more than about six dozen people per county might seriously care about county cricket, enough to show up and cheer. Also, advertisers might be encouraged.

I went to a county cricket match not so very long ago, at the Oval, between Surrey and Hampshire. Shane Warne was playing, for Hampshire, as was Surrey's Mark Ramprakash, he of TV Come Dancing fame. But despite the presence of such stars, the overwhelming atmosphere of failure and loser-ness was palpable. I felt ashamed to be there, and had to pretend to myself that I was merely reporting on it all, for my blog, as indeed I was. Had I been there for real, just to support Surrey against Hampshire ... well, I might as well have put a big sign on my chest saying: Bury Me Now. That's how it felt to me.

The depressed state of unlimited overs English county cricket, which has been moribund for several decades now, only serves to highlight the fact that twenty-twenty cricket has for many years now been a cricketing cultural revolution waiting to happen. In England (and in Scotland it seems) twenty-twenty or something a lot like it has been going on for decades, in the form of short club games, played of an early evening or on a weekend afternoon by amateur teams way down cricket's pecking order. But it needed the fifty over version of the professional game to become seriously stale before the penny dropped and the English counties finally got around to playing twenty-twenty. As soon as they did it was an immediate popular hit. Suddenly, you could enjoy a game of cricket, and have a life, all on the same day. It helped that they had finally worked out how to play cricket under floodlights.

While English cricket bosses dithered and blundered about what to do next, Indian zillionaire Lalit Modi grabbed the torch and set up the IPL, of which this current tournament is now the third iteration. The IPL, like the Atom Bomb, works. People love it. Indians love it. TV viewers in England like me love it, especially if we don't have to pay. Advertisers love it. All of which means that the players get paid more for a few weeks of this unreal crudity than they are paid for a year of the usual international grind, which, just like county cricket, is as often as not performed before row upon row of empty seats.

Consider Paul Collingwood. Collingwood is a current England test batsman famous until now mostly for his immense skill and resolution in turning imminent England test match losses into draws, by batting for six hours or more while scoring very few runs indeed. Collingwood did this exact thing in England at the end of the first game in the Ashes series last summer against Australia, turning a game England thoroughly deserved to lose, until he started batting on the final day, into a game they just managed to save, thanks to further heroics by their last pair of bowler-batsmen, Collingwood having finally go out just before the end. Given that England went on to win that series 2-1, Collingwood's grind at Cardiff was as important an innings as any played by an Englishman during the entire summer. But until now Collingwood has not excelled at twenty-twenty, and in this respect he resembles England players generally, who are mostly notable in the IPL by their absence and ineffectiveness compared to Australians, South Africans, Indians, and even West Indians and New Zealanders. There are a handful of English batters who are contributing, notably Collingwood and a guy called Michael Lumb, who used to play with Warne for Hampshire and who now plays in Warne's IPL side, but no English bowlers at all, unless you count Collingwood's own medium pace fill-in stuff.

In addition to having become a stalwart in England's test line up, Collingwood has also done well at the fifty-fifty game, especially when England's other batsmen have succumbed and a period of careful rebuilding has been needed. But until now, as I say, the twenty-twenty game had seemed just two hectic for Collingwood, too frantic, too chancy, too twenty-first century. But Collingwood seems now to have adapted to twenty-twenty cricket, at least on the evidence of his first two IPL innings this time around. The first was a mere support act for a small but muscular Australian called Warner who hit an amazing century, but the second was a true man-of-the-match effort. So, here was Paul Collingwood - hitherto a hero only of heroically torpid draws prised hour by agonising hour from the jaws of defeat, and of closely fought fifty-fifty games where his carefully compiled century lasting about forty overs was just enough to make the difference - clouting sixes into the IPL crowd, for all the world like an Indian or an Australian. How come? Whence the transformation?

If you'd seen a TV interview that Simon Hughes did with Collingwood at the beginning of his latest IPL stint, you would have known. Simply, Collingwood had gone into the nets and practiced - practiced, that is to say, hitting sixes. He wasn't strong enough? Very well then, Collingwood went into the gymnasium and did weights. He practiced batting with a bat weighing a quarter of a ton to make himself stronger. Paul Collingwood is, in short, applying the exact same determination that in Cardiff had gained England that crucial test match draw to the business of becoming a fully paid up (the best of them being very well paid indeed) twenty-twenty super-hitter. Subsequent failures demonstrate that Collingwood is not yet the finished article, but this is definitely not for want of him trying. Seasoned Collingwood observers, like me, believe that he'll crack it, and become one of the IPL's most effective players.

My point being that if Paul Collingwood is determined thus to transform himself, this proves that what we have here is a tide in the affairs of men in general and of cricket in particular that is not to be resisted. Twenty-twenty cricket may be crude and unreal, to the sort of cricket fan who considers it crude and unreal. But it is the future. Indeed, when I listened to Collingwood talk about how he needed to build up his strength and learn how to be sure of clearing the boundary, I was reminded of a passage in The Right Stuff, that book by Tom Wolfe about another cultural transformation that took place among an earlier and rather more exalted group of alpha males, namely America's top test pilot fraternity as the best of those men mutated, in the 1950s and 1960s, into astronauts. Old school aviators grumbled that being an astronaut was merely to become a monkey blasted off into space in a tin can over which you had no control. But while the grumblers grumbled, the young astronauts eagerly applied themselves to the new rules of the new game. If becoming an astronaut meant learning how to talk politely and charmingly to journalists and to blow bubbles into bottles for three minutes on end and to hold your urine inside you for an implausibly long time, then by golly that is what they would learn, yes sir, goddamn proud to be doing it and God Bless America. And if Paul Collingwood, the very exemplar of sedate, self-controlled British cricketing manhood of the most heroically old-fashioned sort, is determined to become a twenty-twenty star batsman, then all that any of us cricket fans can really say about that is: God Save The Queen and bring it on.

Talking of Babe Ruth, astronauts, and so forth, there has for some time now been talk of twenty-twenty cricket getting seriously started in the USA. No one is that sure that it will catch on. But everyone concerned is very sure that of all the various versions of cricket that might be tried in America, twenty-twenty has by far the best chance of reaching lift-off. And I say: bring that on too. Might it prove in the longer run that one of the most important impacts of India on cricket was that the Indians Americanised it?

(15)

An unfolding saga in the game of cricket in recent years has been the question of whether technology should be used to aid umpires in the case of close or potentially controversial decisions. Like many things in life, the question of whether to do this has turned out to be more complex than it may at first have appeared to be. There have been situations in which the on field umpire has asked for a replay, and the replay has been unclear but has none the less been used to overrule an on field umpire who probably saw more. There have been situations in which the players have appealed to a video replay that didn't show anything, when they likely knew themselves what had happened and the situation would previously have been resolved with a gentlemanly code of conduct. There have been situations when the television company did not manage to produce the appropriate replay in time, and the umpire then made a decision that was revealed to be incorrect five minutes later. Many decisions depend on whether the batsman hit the ball, and a mixture of sound and picture is used to make these decisions, and determining which items of the bat, ball, ground, clothing, safety equipment etc came in contact with each other is often no clearer using the technology than not.

Fans of other sports are no doubt nodding at this point, as similar issues have come up in most sports that have attempted similar things. Cricket has one further issue, not unique to it but relatively central to it, which is the question of how technology should be used in the interpretation of the leg before wicket rule (LBW).

One of the principal ways of getting a batsman out is for the bowler to bowl at the batsman, for the batsman to miss the ball, and for the ball to then strike the wooden stumps behind him. It would be possible for a batsman to avoid getting out this way by his simply standing in front of the stumps at all times. In order to avoid this, the rules of cricket allow for a batsman to be out if he is standing directly in front of the stumps, the ball hits his leg, and the ball would have gone on to hit the stumps. (The rule is actually more complex than this, but the complexities are not relevant to the point I am making). The umpire stands in a good position from which to judge whether the ball will hit the stumps, and traditionally the umpire's judgment has been used to decide whether the ball would have hit the stumps.

Umpires inevitably make mistakes, and there have been many accusations of umpire bias over the years. For a long time people have been watching replays in slow motion on television in order to second guess umpires, but these have never been conclusive. Occasionally an umpire will make an obviously wrong decision, but most of the time there is as much of an element of doubt watching at home as there is for the umpire. Or perhaps more: the umpire is in a better viewing position than the TV cameras.

In recent years, however, things have changed. The "Hawk-eye" system was initially used by television companies, and there was then pressure for it to be used in assisting umpires as well. Basically, this system looks at a number of video replays, and from them constructs a three dimensional model of the ball, the pitch, the bat, etc. From the this model, the path of the ball is extrapolated going forward. Television viewers see a computer graphic image of the ball hitting (or not) a computer graphic image of the stumps, and are told whether the ball would have hit the stumps and whether the batsman was or was not out.

Every since this system has been in place as part of television coverage, there has been pressure for it to be used in umpiring decisions. When people have asked me about this, I have stated my position with unexpected vehemence, particularly given that I am generally in favour of using video replays as part of the adjudication process. For I am, at present, unequivocally opposed to the use of Hawk-Eye and similar decisions in umpiring decisions.

My reason for this is as follows.

Hawk-Eye is a system featuring a lot of complex computer code. The code is proprietary, so what follows is largely reasonably well informed speculation. Although we do know the laws of physics with respect to motion of cricket balls, air resistance, the effect of gravity, bounce when the ball hits the pitch, linear and angular momentum, etc etc etc, the complexity of a even a relatively simple system such as a cricket ball moving in a cricket game is such that it is difficult to impossible to develop a useful model directly from the physics. In addition there are margins of error when triangulating the motion of the ball from video imagery. What this means is that Hawk-Eye's models are not really physical models per se. What they have likely done is a more simple matter of trial and error followed by extrapolation. The ball has been measured going through the air, perhaps half way down the pitch. Various ways of further extrapolating the position of the ball have been tried, and they have been compared with the actual motion of the ball further down the pitch. Trial and error has continued until prediction and reality have become close, and the resulting (statistically derived) algorithm has been used to predict the motion of the ball in cases where the ball has not actually traveled the full distance (because, perhaps the batsman's leg was in the way).

This is all actually fine, except that there are circumstances in which the system can break down. Weather conditions that were never encountered in the development phase might be one. Balls made by different manufacturers might behave differently. Pitches in different places may be made of different kinds of grass. In cricket, local conditions matter a lot, and pitches in different countries are known to have different characteristics and favour different types of bowlers and bowling. (The greatest players will succeed in any conditions, but some players will only be effective in certain kinds of conditions).

These sorts of empirical models are not always terribly robust: the further you are from looking it the actual physics the more likely that your software will do a poor job when you depart from the exact conditions in which you did your calibration. A model developed in English conditions by Englishmen may not work as well when used in India. It may contain biases, either accidentally or deliberately.

However, there is a dangerous tendency of people to fall in love with the technology: in cases where the technology disagrees with reality, then it is reality that is at fault. "Science" has given you a definitive answer, which is obviously right. However, if you dive into the science, you will discover it has been developed using a methodology involving a lot of ad hoc steps and statistical approximations and errors.

It may well be that Hawk-Eye, as it exists, is better than the unaided umpire's eye. However, arbitrary choices have gone into its design. Human biases have gone into its design. Different, equally skilled programmers may have made different choices. Hawk-Eye is not definitive.

In tennis, Hawk-Eye is used in umpiring decisions. Players have the right to challenge line calls. When they do so, a simulation of the ball hitting the line on the court is shown, and the computer rules the ball in or out.

And yet, when this decision is made, all the umpire sees is the simulation. A simulation of the ball intersects with a simulation of the line. There is no attempt to superimpose the simulated ball on the real ball, or the simulated line on the real line. It is all technology. Players have from time to time complained that the computer's decision is wrong. And yet, on television there is no way of telling that.

Given that Hawk-Eye is not definitive, another nasty possibility rears its head. Like baseball, cricket is a game greatly suited to gambling. There are a huge number of statistics that followers of the game are interested in, and it is possible to bet on the outcomes of most of them. Cricket has had a significant number of corruption scandals in recent decades. Most famously, a captain of the South African national team took bribes from Indian bookmakers to lose matches. (He later died in a mysterious plane crash). Many other players took money from bookmakers in return for various favours, more of which probably influenced specific match statistics rather than actual results of matches. The manager of the Pakistan team may or may not have been murdered by gangsters for reasons related to gambling during the last world cup.

Imagine then a situation where statisticians and programmers are running a system of computer code that nobody understands (and which, in fact, they are extremely secretive about the workings of, on the basis that it is "proprietary intellectual property" and a valuable trade secret) which has the ability to overrule umpires decisions. Nobody outside the firm they work for (and indeed few people inside the firm) knows exactly who the people are who run this stuff - certainly not the official administrators of the game. The potential for corruption is obvious.

Far fetched? Well, the best way of running such corruption would be to not be obvious about it. Decisions should still appear approximately right. You do not change the result of matches, but apply a systematic bias of 5% in the direction that improves your profitability. As it happens, I am not a bookmaker, but I am a financial analyst. Give me a 5% systematic bias in the financial markets that I can control, and I will shortly be a very rich man.

You don't believe that bookmakers could figure out who was in charge of this code, who was vulnerable to bribery, and get to them? Well, bookmakers have got to a lot of people in this game. Players, officials, and coaches. And as far as understanding technologists and statisticians, bookmakers are way ahead of just about everyone. Bookmakers these days employ huge numbers of programmers and statisticians. If you think about their business for even a moment, it is obvious why. In fact, it is likely that statisticians and programmers in both these places know one another already, as they were likely recruited from the same pools of people - mathematically adept obsessives who love sport.

Which is why I have been opposed to the use of Hawk-Eye or similar systems to assist umpires in cricket. The potential for corruption is too great.

Except, when people have pressed me further, I have qualified this a little, and I have actually said that Hawk-Eye and similar systems should not be used unless the code and the data are open. If people at home are able to go through the code line by line, see what it does, and then run it themselves, and duplicate it themselves, using the same video footage being used by the actual system assisting the umpires, then any corruption will be visible instantly, and the game is safe.

As it happens, I suspect that the administrators of cricket and the television networks broadcasting it consider the footage (ie the data) to be too valuable to make it available to everyone. I suspect also that the developers of Hawk-Eye consider their intellectual property to be too valuable to make the code available for technically minded cricket fans to run at home. If so, then fine. LBW decisions should be made by the on field umpires. They may be corruptible, but at least they are the people responsible for their actions, rather than some unidentifiable programmer. Hawk-Eye is a wonderful tool for observation and commentary on the game, but involving it in the administration of the game raises issues that its developers may not want to deal with.

This story, of course, is very similar to the stories of many other fields of endeavour, particularly scientific endeavour. A huge amount of modern life, and a huge amount of modern science, involves computer simulations of statistical systems, either in the foreground or the background. The level of complexity and the level of obscurity of these systems is such that (intentionally or unintentionally) such systems are very vulnerable to becoming sloppy, biased, or corrupt.

This, of course, is why, if it deals with anything important, such code must be open. And data must be available. Outside eyes must be able to investigate such biases, and the possibility of the presence of outside eyes must be there in order to discourage corruption and simply to discourage sloppiness and detect genuine errors. And the data must be available, so that other people with different biases can construct competing models, as, always, little is ever settled and improvement comes through competition.

It is when results are robust to such biases that interesting things are discovered.

(34)

"I think one of the things I especially like about the IPL is that lefties, I sense, don’t like it at all. They preferred India when it was a basket case, taking its economic policy advice from them and from the USSR. Now that it has liberalised, i.e. turned its back on lefty/USSR economic policy crap, India is doing outrageously well, at any rate by comparison with the bad old days. And IPL showcases that outrageous economic wellness for all the world to see. Ludicrously rich Indian film stars owing entire teams that cost a billion quid. Cheerleaders. Spoilt rich brats making painted faces at the cameras. And above all, Indians hitting sixes and bowling really fast and looking like ancient mythic warriors, rather than all thinking and looking like Mahatma bloody Gandhi and being glad if they scrape a draw. Hurrah!"

- Our own Brian Micklethwait, writing over at his own blog about innovations in the glorious sport of cricket, and what it says about India.

(4)

Last night I listened to this podcast, in which Patrick Crozier interviews our own Michael Jennings, globetrotter extraordinaire, about how the English Premier League (i.e. soccer) is followed with a passion in faraway countries of which most English people know very little, and of which many English soccer fans would be rather scornful, if they gave them any thought.

Points made (recycling (and expanding upon) Patrick's blog posting on it): that the Premier League is a big deal in Asia (and Africa); that it's really big; how it got that big; why the 39th game is going to happen (because so many English clubs are strapped for cash); and how it might be done fairly (not hard to contrive if they really want it).

I enjoyed it very much. Did you know that there are firms in Vietnam which reach potential Vietnamese customers by putting signs up at English football grounds? Me neither.

(15)

Well, for yours truly, along with fellow rugby fans such as Antoine Clarke and Brian Micklethwait of this parish, some of our weekend plans have had to be slotted around watching, or trying to watch, the rugby matches in the Six Nations tournament. For the uninitiated, the teams are Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, Italy and France. I watched the games on Saturday - I did not see today's England-Italy match as I was driving around the Kent coast - but on the strength of yesterday's matches alone, I am risking the prediction that this tournament could be one of the finest of recent times, or at least one of the most engrossing.

As a person with a bit of Scottish inheritance, I was rooting for the Scots on Saturday, and I thought they had pretty much clinched it until, in the last 10 or so minutes of the game, the Welsh, aided by some Scottish injuries, errors and possibly some lapses of concentration, staged an incredible comeback to win the match. As for the French, they comprehensively beat the Irish in Paris by a margin that makes one wonder how the Irish managed to win the previous tournament, although I imagine that the Irish will play, or try to play, with a bit more composure in the next match. But the French look a class apart from the rest - their pack was awesome.

One small detail pleased me yesterday, in that the Scottish team seems to have reverted to wearing a dark-blue strip that bears some relationship to the colours of the country. As I noticed several years ago, the Scottish recently had a strip that looked very similar to that of the New Zealand one, and very confusing that was.

Anyway, bring on next weekend!

(15)

Football: is the bubble about to fade and die?, asks Jim Thomas. No Jim Thomas, it is not. It may be about to burst. But bubbles don't fade. Further figures of speech surge forward. "Damp squib", "Macbeth levels of scheming", "weathering the storm", "walking towards the precipice", "belt tightening". Mix and mismatch at will.

Aside from this linguistic oddity, this short piece is quite interesting, listing some of the financial grief now afflicting various English soccer clubs. Thomas singles out Arsenal and Aston Villa for praise. Apparently, they have not been spending loads of money recently, hence their ability to weather the storm, avoid the precipice, etc.

(25)

Read about it here. Victorious Afghan Hamid Hassan blogs about it here:

After the match, I had to go to do a post-match media conference and they all wanted to know how it felt to beat USA, but the opposition didn’t matter to me. I was just happy to win another cricket match.

I love getting the chance to play against different countries and this was the first time we had ever played USA in an international match. I could never have dreamed when I was young, that I would one day play them in a cricket game.

I am a big fan of American television and movies and my favourite film is Rocky – I vividly remember watching it when I was growing up – and one of my heroes is Sylvester Stallone.

I think that there is a similarity in the story of Rocky and the Afghanistan cricket team – we both started at the bottom and gradually made our way up the rankings. ...

Gradually? I thought Rocky did it with one fight.

Seriously though, it's fun to see a guy so gripped by the American ideal of the common man excelling, and as a result ... defeating America.

The way Hamid Hassan writes about Rocky and Silvester Stallone and so on makes me also think of this piece, about how the imminent decline into relative insignificance of the USA is once again being oversold, in which Joshua Kurlantzick says:

Most important, the United States is a champion of an idea that has global appeal, and Asia is not.

Although my part of the blogosphere is very anti-Obama just now, what with Obama seemingly hell-bent on ruining the USA's economy, the rise of Obama to being President of the USA must look like a very similar kind of story to Rocky, if you are someone like Hamid Hassan.

(11)

Ballet by elephants.

- Mike Carlson, commentating for BBC1 TV during the first quarter of Super Bowl XLIV, describes the Indianapolis Colts offence as they run in the first touchdown. 10-0 Colts at the end of the first quarter.

(11)

This image makes me smile and I wish him every success in a highly competitive area of sport shooting. How lucky he is not to be British.

(11)

Sir Bobby Robson, former manager of Newcastle Utd, England and a brace of successful European clubs (such as PSV Eindhoven, Barcelona), has died after a brave fight against cancer. But the club that in many ways will feel the pain of his loss the most is Ipswich Town FC, the club I have supported since I was a young boy

He took this relatively unfashionable club on the UK's east coast to the heights of success in the FA Cup and in European competition, coming also very close to winning the old domestic First Division. His teams were glorious to watch. He conducted himself with grace, good humour - apart from the occasional tiff with the media - and had an infectious love of the sport that inspired football fans and players from all clubs. RIP.

(1)

Tomorrow morning, the third test in the current five match Ashes series begins in Birmingham, weather permitting. Ashes as in cricket, between England and Australia, which is as big as test cricket (i.e. the long-drawn-out goes-on-for-days-and-days variety) in England ever gets. Both Michael Jennings and I have had a break from blogging in recent weeks, but earlier this evening we got together to record a conversation about it all, and here it is. We rambled on for just under forty minutes.

However, two blemishes should be noted. First, for some reason, there are occasional little bursts of crackly sound, of the sort that used mysteriously to afflict gramophone records and which caused all classical fans other than vinylphiliacs to switch to CDs. These noises are not that obtrusive, given that this is a mere chat between mates, but they are a mild irritation. Apparently something weird happened every now and again in Michael's laptop, which was what we recorded into. Sorry about that.

Second, I (Brian) referred to the current England player Stuart Broad as "Chris" Broad, which is a quite common error because Chris Broad, Stuart Broad's father, was also a test match cricketer. Nevertheless, apologies again.

Apart from that, and if you think you might like this, do what we did. Enjoy.

(17)

“It is often wrongly assumed that the free market is always on the side of life’s heavy hitters. But sport gives plenty of examples that it is the market which corrects received wisdom in favour of untrumpeted stars. The internet has done something similar in publishing.”

What Sport Tells Us About Life, by Ed Smith. Pages 88-89.

Brian Micklethwait had thoughts about this short and excellent book a few months ago. A good book to read as the Ashes cricket series continues with the second Test at Lord's starting later today. Bliss.

(10)

If you wondered why Formula 1 motor racing sometimes has all the excitement and crowd-pleasing qualities of a German art-house movie without subtitles, then Patrick Crozier will explain it to you here and here. I recall him making these and related points in a talk at Brian Micklethwait's place a few years ago. Very interesting it was.

Even if you are not a sports fan or motoring enthusiast, the broader lessons of how a sport can regulate itself into narcolepsy are worth reflecting on.

(6)

I guess it was inevitable. Football, like other aspects of life, has been hit by the credit crunch. In the case of Southampton, a team that once graced the top flight of the English league and has boasted some notable cup wins - famously winning the FA Cup in the 1970s - it has suffered terribly. It is now in danger of extinction. My own team, Ipswich Town FC, was in administration a few years ago although it has been since taken over by Marcus Evans, the man who owns the eponymous conference organising company. Ipswich also has appointed former Manchester Utd and Ireland international player Roy Keane as its manager (gulp, nervous laughter).

Henry Winter, one of the main football scribes in the print press, believes Southampton's local council should buy the team. He argues that the council and the lucky taxpayers of the south coast will be getting a bargain. Maybe. But it is not the business of councils to be spending money on what has been the money pit of professional sports, particularly when a place such as Southampton has many competing demands for public funds, such as policing, garbage collection, road maintenance and so on. As I said, when my club was in financial dire circumstances, no doubt some people would have been happy to see the Suffolk taxpayer foot the bill to put The Blues back on top. But wiser heads prevailed.

The sad fact is that football clubs can die if the finances run out. We have seen teams like Leeds Utd hit by unsustaintable debts in far happier economic conditions. Even mighty Man Utd has heavy debts stemming from the leveraged buyout by the Glazers, while Chelsea is kept in the lifestyle to which it is accustomed due to Abramovich's huge Russian oil wealth. The economics of sports clubs are a murky affair at the best of times. So my message to Southampton fans is that it is better for a hard-nosed private investor to sort out the club than a bunch of politicians. If Southampton really is a bargain, why are public funds needed - surely a canny entrepreneur will spot the opportunity? I hope someone does.

I sometimes wonder why as, a football fan, I put myself through all this heartache. My wife shakes her head in wonderment.

(12)

Well, in a change from my usual ruminations on current affairs, I thought I would mention that I am planning to take a scuba diving course. I am off to my regular haunt of Malta/Gozo this late-summer to do a PADI course, as well as relax down there. Yes, you have guessed it, people blog about scuba diving as well as many other pastimes these days. As a keen amateur sailor, I have always wanted to have a go at exploring what lies under the waves and the blue seas surrounding Gozo, in particular, look just too damn inviting. If any readers have any tips or suggestions on how to avoid rip-offs or other problems, I'd be very pleased to hear them.

The island of Gozo seems to be packed with diving school firms, such as these guys. The PADI courses, which are internationally recognised, are a good example of how a benchmark for a particular activity can arise without any central government agency decreeing it.

(5)

"Rome wasn't built in a day. But I wasn't on that particuar job."

- Brian Clough, the late English club football manager who did not suffer from the national trait of false modesty.

(7)

Wisden, the cricket-lover's bible (if there can be a new bible every year), yesterday announced its five Cricketers of the Year. It's an odd arrangement, because you can only win this title once. So, you can be a totally dominant cricketer, but because you also did fairly well in 2003 and were picked then, you can't be picked now, again. This year's crop are accordingly the usual collection of pretty good cricketers who did very well, but who didn't exactly grab many headlines: perennial nearly-man James Anderson, the best of a rather bad lot of England bowlers, someone called Benkenstein who did well for champion English county Durham, and a couple of the South Africans who recently beat England in England and then Australia in Australia. But one cricketer on the latest list really has done indisputably great things in the previous few months:

Taylor and the England team had been in magnificent form leading up to their World Cup triumph: early in 2008, they retained the Ashes by winning only their fourth Test in Australia; they then went through the entire summer undefeated. Taylor was instrumental in both achievements, and established ...

Pay attention:

... herself ...

Indeed.

... as the leading batsman in women's cricket after sealing victory in the Bowral Test.

Said Wisden's Scyld Berry, of Claire Taylor, the first woman ever to receive this particular form sporting recognition:

Beating Australia in Australia is the objective for all cricketers, at least in England, and Claire almost single-handedly saw England through to victory and the retention of the Ashes in Australia last year, not to mention her success in the World Cup just a couple of weeks back. It would be a sin of omission, an act of prejudice, to exclude her from the accolade.

I wonder if a woman will ever play in one of the international men's teams, so to speak. The immediate response would probably be: never, except maybe, one day, as a spin bowler, before then collapsing dead of exhaustion. Women, it is now assumed, just don't have the necessary strength or stamina to challenge the men as top class cricketers. Well, power is certainly one way to do well as a cricketer, as men like Botham, and now Flintoff (who by the way took a match- and one-day series-clinching hat trick yesterday against the West Indians), have proved. But some quite small, even slight, men have excelled at cricket, especially as batsmen. Surely the real reason women do not now regularly challenge men at cricket is that until recently few women have played cricket at all, a state of affairs that is now changing quite fast. Because of the example of women like Claire Taylor, it will probably change quite a bit more in the near future.

(3)

"It is perfectly possible for inertia to be beneficial and an improvement, if the alternative is poorer. It is the same fallacy as the claim of the current Government concerning the current economic crisis, that 'doing nothing is not an option'."

- Former England rugby player and man of firm views on the sport, Brian Moore. Now a television commentator and newspaper pundit, Mr Moore sees parallels between the rule changes in rugby - some of which have been a retrogade step, in his view - and the reaction of certain governments to the credit crisis.

(12)

If you want evidence of management ruthlessness, never mind Wall Street, the City or for that matter, politics, then check out the English Premier League. Scolari, the Gene Hackman lookalike who was once the manager of a World Cup winning side with Brazil, no less, has been sacked as manager of Chelsea by its Russian owner. Chelsea are only a few points adrift of Manchester United, the leaders. Tony Adams has been fired as manager of Portsmouth, which is near the bottom end of the table. A few weeks ago, Paul Ince, a former midfielder with Manchester United and West Ham, was sacked from his job. At Tottenham, they have been through about three managers in as many years. The same merry-go-round operates at such febrile clubs as Manchester City, Newcastle, Bolton or West Ham. In the latter case, you can bet the cries will go up that its current, relatively new manager, Zola, should be headed for Chelsea, where he is rightly adored as a legend. Against all this, it seems mildly incredible that Arsene Wenger has lasted so long at Arsenal, and of course that Sir Alex Ferguson has reigned for more than two decades at Manchester United.

It is as if the credit crunch has barely begun to make itself felt at the world of English football. Some time ago I wrote about the wrangles between players and clubs over contracts. As far as the sackings of managers go, the world of football looks more cut-throat than ever.

(4)

This is wonderful, funny and true.

Via Radley Balko.

(15)

In these days of modern motoring safety features, racing - either F1 or other genres - is not as dangerous as it used to be, when fatalities were common and some racers, such as the Austrian racer Niki Lauda, suffered terrible burns. I am glad the sport has got safer because the close racing of last year, when Lewis Hamilton famously won by a whisker in Brazil, can be just as exciting even when you know that the cars are so well made, the circuits so well designed, that death is not such a close presence on the track. The idea that we need the risk of death to spice up a sport is not a view I share.

One sport that remains bloody dangerous, in my view, is downhill ski racing. Anyone who has skied on a difficult, icy slope in Europe or North America, say, will know what I mean. I have tried to imagine what it must be like to ski at 90mph or more down an icy race track such as the famous one at Kitzbuhel, Austria. It frightens me just to think about it. Here is a story showing what I mean.

Anyway, considering my work commitments and the low value of sterling, I cannot really afford to hit the slopes this year. Next year, maybe.....

(6)

The hottest story in cricket just now, if you are an England cricket fan like me, is the apparently near simultaneous resignations of the England captain and the England coach, but I think the bigger story in the long-run is the third test between Australia and South Africa, which Australia won this morning (my time). Had South Africa won, they would have won the series 3-0. As it was, they won the series 2-1, and Australia had a consolation victory.

Except that actually Australia achieved more than that. They achieved, by this otherwise merely consolation victory, the continuation of their reign as the top-rated test cricket team. This was what the match was about, given that the South Africans had already won the series, in other words it was about plenty. Without the test rankings system, this game would indeed have been decidedly empty. With these recently contrived rankings, Australia still stay top country. Now okay, you could argue that they aren't really the top country any more, having just lost to India and now to South Africa. Well, maybe so, but sporting tournaments have a force of their own. If, according to the rules and calculations of whatever tournament it is, you win, then by golly you win and that still counts for something.

I remember when Greece, a palpably second-rate team but coached, as I remember it now, by a German who knew his stuff, fluked and battled their way to winning the European soccer championship. They clearly were not the top team in Europe. But did that mean that their win in this particular tournament meant nothing? Did it hell.

Australia are still top of the world test cricket rankings, and that's a whole lot better than not being top, which is what would have happened had South Africa won this latest game.

Equally significant is the general principle that this particular game illustrates, which is that the world rankings will regularly confer major meaning on otherwise rather meaningless games. And given that having a great big get-together tournament to play five-day test cricket would probably be just too long-drawn-out and unwieldy ever to happen, then the world rankings is all there is for test cricket. In the absence of any other way of deciding what the pecking order is in test cricket, these rankings can only grow and grow in significance.

Add another fact about sports tournaments or sports ranking systems. They take time to get going. The journalists take a while to understand them, and to write about them and get excited about them. It takes a while for fans and players to care about them. But then your team wins, and suddenly it matters a whole lot more and goes on mattering, even when your team reverts to losing most of the time. Think European Cup, again in soccer. When that started, lots of teams just didn't bother, especially British teams. But the closer that British teams (remember Celtic and Man U in the 1960s) got to winning that, the more it meant, and when they finally did win it a few times, the European Cup became enthroned as a huge tournament for British teams to win, arguably the hugest of them all.

These test cricket world rankings will be like that. This rolling 'tournament' has only been around for a few years, and maybe the rules ought now to be examined and changed, so that they don't now say that Australia are the best when they probably are now not the best. Details. The point is, in more and more cricket spots and cricket commentary places, these world rankings are starting seriously to count. You can bet that in the country that finally does 'officially' topple Australia from the top spot, which can only now be a matter of time, that country will from that moment on take these rankings very seriously indeed. And once everyone in cricket does take them seriously, it won't just be moving from second to top that causes a stir. Moving from fifth to fourth will also raise a cheer, maybe, again, in the last game of a series that would otherwise be drearily beside the point, as this Australia/SA game would have been, but actually was not.

I think I may have underestimated the time-lag effect, when I first noticed this ranking system, way back in 2003 when they first got it started. Otherwise that first piece holds up pretty well, especially when you consider that it contains this choice quote (from this:

The system means that there are no longer any `dead rubber' Test Matches and that in any series both teams have the opportunity to improve or worsen their rating.

Precisely so.

A perspicacious commenter on that posting criticised the ratings - the detail of how they are done rather than the principle of them - by arguing that they give too much value to results in the not-so-recent past. Hence, presumably, now, Australia still remaining top. Good point, but as I say, a detail. This does not affect the excellence of the basic idea. It just becomes one more thing for cricket fans and players and officials to argue about.

Lower down as well as at the top, these rankings have for a while now been applying pressure and creating meaning. Going back to that English ruckus, which is all about the recent battles between the England captain and the England coach, the fact that England have recently slipped down the world rankings in a measurable and publicly measured way is all part of why the England coach also had to step down, and not just the England captain for being too publicly rude about the England coach. England were second in the rankings not so long ago, leading the chasing pack behind Australia. Now they are fifth. A hardworking journalist could, it's true, have done sums like this for himself, and announced that England had indeed slipped from ... two-ish to five-ish. But how much easier and more persuasive it is for him if the sums have already been done, and are official.

So, whoever contrived these rankings, well done chaps. You can be proud of yourselves, and especially proud today. But, keep your eye on the details of how the rankings are done, and be ready to modify them.

(2)

Getting my sleep patterns into sync with UK daylight is for me, now, a constant struggle, especially now, when there is very little in the way of daylight in my part of the globe, and especially when there are such good international cricket matches going on elsewhere in the world, together with, now, the means to follow them, ball by ball. The latest such disruption to my daily clock took the form of a terrific game between Australia and South Africa in Melbourne.

I found day three especially hard to ignore. At the beginning of it, South Africa looked odds on to lose the 1-0 advantage they had gained with their amazing fourth innings run chase in the first test at Perth. With only three first innings wickets left, they were looking at a massive first innings deficit, but they ended with their noses actually in front, an advantage they pressed home the next morning by taking three quick second innings wickets before the Aussies had even got their noses back in front. I was still checking the score on that third day at tea time, which was at about 4 a.m. my time. JP Duminy got a big first test century in only his second test, having also done well at the end of the Perth run chase, and fast bowler Dale Steyn, who also took ten wickets in the match, gave Duminy massive support with the bat.

In its way, this third day was a bit of cricket history, because it marked the moment of Australia's definite, absolute, unarguable fall from grace as the definitely best international cricket team in the world. They recently lost to India in India, but that can happen to anyone. But then to go back home and immediately to lose to South Africa in Australia, well, that was something else again.

The difference is Shane Warne, the greatest leg spinner and very possibly the greatest bowler in the entire history of cricket. Australia with Warne to back up the font line quicks would never have allowed Duminy and his helpers to get from 184-7 to 431-8. Australia's bowlers are still pretty good. But there is pretty good, and there is Shane Warne.

The point about Warne is that he was so very, very accurate. He could send down ball after ball that did exactly what he wanted. The average good leg break bowler bowls away, hoping that he will hit the jackpot with the occasional beauty, but resigned to serving up rather more frequent full tosses or long hops, which for the benefit of any Americans still with me, means bad balls that the batsman can score off heavily. But not only could Warne do those beauties more frequently than the best of the rest, but equally importantly, for over after over, there would absolutely no rubbish. He could bowl eight or ten or a dozen or more deliveries exactly as he wanted to, setting up expectations and reinforcing them, but then delivering the coup de grace, the words "he set him up" being one that constantlly recurred in the mouths of those commenting on Warne's numerous triumphs. The result was a level of pressure that was outside the experience of the opposing batsmen in any other games they played, and what is more often at a stage in the innings when batsmen usually expect a degree of relaxation and easy run-getting. Then, in the event that Shane Warne hadn't actually wrapped up the entire innings, back would come the Australian front line quicks, well rested, with the second new ball. Making big scores against all this was hugely difficult, and it speaks volumes for England's quality as a side at the time that they contrived to win the Ashes in 2005 against Australia, Warne and all. That a weaker England then got smashed in Australia was no big surprise, even if the margin (5-0) was rather crushing.

Afficionados will want to add the name of Glenn McGrath to the above mix. Indeed. Another very great bowler, who was also amazingly accurate. But would McGrath have been quite so good, or have lasted quite so long, without Warne? Events since Warne's retirement suggest not. Without Warne to share such a big part of the bowling load, the Australian quick bowlers now look vulnerable to overwork, with their most experienced quick, Brett Lee, being but a hobbling shadow of his recent best. And now, deprived of that confidence they used to have that they could win any game from just about any apparently losing position, the Australian batting is starting to look less formidable too. Gilchrist, the best wicketkeeper batsman ever, is no more, and Hayden is nearly done also. The Aussies are just not the force that, for a decade and a half, they were. Before them, the West Indies were dominant. Who might dominate next? South Africa? India? If India could make weight of numbers count at the top level they would be unbeatable, but cricket fans have been saying that for years.

England have a bit to do before challenging for the top spot, for they remain the dodgy outfit they have been ever since the 2005 Ashes side started falling to bits. Flintoff is getting back to his formidable best after yet another injury. Pietersen looks a good captain, possessing as he does an undentable ego. But England are short at least one good batsman (personally I think his name is Owais Shah). And the bowling still depends far too heavily on the notoriously undependable Harmison. But because of Australia's decline England still have a decent shot at getting the Ashes back next summer.

Test cricket in general has been doing well just lately. Despite initial hesitations after the Mumbai killings, England did play more cricket in India, and the first of the two tests they played was a cracker, won by India but only after three days on the back foot against a very good England effort, the great Sachin Tendulkar reaching another hundred and winning the match with the one shot. And only today came news of another fine game, between Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The difference between losing heavily and abjectly, and losing bravely and more narrowly, is huge. Winning alone is not everything in sport. Losing in a manner that suggests that your team could have a winning future also counts for a lot. Bangladesh were chasing a seemingly impossible five hundred in the last innings to win, but got past four hundred before the last four wickets fell cheaply. Sri Lanka got a huge scare before winning. Given that Bangladesh have tended to lose heavily and abjectly of late, this was an important game for them, and by extension for the entire game of cricket.

(7)

I agree with all those who are now saying that the England cricket tour of India should not be interrupted, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. My understanding of terrorism is that what makes it such a headache to defend against, given that in India people generally are not allowed to carry guns (correct?), is not knowing when or where they might strike. But if you have a number of set-piece, high profile events to defend, with definite times and places attached to them, you can. It will be cumbersome and tiresome, and expensive, with lots more frisking of people who look like they might be terrorists, and lots more frisking of people who do not look at all like terrorists, both to avoid upsetting people who look like terrorists and to make sure that any terrorist plan deliberately not to look like a terrorist is also guarded against. But if the authorities and people of India are willing to put up with all that, then so should our cricketers be.

I am even opposed to the final two one-dayers being cancelled, although I daresay the Indian authorities would not have had the time to make their dispositions, given that the one-dayers would have been very soon. But the test matches should definitely go ahead, including and especially the second one, which they have already, regrettably, moved from Mumbai to Chennai. I guess the Mumbai police have enough on their hands already, or think they have.

Playing those two one-dayers would have changed nothing in a cricketing way. 5-0 to India would almost certainly have become 7-0 to India, but playing those games, and the Mumbai test in Mumbai, would have made another and bigger point. I daresay that, because of their disappointing cricket, England's cricketers are not now very highly regarded in India. This would be a chance to get back into India's good books. Risky? Maybe, a little. But also, given the money now disposed of by India's cricket fans and by Indians generally, to make this small stand against terrorism might also been, you know, rather lucrative. But headlines like Pietersen wants security assurances don't strike the right note at all. This guy had a great chance to make a much more positive statement than that, but he muffed it.

As James Forsyth put it yesterday:

Imagine how we would have felt if after the 7/7 bombings the Australian cricket team had headed to Heathrow.

And commenter CG added:

Some of the star players in the Australian Rugby League team wanted the team to pull out of their English tour in 2001. When they were told that they would be replaced by more willing players, and may not get their places back, they decided to come after all.

I know, I know. The reckless courage of the non-combatant. But I didn't stop using London's buses and underground trains in the immediate aftermath of 7/7, still less run away to the country.

(9)

Formula One motor racing doesn't usually excite me that much, because far too often F1 races are just tedious processions, in an order determined not by drivers but by mechanics, with far too much seeming to depend on pit stops and refuelling strategies. But the Brazilian Grand Prix today was something else again. On the very last lap of the race, Lewis Hamilton moved from 6th place to the 5th place that he had to get to be the champion, given that his rival Massa had just won the race. Minutes earlier it had started to rain, and Hamilton had switched to wet weather tires but the guy he had to overtake stuck with dry weather tires. It had to rain properly for Hamilton to win. It did, just enough for Hamlton to overtake on the second last bend of the race, in other words right at the end of the final lap of the entire season. Amazing. Youngest ever F1 champion, apparently. So, no credit crunch for him.

As for the big money that the England cricket team were chasing in the West Indies on Saturday, well ... better luck next year. They will have to play very badly indeed to do worse than they did this time around. Plus, I thought that this headline was about the cricket, but it seems there was another English sporting fiasco this weekend, in rugby league. Oh well, win some lose some. It's only games.

(1)

There's a rather comical culture clash now being played out in the West Indies, between new money and cricket:

Senior ECB officials, who almost bent over backwards to welcome Stanford and his millions at Lord's last summer, were also under fire with calls for them to stand down after failing to undertake adequate checks on Stanford. Rod Bransgrove, Hampshire's chairman, told the Daily Telegraph that the position of Giles Clarke, the ECB chairman, was in doubt. "I asked the ECB to do a lot more checking on Stanford and this competition. We made it very clear we that we should not enter into this agreement without proper checks but he [Clarke] had already done the deal. The board should resign collectively".

The ECB and Stanford agreed on an unprecedented US$100 million deal in the summer, spread over five years, but the inaugural competition this week in Antigua has attracted mounting criticism in England.

The flack really started to fly on Monday when Stanford was pictured with Matt Prior's wife on his knee and with his arms around two other girlfriends of members of the England team during a match the night before. It provoked a strong reaction from parts of the media, and in addition, one England player reportedly said: "If that was my wife he'd put on his lap I would have wanted to punch him".

Last night's planned cocktail party with the teams was cancelled at short notice, with officials rather unconvincingly claiming there were "logistical problems over a venue". One journalist was unconvinced. "As if Stanford would ever have trouble in securing a venue for anything in Antigua," he noted. "He owns most of them."

I recall boasting here a while ago that my grandfather was the captain of his local cricket team by virtue of the fact that he owned the pitch. This was in Dingestow, which is a small village in Monmouthshire. My cousin still lives there, in the biggest house there, which is called Dingestow Court. But that's old money. Old money pitch owners would make irrational bowling and field placing decisions, but they wouldn't mess with other cricketer's wives or 'girl friends', i.e. ladies whom other cricketers were courting.

All of this trouble in the West Indies now has arisen because of the rather sudden eruption of Twenty20 cricket. It turns out that, unlike so much of old school test cricket, people will pay large amounts of money to go and watch Twenty20, even between relatively moderate players. Suddenly cricket has become a very, very big, very twenty-first century business. And the cricket world is finding it tricky to adjust. It hit me the other day what a huge impact Twenty20 cricket is having when I half noticed (as you do when watching the telly) a TV advert for some kind of computerised or perhaps gambling-related version of soccer, which they were also calling "Twenty20". Cricket is now featured in the sports pages of the popular press in Britain in a way that it hasn't been for years, except during an Ashes series.

Here is some more Stanford grumbling. English cricket, says former England captain Mike Atherton, has become Stanford's WAG.

(9)

There is a new computer game out there, called Spore, which takes up on the theory of evolution. Looks like fun and educational, as many such games are, a fact that critics of computer games rarely seem to take on board.

Here is another item about this game.

(22)

Jeff Randall, writing about the excellent performance by Britons so far in the Olympics, reckons some people are getting all het up about the sort of folk who have been winning the gongs:

Unfortunately, no sooner had our rowers, cyclists and sailors collected their medals than the carping started - largely on account of their successes being clocked up in "posh" sports. That a disproportionately high number of these British champions went to fee-paying schools is regarded by some as a symptom of a divided society, evidence of a deep-rooted malaise.

In place of celebration, there is consternation: dark mumblings about the benefits of privilege. In the warped view of the Grumblies, middle-class successes are to be resented, as if, like those of drugs cheats, their places on the awards podium were the result of improper behaviour.

Britain's middle classes are already in the dock for heinous crimes, such as seeking the best schools for their children, paying extra for private healthcare and determining the output of Radio Four. Now, it seems, they must endure being rubbished for having the audacity to produce results in a sporting arena that the nation expected to be dominated by foreigners.

He has a point, but I have not sensed much of this sort of snide carping. What I tend to notice from the coverage has been how pleasant and modest most of the sportsmen and women, of all backgrounds, appear to be. I watched as one guy with a thick Scouse accent was interviewed after he fought in a hard boxing bout against a chap from China, I think, and I remember thinking of how decent and philosophical the man was about his chances of success. The meritocracy of the whole event, and the way it has reached people of all classes, is what has shone through.

For all that I dislike the politicking and corruption that goes along with the Games - I dread the likely bill of the London Olympics, which I oppose - there can be no denying that the folk who have done well in th Games, from all nations, are, with the odd exception maybe, pretty admirable sportsmen and women and that bleatings about their class have not been much in evidence.

Randall continues:

But, for me, the finest moment was when the British men's coxless fours rowed down the formidable Australians to snatch gold. Some will denigrate them as "posh boys", largely because they can tell the difference between an adjective and an adverb, but that doesn't make them substandard Olympians.

Quite. It is a pity, though, that something like accent or polish in a TV studio now is considered a measure of a sportsman or woman. After all, our Jeff speaks with the twang of London, so I am not sure what is going on there.

(41)

Science writer John Tierney - one of my "must-read" columnists - has a good post which gets us to consider why it is considered so terrible for sportsmen and women to take performance-enhancing drugs, or have special surgery done to make themselves stronger, faster, more flexible, and so on. In years to come, suppose that say, a footballer has a knee operation and as a result, he is able to ride over a tackle, pass the ball more swiftly. Or a fast bowler at cricket has the same operation done to make it easier to send down a delivery to a batsman (bowlers often get injured because if they are big guys, the strain on their knees and back can be large). It seems to me that the key issue is disclosure. If you had an "anything-goes" games, with sports folk free to do what they wanted, there could be no complaints about cheating. And the boundaries between what is and what is not considered okay are not clear cut anyway, but they are more readily solvable than just adopting a puritanical zero-tolerance approach on enhancements. I cannot also help wonder whether some of the constant sniping at sports folk for taking drugs is not so much about cheating per se, as about taking the drugs in the first place. There is a sort of desire for "purity" in sport which is a part of the more general puritanism in our culture.

Like I said, the key is disclosure. If any cyclist, swimmer, footballer or for that matter, F1 motor racing driver takes drugs as part of their sport, then it should be okay so long as they disclose it. One could always use a handicapping rule anyway. For instance, if a motor racer is taking a drug to enhance his concentration during a race, maybe the race organisers can impose a 5 second penalty.

As medical technologies progress, this issue is going to become more pressing. Rather than continuing to hold out against any of this, the sports world should focus on disclosure and be adult about it.

(8)

It is all so easy when you are an armchair pundit, and we bloggers are no different. With politics or economics, so with sport. Mike Atherton, the former captain of England's cricket team and a man notable for his dogged, never-say-die style of batting, is unimpressed by the England's cricket selectors' choice of skipper, who was born in South Africa, could not get a regular place in that country's team, and by some means, is now the captain of England. One might say that as the final Test in the series at the Oval in London unfolds, that "Our South Africans are better than theirs".

It may all, as Atherton says in Eyeorish fashion, end in tears. But by God, what a start. I went to the match's opening day yesterday with an old South African friend of mine, by the name of Martin. We watched in amazement as the England bowling attack exploited a benign surface and moist air to trick the South African batting with a wonderful spell of bowling that removed six batsmen in short order after the top-order batsmen, notably the captain, looked ominously comfortable. Their comfort proved short-lived. As a result of this marvellous bowling, involving an attacking fielding lineup with so many slip fielders that it looked like the West Indies in the old days, South Africa failed to make it past 200 runs in their first innings. Now England have to beat that target by a good margin if they are to win this match and salvage some honour from this series.

Ironically, the man whom Atherton prefers for the captaincy - Andrew Strauss - had another poor day at the crease yesterday, bowled out after a few deliveries. Ah, the joys of punditry, eh Michael?

(21)

Depending on whether or not they get lucky with the weather, the Beijing Olympics might not, or might, turn into a PR disaster both for the International Olympic Committee, who chose Beijing, and for the Chinese Government, who assured the IOC that pollution in Beijing would not be a problem. But, pollution in Beijing is already a problem:

Thomas Rohregger's first breath of Olympic air was not what he expected. "I hadn’t thought that it would be so bad," the Austrian said after his first training ride. "Really awful, my lungs and even my eyes are burning."

Rohregger rode only the flat stretch of the road race course and didn't get into the climbs. "That's why I tried to ride a bit faster. But the pressure on my lungs was nearly unbearable. Three hours of training felt like six hours," said Rohregger to Austrian television sender ORF.

I've been linking to news about Beijing pollution for a while now from my personal blog, and the man from Blognor Regis, to whom thanks, added that quote-and-link to my latest posting on the subject.

I also added a bit at the end of that same posting about how the architectural planning of the Beijing Olympics has been done by the son of Albert Speer, who is called Albert Speer. Albert Speer senior being the man who did a similar job for Hitler's Olympics in 1936. My thanks to Mick Hartley for blogging recently about that. As another of my esteemed commenters said, you could not make it up. But as soon as I had stuck up that bit about Albert Speer Jnr., I worried that maybe someone had made it up, and that I had fallen for one of those internet hoaxes. I checked every date involved to see that it wasn't April 1st. It seems, amazingly, to be true. Apparently Michael Jennings of this blog emailed me in April about this Speer connection, but I paid no attention then and can find no trace of this email now. My computer must have swallowed it. Or maybe I thought he'd made it up and deleted the email on purpose.

Undeterred, Michael J today emailed me another Olympic link worth following, to a Slate piece which asks of the Beijing Olympics: What could possibly go wrong? Pollution is number two on the list. Four is that the TV coverage might get screwed up, and five is that these Olympics may inflict food poisoning on lots of the athletes.

Blogging personally, and in my capacity as a London council tax payer, my biggest worry is that it will all go very smoothly, that many British people in particular will be very impressed and excited, and that Britain's politicians will then be encouraged to spend even more billions in tax money on the London version of this idiocy in four years time than is set to be spent anyway.

(11)

I came across this statistic here, stating that there will be 22,000 journalists at the Beijing Olympics next week.

The local bars will be doing a roaring trade, one hopes.

Jesus.

(33)

There is sometimes quite a lot in common between the world of professional sports and the investment and wealth management industries. When a talented individual leaves a bank or a football team, it can cause a lot of news and chatter in the industry, prompting fans or clients to change their bank or fret over whether their club has a shot at winning games. I have worked in the financial sector long enough to know that there is also a similar sort of pecking order with banking and sports: there are "league tables" of fund managers, for example. Getting a top ranking as a fund manager with an investment record for beating the S&P 500 can be like the equivalent of winning the Player of the Year award, scoring the most goals in a season, etc.

Which nicely brings me to the subject of a certain Mr Cristiano Ronaldo, the Manchester United forward who has made a very public, and much criticised, effort to leave for the warmer climes of Real Madrid, the famous Spanish team that has won the European Cup (now the European Champions League trophy), more times than any other club: 9 times. He is blessed with wondrous dribbling skills, is brave, fast, good with both feet, can head the ball, can float around the front of the pitch and has the ability to turn a game in a flash. He scored a hatfull of goals last season, and is undoubtedly one of the best players in the world.

He is also very well paid for his efforts. No argument from me on that: he is in a free market for talent and I do not begrude him a penny of his wages. But - and this is a rather big but - he has four years left to run on his contract at Old Trafford. Naturally, his manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, is very unhappy at the prospect of losing him, although a monstrous transfer fee would ease the pain and enable the club to buy in some new players. United has not been exactly a saint either in nabbing players from rivals before their contracts fall due.

But the recent comments that Ronaldo's contract amounts to a form of slavery is stretching the use of language to breaking point, contrary to what Mick Hume, a self-described "red" both in political and sporting terms, says. If a person signs a contract to work for a bank or football team for a minimum of say, four years, he must serve that contract out, unless there was any clear proof that he signed under conditions of duress. A footballer who signs terms with a club binding him into a four-year contract is not selling himself into slavery. It is not as if Mr Ronaldo was kidnapped, frogmarched into the club and forced to play. It is not even as though he was starving, and so desperate for a job that he was prepared to do anything to get a job. Marxists of old like Mr Hume used to argue that workers, who had no reserves of cash to live off, were "coerced" into signing work contracts and hence exploited, an argument that might have just about held water in the early 19th century when thousands of people were living on the edge of starvation, but hardly applies now.

With bankers, it is quite common for executives to sign contracts stipulating that if they give notice to leave, they have to serve out at least six months "gardening leave" and a further period of not soliciting new clients before they can start at a new job. This sounds harsh, but banks have to protect their interests, since if there is an exodus of talent from Bank A to Bank B, the latter bank can grab some of the clients of the former bank who wish to stick with their old managers. For all I know, the same sort of things can apply in other industries.

It seems to me that the only way such terms can be likened to slavery is if there is some clear form of coercion involved in signing the contract, and some clear sign of violence or threats being employed to sustain such contracts. I see not examples in the case of the Portugese footballer.

(3)

Flicking through the television sports channels yesterday morning, I came across the Red Bull air race series, with the latest heat run out of Detroit. Fantastic. In terms of sheer skill and eye-popping adrenalin entertainment, this race takes a lot of beating. It makes Formula 1 motor racing, for example, look positively tame, even though I have no doubt that the actual skills involved have a fair amount in common. For a start, the pilots will sometimes pull a G-force of up to 8 or 9 times, which is the sort of thing you associate with astronauts or jet fighter pilots, for which there is a need to wear a pressue suit to stop blacking out.

The race series is continuing in London soon. I am going to find out if I can get my hands on any tickets. It could be difficult.

Apologies if there is no link here - I am having a problem with this function today. A quick Google will bring it up: check out the great photos.

(19)

One of the more annoying features of tennis today - certainly in the Wimbledon Men's Finals - is how the victor often feels the urge to climb up the side of the stand after he has been declared the winner to embrace his family, girlfriend, mistress, personal trainer, etc. Last night, after winning the thrilling match against Federer, Nadal did all this, and then tried to climb all over the stand. I thought, "Christ, the idiot is going to fall off". It would have been a bit tragic had this marvellous player suddenly injured himself in this way.

In future, Rafa, keep off the bloody stands.

(3)

That is not a sensational boxing headline being concocted; it is the name of an American athlete, being yanked around by some rather pompously programmed software. This morning one of David Thompson's bits of Friday ephemera is a link to this, which is a link to this, which says this:

The American Family Association has a policy at its new outlet, OneNewsNow, never to use the word "gay" but to replace it with "homosexual." And that works absolutely perfectly until they write an article about an athlete whose last name is Gay, as in Tyson Gay, the fastest man on the US Olympic track team.

This was of course hastily corrected, but the magic of copy-and-paste had already done the damage. Most quoters have quoted the searched-and-replaced version, but I'll let you do it. Change "Gay" to "Homosexual" in this, from the revised-and-then-revised-back-again version:

Tyson Gay was a blur in blue, sprinting 100 meters faster than anyone ever has.

Or this:

"It means a lot to me," the 25-year-old Gay said. "I'm glad my body could do it, because now I know I have it in me."

Or, my favourite, this:

After the race, Gay and Dix looked at each other and slapped palms, then hugged.

But amidst all the joking, it should not be forgotten that this guy sounds like he might be a real athletics superstar.

No one ever has covered 100 meters more quickly.

I say "might", because when you hear that an athlete is really, really fast your first thought may be wow, but a close second in a photo-finish is: I wonder if it's just that the dopesters have now found a new and cleverer way to do it. Gay might, that is to say, be a very quick runner but a fake superstar. If you don't want to be at the centre of universal suspicion, do not be a superstar sprinter, and in particular, do not come to the boil just for the Olympics. Lawyers may forbid constant reference to this suspicion in official big-media sports reports, but this is what all of us casual onlookers now think, and all the lawyers on earth cannot stop us. For Gay's sake, I hope that this proves to be a real, drug-free record.

I also hope that, come the Olympics, Gay doesn't choke. Ditto all the other athletes. But then again, if such a PR catastrophe in some way makes the government of China a little less nasty, maybe a bit of athletic choking would be a good thing. Sadly, however, if the story so far is anything to go by, such an eventuality would probably cause that government behave even more nastily, perhaps by inprisoning all the TV cameramen who concentrated too much on the choking.

(4)

The odd dull, negative game apart, I thought the European Championship football tournament, held this year in Austria and Switzerland, has been excellent with plenty of attacking flair to savour. For me, the highlights have been the Holland-Italy match (the Dutch won it decisively); the Russia-Holland game (the Russians turned over the Dutch in superb style) and the final, won by the wonderful Spanish side, which has waited a long time for this moment. It is good to see a flair team win a tournament like this rather than some dour, heart-breaking finish involving a penalty shoot-out. Here is a good Reuters summary of the whole tournament.

And I will not be the first, or probably the last, person to write that I did not miss England's involvement this year (the English did not qualify for the tournament). We missed the worries about English football fans misbehaving, or endless media agonising up to the games and the inevitable penalty shoot-out losses to the Germans or the Portuguese. Bliss.

(9)

Geoff Boycott: A Cricketing Hero
Leo McKinstry
first published by Partridge, 2000, fully revised and updated edition published by Harper Collins, 2005

Sportsmen seem to be arranged along a spectrum. At one end are those who are so naturally gifted that their careers are, to them and to us, a gift. They don't have to think about it, they just do it, with supreme grace and style. You watch them, and marvel. You think: I could never do that. But glory be, homo sapiens can do it. Because look, he just did it, although heaven knows how. At the other end of the spectrum are sportsmen of relatively average talent, who, by supreme effort and constantly applied strength of mind and character, make the most of what they have, often defeating more naturally gifted opponents who haven't learned to fight until too late. These talent maximisers do better than they have any right to, so to speak. You watch them, and you think: If I tried that hard, I could do that do. You probably couldn't, because you are probably as lacking in the necessary mental strength as you are lacking in natural talent (and they actually have rather more natural talent than you do along with their superior mental attitude), but that's what you think while you watch.

When cricket fans like me think of supremely gifted cricketers, we think of players like David Gower. Gower unforgettably (I watched it live on TV!) hit his first ball in test match cricket for four, as if he had already been playing cricket at the top level for half a lifetime. And when we think of cricketing talent maximisers, the men who make the absolute most of what they have, we think of Geoffrey Boycott.

Because they have to think so hard about their game, the talent maximisers tend to make the best coaches and the best commentators. Having made the most of their own talents, by analysing relentlessly what needs to be practiced and applied on the pitch, and having applied their conclusions with total discipline and single-mindedness, they are ideally prepared to bring the best also out of others with similarly imperfect natural gifts. The talent maximisers are likewise well prepared to explain what's happening to us ignorant onlookers, because they have been analysing this relentlessly for the previous twenty years. Thus it is that Geoffrey Boycott, having been for so long such an effective and successful - if often hideously slow-scoring - opening batsman for his beloved Yorkshire and for England, is now a very skilled coach and one of the world's most effective, sought-after and immediately recognisable commentators.

I don't usually read sports biographies. Niagaras of cliché, most of them. But when I saw the names of Geoffrey Boycott and Leo McKinstry on the cover of what was obviously a widely selling paperback (if it wasn't widely selling it wouldn't have been in the sort of shop I saw it in) I didn't hesitate. McKinstry is a writer already known to me, and probably to many other readers of this blog, in particular for his many Spectator pieces over the years. Boycott is Boycott, still a unique figure in English sport. He is still commentating now on international cricket, in his typically trenchant, no-nonsense style, and in that delightfully immitable Yorkshire accent of his. He is also a man who seems to proceed through the world surrounded by a force-field of controversy and confrontation, in both his cricketing and his personal life. Yorkshire cricket has been plunged into such rows in recent decades that no cricket fan however casual could fail to notice, and nor is any cricket fan like me unaware of the black cloud of tabloid coverage concerning Boycott's trial and conviction for assaulting some woman or other, whom he was having a fling with, or something. Many, me included, used at first to suppose that Boycott was gay, but more recently a very different, very un-gay and now not nearly so private Boycott life hit the headlines. What was that all about? I knew that even at new-in-a-real-bookshop full price this book had to be worth a punt, and I was not wrong.

First things first. It's a good read. Whether someone less excited by cricket and less interested in Boycott would enjoy it, I don't know. Maybe not. But I loved it. It was my holiday reading during a recent trip to Brittany. Travel can involve much waiting around, and your usual diversions are mostly absent. A good book is a necessity, and this one did that trick for me splendidly.

As for the story it tells, the word that keeps cropping up again and again is "selfishness". The chances are that any sportsman who, selfishly, concerns himself relentlessly and successfully with the quality of his own personal performances will be a major asset to his team, but Boycott tested this principle to destruction, again and again.

He did this most notably in the matter of his running between the wickets. Do I have to explain what "run out" means, to Americans, women, etc.? It's probably the one cricketing technicality that you just have to grasp if you are to have any proper understanding of the Boycott phenomenon. (For a general description of cricket, try this.) At any one time during a cricket match, there are two batsmen out there, one at each end, rather than just the one at the one spot like in baseball. When one of the batsman hits the ball out into the field, occupied by the fieldsmen of the opposing team, he and his partner at the other end must change ends if the batsman who hit it is to score a run, change ends twice for two (i.e. go to the other end and then back again), three times for three and so on. But if the fielding side gets the ball back to one of the wickets and breaks them with the ball before the batsman in question has got to his ground and touched his bat down, that batsman is "run out", and has to leave, just as if he had been bowled out or caught or out lbw (don't ask). Running between the wickets therefore requires cooperation and mutual trust between the two batsmen, often with one of them saying yes, let's have a run, and the other just having to hope that his mate has got it right, because if his mate hasn't, then as likely as not he could be the one who gets run out.

And Boycott's running between the wickets was, shall we say, famously variable. This was the one major aspect of the art of batting that Boycott simply refused to master. Oh, he mastered the art of not himself getting run out. But time and time again, the other fellow would find himself stranded between the wickets, having responded to an absurd Boycott call whose entire purpose was to enable Boycott to keep the strike, and have to disappear, fuming, to the pavilion. There he might later confront a totally unrepentant Boycott, or he might decide that it just wasn't worth the bother.

For Boycott, the runs scored by his own team were like a fixed sum. Either he got them or those other bastards in his side did. On one occasion, his opening partner contrived the impossible, and actually succeeded in running Boycott out, in a test match in the West Indies, on a plumb batting pitch. Boycott spent the rest of the day telling anyone willing to listen to his griping that "that bastard is scoring my runs". And if the rest of the team were rubbish ("roobish") who weren't going to get those runs if Boycott didn't, well then, all the more reason for Boycott to drop anchor and bat all day at a snail's pace.

Sometimes Boycott would apologise after running somebody out, in the sense of make a great public fuss of how sorry he was. But McKinstry tells a revealing story of how, having run out some other England batsman in his usual blatantly selfish way that the aggrieved batsman is still sore about to this day, Boycott indulged in a great drama, putting his head in his hands like some ham actor, to communicate to everyone how desperately sorry he was. But close examination of the video record reveals the real story. First, Boycott ruthlessly and calculatingly checks that he himself is not going to get out. Then, realising that the other fellow is now getting out and this is going to make Boycott look very bad, the gears in Boycott's head engage, and the regretful performance only then begins. From the boundary's edge you couldn't spot the deceit. On closer-up video, the ruthless incompetence of Boycott's running between the wickets and his indifference to all the misery he caused to his supposed colleagues, again and again, is clear.

This book is crammed with anecdotes concerning Boycott's sheer nastiness to professional colleagues. He really was not a team player. McKinstry relates how David Gower, having resisted the might of the West Indian fast bowlers at their frightening best for an hour or more, then got himself out to the occasional bowling of Viv Richards and returned, seething, to the pavilion. I could see it coming, said a gleeful Boycott to Gower as soon as Gower was back in the dressing room. You were getting casual! Sloppy! I could see you were going to get out! Exclaimed the usually equable Gower: Oh, put a sock in it Geoffrey. There, says McKinstry, you have it all. Both the perfect reading of the game, and the simultaneous doltishness of parading that understanding at exactly the wrong time, in front of the one person in the world who really does not want to be told about it just now thank you.

My favourite, if that's the word, Boycott-is-a-bastard story in this book concerned a little clutch of Pakistani boys who had gathered outside the back of the pavilion to get Boycott autographs for their notebooks. So Boycott arrives in his car, which is covered in the dust of Pakistan. The boys clamour for their autographs. Boycott says not now, but I tell you what, you clean my car and when I get back you can have your autographs. When Boycott returns, he gets into his now immaculately cleaned car and just drives off, leaving the boys stunned and autographless. What a swine.

The frequent imperfections of Boycott's running between the wickets paled into insignificance when set beside the awfulness of his various attempts to be a cricket captain. The problem wasn't Boycott's grasp of cricket. There was nobody better at reading a game and seeing what was needed. The problem was that Boycott cared far more about his own batting, and about himself in general, than about anyone else in his team, even when he was supposed to be captaining it. If, when captaining, he personally got out for a small score, he would do his usual two hour sulk with his head wrapped in a towel, and if any of the other batsman in his team might have benefited from his guidance about the nature of the bowling or the pitch or the state of the game, well, basically, to hell with them. They were on their own, just like Boycott himself.

Yet through it all, the runs piled up. When Boycott started out for them in the early sixties, Yorkshire had a number of great cricketers in their side, such as the great Fred Trueman to name but one. But as Boycott's career developed, the uniquely incompetent managerial style of the Yorkshire committee, who were apparently a sort of collective Boycott in their man-management skills, resulted in a steady drain of top talent away from the club. Throw into the mix the refusal of Yorkshire, for several decades after all the other counties had abandoned such notions, to make use of any cricketer not himself born in Yorkshire, and Boycott rather suddenly became the only thing that your average Yorkshire cricket fan-stroke-fanatic could feel good about. So even as Boycott continued to exasperate his team mates, the mere supporters adored him more and more. Boycott had made the most of what talents and skills he had, damn the world, and most of the fans prided themselves on doing much the same. They identified with him, and worshipped him. When he batted, he was batting for them.

It was a disastrous cocktail of feelings. Boycott's profound understanding of the mere technicalities of cricket convinced him that he ought to be the captain of Yorkshire and of England for as long as he ever played for either. Yet his frequent acts of nastiness to people who were supposed to be on the same side as him, which was not helped by his alcoholic abstemiousness and general refusal to muck in on the social side, caused him again and again to be loathed by the very people whose support he most needed in order first to get and then to make a success of the captaincy of cricket teams.

Boycott the batsman refused to be deflected by Boycott the captain into playing more for the team and less for himself and for his records and averages. Time and again, a Boycott-lead Yorkshire team would need quick runs, to get batting bonus points or to win run chases, yet Boycott the batsman would grind out his usual pile of slow but now ever more irrelevant runs, watched by colleagues torn between lingering admiration and growing contempt. On one amazing occasion when quick runs were needed, Boycott had done his usual slowcoach act, but this time, when he did finally get out, the next two batsmen just said to themselves: fuck it. Instead of accelerating in the way everyone present assumed they would, they carried on scoring with agonisingly Boycottian slowness, in a spontaneous protest. In such an atmosphere, it is little wonder that such a high proportion of the relatively few half decent Yorkshire players still left buggered off to play for other counties, or even emigrated, to get as far away as possible from the mess. Because, by the nineteen seventies and eighties Yorkshire cricket was a truly frightful mess, as McKinstry explains very well. The Committee, having decided to sack Boycott as captain, found itself humiliated by supporter power, and Boycott was effectively handed control of the entire club. Not that he did anything positive with that control. Yorkshire only got back into the swing of winning county cricket after Boycott retired, or rather, was retired. He probably still had two or three more decent years of batting in him, but by then everyone who mattered, even most of his formerly fanatical supporters, were sick of him.

But, there remain all those runs. You win cricket matches, as our current much admired England test captain (and Yorkshireman) Michael Vaughan never tires of saying, by putting lots of runs on the board and putting pressure on the other side. And Boycott was the supreme run-getter. For a brief moment his total of test match runs was the highest there was, by anybody anywhere. Sunil Gavaskar of India, and since him many others - David Gower included, no doubt to his profound satisfaction - have sailed past Boycott's total of 8114. But test matches are far more frequent than they used to be, while the bowling of Boycott's time was as formidable as test match bowling has ever been, and he opened, remember. McKinstry convincingly argues that Boycott, far from shirking it, as was said at the time by some, was actually one of the best batters against super-fast bowling there has ever been. It was his cussedness and social ineptness that got him dropped for a while by England, not any fear of fast bowling on his part. When he returned, he made centuries against Michael Holding and Dennis Lillee, and opposition teams always rated him very highly, celebrating hugely whenever they got him out.

One of the oddest moments in Boycott's career came near its beginning, when he scored a sparkling, Man-of-the-Match-winning 146 against my own Surrey in the Gillette Cup Final of 1965, much to my mortification when as a teenager I heard it described on the radio. Sparkling? Sparkling? Scored by Boycott? Indeed. He began in his usual leaden fashion, despite this being a limited-overs game. But then the legendary Yorkshire captain Brian Close came to the crease and commanded Boycott to pull his finger out. Boycott denies that Close said any such thing, but Close says he did and I know who I believe, as does McKinstry. What other explanation for such an anomalously rapid and entertaining Boycott innings could there possibly be?

I mention this episode, and Boycott's probable mendacity about it, because just when Boycott's commentating career was getting truly into its stride, an episode occurred which damn near finished it, and what you think about this circumstance hinges on whether you think Boycott is in the habit of telling the truth.

Boycott has always, it seems, had an eye for the ladies, especially glamorously self-supporting and professionally self-driven ones (i.e. the sort who won't become dependent upon him), and has also always had the trick of chatting them up successfully. One such lady had an argument with Boycott in a French hotel room during which she fell and received a bump to her head. It was an accident. This lady was, although glamorous, not at all self-supporting. Badly in need of large quantities of cash, actually. And by the time she had finished embroidering the story Boycott was a violent and misogynistic woman-beater. Worse, far worse, Boycott was convicted of such a crime in a French court of law. It was his word against hers, and another lady, the French judge, took her word for it, as did a subsequent French appeal judge. Says McKinstry of this episode:

Boycott was, in my view, a victim of cruel injustice at the hands of the French judicial system. The evidence against him had been absurdly weak, the conduct of the case farcical. His entire career and public repuation had been disastrously undermined by a woman who had indulged in a form of blackmail, and had been described in the British High Court in a separate case as 'fraudulent and dishonourable'.

The British case being her bankruptcy case. McKinstry assembles copious evidence to back up this damning judgement, damning, that is to say, of the dishonest and money-grubbing woman and of the French legal system that backed her word rather than Boycott's. I believe Boycott's version of these events rather than that of his adversary and tormentor, but not because Boycott never lies, which is what McKinstry rather oddly says. It's all the other evidence that McKinstry lays out that I find convincing. This is the one note in McKinstry's book that jarred somewhat.

That Boycott's commentating career survived this horrible episode is largely because of all the countries where his commentating is admired besides prim and proper England, with its stuffy institutions and pious, pompous, humbug-ridden tabloid press, where even the false suspicion of violence towards a woman gets you cast out of polite society. I knew that I liked Boycott's commentating, but I had no idea, until I read this book, how much he is liked in, for example, India. Here the bluff Yorkshireman act results in giving credit where credit is due, without national, ethnic or cultural bias of any kind. Interestingly, while others have denounced Pakistan's great recent pace bowlers for ball tampering, it is Boycott who has insisted that everyone does it on the quiet. He has also defended Muralitharan's controversial bowling action. The white fellows only complain about brown bowlers, Boycott implies, because they can't play them properly, and the further implication is that he, Boycott, if he were only twenty years younger, would have been able to handle them far better. You can see how this would be popular in foreign parts. The Indians also like Boycott's commentaries because they are clear and direct, unlike many of their rather flowery local wordsmiths.

What I do believe is that Boycott plays the part of the blunt truth-to-namby-pamby-southerners Yorkshireman raised by coalminers and pigeons in a cardboard box, etc. etc. Because, at heart, Boycott is one of life's performers. Once you get that, it all snaps into place. Great with audiences and crowds but relatively bad – often disastrous - with individual people face-to-face. Also, great with the right sort of woman, such as a woman who gets all this and who respects it – often because she is some kind of performer herself. The obsessive preparations for each performance, with the kit and the costume all just so, at first for the batting, now for the commentating. Underneath it all, there is the hope that the performance will be understood as a performance, to which the appropriate response is another competing and contrasting performance, rather than just slinking away and sulking or moaning about the rudeness of the Boycott performance. And all stirred into this is the fear that there is only so much limelight to be competed for and that you have to stake your claim for it, or some other bastard, as likely as not some more naturally gifted and less deserving southern consumer of gin-and-tonic, will upstage you. Don't let him, unless he's proved he's earned it.

It is revealing that some of Boycott's staunchest admirers are often people whom he started out being rude to, but who, instead of surrendering meekly and being content to badmouth him to journalists behind his back, instead read Boycott their own version of the riot act, straight to his face. After that things would often be greatly improved. Many are the "after I said all that I had no further trouble with him and we got on fine" stories in this book. And actually, on the quiet, when he felt at ease with people, with people who weren't felt by him as any sort of threat, Boycott could and can be very kind and generous, depending on his mood. Once his playing career ended, he started to show what a brilliant coach he might eventually have become. Trouble was, the money he could make as a commentator was so huge by comparison that no mere cricket teams could ever match it.

Just as that cloud of French legal dirt was clearing away, not least, I daresay, because of McKinstry's own writings about it all, in the first version of this book and elsewhere, and just as his commentating was getting back on track, another terrible enemy stepped forward to challenge Boycott's character and courage and fighting spirit. Cancer is something of an equal opportunities killer, often picking out the very people who have been most fastidious in their personal and dietary habits. Along with smokers and sunbathers, it grabs those who do not in any way deserve to be grabbed by it, and cancer grabbed Boycott by the throat, literally. The doctors were going to operate but then decided that the risk to the Boycott voice, now also Boycott's fortune, was too great. So, chemotherapy. Horrible. But Boycott battled his way through that as he had battled and batted his way through so many other ordeals, and triumphed yet again. As I say, he is, as of now, still commentating away, giving as good as he gets, mellower now since his recent brush with death, but still the same acute observer of the game he loves and would give almost anything still to be playing.

If you are still with me here at almost the end of this long posting, you can surely tell that the length of it is a measure of the pleasure that this book has given me. I enthusiastically recommend it to all who love cricket and the diverting range of people who play it and talk about it. And if you merely would like to understand cricket, here might be a good place to start.

For me, what Boycott's life illustrates, among much else, is that people who are "selfish" are just as likely, in among all the inevitable bumps and bruises and resentments, to do favours for the rest of us as are the more altruistic souls who think only of others all the time, never of themselves, and whose reaction to someone like Boycott is to back away in horror. Life is not a fixed sum game, and selfish people like Boycott can often enrich it mightily, for the rest of us as well as for themselves. A less selfish Boycott could never have ground out all those runs and all those centuries. A less selfish Boycott would now be reluctant to cut to the often painful heart of who just made what dreadful and perhaps career-ending mistake on a cricket pitch. A less selfish Boycott would have been killed by the cancer that he has, for the time being, defeated, and most cricket fans would have counted themselves the losers, not just the man himself. A less selfish Boycott would have been so much less interesting. Long may his fascinating life continue.

(4)

The annual jamboree that is known as the Wimbledon tennis fortnight gets going in a few days' time. I watched the Roddick/Nadal match yesterday and was stunned at the sheer speed with which Andy Roddick, the US player, served the ball. On several occasions he hit serves of more than 140 mph. Jesus. It made me wonder whether there is any wisdom in John McEnroe's suggestion that wooden racquets are brought back to put some more finesse into the sport. There is no doubt that modern sports technologies, including the materials used to make everything from tennis racquets to the heads of golf drivers, have evolved at an amazing pace. One reason why modern tennis championships have to use special gadgets to test that a ball has fallen inside a court boundary is because of the ferocious speed with which the ball can be hit. It is almost impossible for a line judge to see the fall accurately over the course of a long game. I play occasionally and bought a racquet in a sale that, to my amazement, can be used to hit the ball incredibly fast. But I wonder whether this makes for a better game overall.

In the meantime, here are some good reasons to watch the sport. As for the ladies, I am told they are rather keen on the young Spanish maestro, who threatens to dethrone Roger Federer, one of the greatest tennis players I have ever seen, from his spot as best player on grass.

(18)

A story here which says that fans of computer games are not all weird. I have never quite understood this whole media fixation with games just because they are on a screen rather than face-to-face. A lot of games draw on all kinds of creative energies and are arguably far better for cognitive development than just passively watching TV. As for the arguments about various social pathologies, well, this book is an excellent corrective to the social scolds, pointing out that games involving superheroes and vanquishing monsters is actually a very healthy thing.

Coming next, research shows that people who like to play poker with their mates on a Friday night, play tennis on a Sunday afternoon, do the Times crossword, are also normal. (Sarcasm alert).

Of course, by some yardsticks of social behaviour, gamers, or other hobbyists, are "weird", but then what counts as normal, exactly?

Personally, I think the world could use a bit more eccentricity, not less.

(31)

I am glad to see that a long-standing US friend of mine, Russell E. Whitaker, is back posting to his blog, which has had a bit of a haitus due to the man's shift from California to New York and his being incredibly busy with work. Russell writes a lot and has a lot of knowledge of martial arts. Thanks to him, I started to go to Bujinkan classes in London's Hammersmith. It is great fun and an extremely useful set of skills about self-defence, although physically tough as well to learn. Unfortunately, due to work reasons - I had to work late in the evenings last year - I was not able to attend as much as I liked last year but that has changed and I intend to resume. In the meantime, I have started to fence. Fencing, I find, is even more physically demanding than Bujinkan (yes, really). Initially, I am learning to use the foil, a very light sword where you score if you hit the opponent on certain parts of the body. Depending on which type of sword one uses, you score differently by hitting certain body parts. Of course fencers wear lots of protection these days so there is little chance of getting injured although you cannot afford to be reckless. I find it incredibly good for eye-hand co-ordination. I have also learned that one needs to do lots of stretching exercises since fencing requires people to be flexlible. My knee joints felt pretty sore the following morning after a class. It is a good incentive to get really fit.

Our lead instructor is a Frenchman - French seems to be the language of fencing - and another instructor is a Hungarian. More than half of the class are women, who are often much better than the men.

On the subject of fencing, we all have our favourite films. There are some great sword fighting scenes in Cyrano de Bergerac, Le Bossu, and in the excellent Ridley Scott film, The Duellists (starring Harvey Keitel).

For those interested in fencing as a sport, here's a book worth looking at. But in the end, if you want to have a go, you have to go to a class. One word of warning: the kit can be expensive, so it is best to go to a few classes, use the class stuff to see if you like it first.

(21)

As a child, I was indifferent at team sports - especially rugby union - and my preference was and is for individualistic games like golf, tennis, squash, martial arts (Bujinkan and fencing), or the odd game of poker (I guess some card games like Bridge count as a team game of sorts). One exception to the Pearce Crapness at Team Games was cricket. I loved playing it, unless some sadist of a captain put me on the boundary at point on a chilly afternoon with no prospect of a bat or bowl. I do not play much any more. My fielding was one of the best parts of my game: I once took a flying catch off a batsman who was beginning to rack up a big score and the catch was the pivotal point in the game. Our lot won. There is also the sensual pleasure of hitting a cover drive on the 'sweet spot' of the bat. You get a similar tingle down the spine when you do that in other sports, such as baseball. But cricket was my great team sporting love if only for the entirely selfish reason that I was just about competent at it.

I was reminded of all this by this excellent piece in the Daily Telegraph today. Like the author of that piece, I played cricket at a state school; cricket is being taught and played less in the public sector education system, to the detriment of the national game. Personally, as an advocate of private schooling and of reducing, not raising, the school-leaving age, I would not want to moan if the sport is taught less if that is what the parents, and just as importantly, the pupils, want (some kids hate team sports so much it has scarred their memories of schooling for life). But I would like to think that in a genuine private sector school system, where parents can use their consumer power to drive up standards, that the Greatest Game Known to Man would flourish a bit more.

I would be interested to know what fellow cricket nuts and Samizdata conspirators, Brian Micklethwait and Michael Jennings, have to think about this. Brian recently linked to this book, which looks very much worth a read.

(4)

"The only way that that Liverpool is going to win the [English Premier] League is if Robert Mugabe is counting the points."

An anonymous commenter on the Guardian's sports pages, arguably the best bits of that outfit.

(19)

It is increasingly clear that much of the current wave of repression is occurring not in spite of the Olympics but actually because of the Olympics.

- Amnesty International which has detailed numerous arrests and the harassment of Chinese civil rights activists

(15)

Yesterday afternoon, and again this afternoon, my hopes of getting a day's worth of stuff done in a day, and then another day's stuff in another day, were dashed by cricket, on the television. This was no ordinary cricket. This was not, for example, English county cricket, which has just begun again, and whose first round of matches concluded today, mostly in draws made inevitable by the gloomy, drizzly English weather. I did not get to see those two test match under-achievers but county supremos, Mark Ramprakash and Graham Hick, score their inevitable opening match centuries, in front of the usual tiny smattering of chilled spectators. No, what I saw was something quite different to all that. What I saw were two games on the first two days of something called the Indian Premier League.

On the face of it, this was not cricket of any great profundity, being twenty-overs-each-way slogfests, quite lacking in the long-drawn-out subtleties of five day test cricket or four day English county cricket or Australian Sheffield Shield matches. Nevertheless the Indian Premier League is something extremely profound. It signals the emergence of India as the superpower of cricket that it now is. Everyone in cricket agrees. It's a new era.

India is not the cricket superpower because of its players, excellent though those players are. Yes, Sachin Tendulkar will soon become the greatest run-getter in test match history, when he overtakes the West Indian Brian Lara. But Australia are still, despite the recent retirements of Warne and McGrath, what they have long been, the best international side in the world. No, what makes India special is the number of its fans. I am fond of saying that there are more cricket fans in India than there are people in Europe, and my friend and fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings would have corrected me long ago if this was wrong. And now, these fans are starting seriously to shift the centre of gravity of cricket.

The Indian Premier League doesn't just feature Indian players. Their plan is to make the IPL have a place in cricket much like that the of the English Premier League in soccer, namely something played by the best players in the world, and watched and followed all over the world. And now, it has started. The atmosphere I got from watching these two games on my television was of a big, big country, self-confident enough not just to offer the world a compelling sporting product but to share the glory of it all with whoever in the world has the nerve and the determination to grab it.

And it so happens that the visitors are seizing their chances, so far rather better than the locals. Perhaps the Indians are weighed down a little by the burden of what they must be telling themselves is cricket history in the making, and are taking it just that much too seriously, whereas the visitors just see it as the chance of some fun and some (in some cases a lot of) highly welcome cash. Warne and McGrath have both forced their tired old bodies to have one final outing, I notice.

In the opening game, the Kolkata Knight Riders crushed the Bangalore Royal Challengers, from whom there was alas not much of a challenge, and the result was settled long before the end of the game, as often happens in these types of games. But New Zealander Brendon McCullum nevertheless got the IPL off to a suitably headline grabbing start by making the biggest individual score ever recorded in a twenty-twenty game. And today, another rapid not out century by Australian run-machine Mike Hussey was also the difference between the two sides, as the Chennai Super Kings set an even bigger target, which the Kings XI Punjab made a decent stab at but in the end couldn't match. The Punjab side would have got closer if their top scorer, another Australian, had hung around longer and hit some more boundaries.

No wonder the best of England's county cricketers are envious. They can hardly wait to get involved.

There are genuine fears that cricket is not so much being played as used up, and that spectators may in due course get bored with all this vulgar slogging, and instead of turning to more refined and antique versions of cricket, may instead switch their allegiances to other sports. But good or bad, this is certainly an event, not just in the history of cricket, but, because of the emergence-of-India-as-a-superpower angle, in the very history of the world.

I chanced upon these excitements (by coincidence immediately after posting this about the IPL at my personal blog) on something called Setanta Sports 1, channel number 34 on my digital TV, which is sometimes "encrypted" (i.e. it doesn't work), but sometimes not (i.e. it does!). Can anyone tell me what further games I might be able to watch here in England on Setanta, given that I am not a subscriber to Setanta and do not plan to be? I get very little live cricket in England to watch, unless I visit a pub. I would love to be able to watch more of this tournament in my home.

(51)

The Olympics are a vulgar, ruinous hullabaloo the chief functions of which are to facilitate graft on a spectacular scale and to act as a vehicle for the promotion of despotic values. They are, at best, unedifying and, at worst, intolerable.

(7)

Poor Roma. The Italian football team - which is actually pretty good - has so far not had a good time of it against Manchester Utd. And with Ronaldo, the Portugese ace forward scoring a hatful of goals for ManU, the pain gets worse. Even more so when this young man, who hails from the island of Madeira, not only possesses incredible skill on the ball, but relishes sticking the ball between an opponent's legs (known as "nutmegging"), flicking the ball in such a way as to bamboozle a defender, etc. Electrifying stuff to watch. Ronaldo, to an extent that many highly-paid players do not, understands that football these days is competing for wallets and time with all manner of entertainment.

But some of those who come up against him do not like it very much. I can sympathise, up to a point. But I do not think this man sets out to grind his opponents' faces into the dust. It simply his way of playing the game. If the current generation of footballers cannot take it when a winger players coruscating football, god knows how they would have handled the late George Best, who used to take on opponents for fun, even put his foot on the ball to take a breather, then make a face and challenge them like a matador (he could also play a bit).

This sort of stuff does raise issues of sportsmanship, though. There is a fine line, not always easy to draw, between outrageous skill on the one hand and taking the mickey out of an opponent, on the other. Sport, as Brian noted the other day, can tell us a bit about life in general. Great skill is something to marvel at, but we generally do not like taking the piss. But on this occasion, I do not think that the arguably best footballer of our times is doing that. I was far too young to have seen Best, Pele or Di Stefano in their prime, but I am grateful, even as a supporter of another team, to watch this wizard weave such magic.

(6)

What Sport Tells Us About Life: Bradman's Average, Zidane's Kiss and Other Sporting Lessons
Ed Smith
Penguin books, 2008, 190 pp., £14.99

I rarely buy new books in hardback at full price, because I rarely want any particular book. Usually I am just looking for something that is interesting, and prefer to soften the financial blows by taking my chances in the remainder and charity shops. But something about Ed Smith's little book appealed to me, despite its combination of brevity and a high price-tag. Partly it was that the first three people quoted on the cover saying how good it was were Mike Atherton, Christopher Martin-Jenkins and Michael Brearley, all of them big names if you are an England cricket fan like me, and all people whose opinions I greatly respect. Ed Smith himself is also a name, if you follow England cricket, because he is one of those many unfortunates who played a handful of test matches (his were in 2006 against South Africa), but who was then, somewhat unluckily, discarded. He now captains Middlesex. On the other hand, maybe he won't prove to be so unfortunate in the longer run, because England batting places are now up for grabs again, following several batting debacles in recent months, and Ed Smith, who read history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, is just the kind of thoughtful, intelligent type – like the aforementioned Michaels, Atherton and Brearley - whom selectors like to have trained-up and ready to take over as England captain, should they be caught short for one. There are a few broad hints in his book to suggest that Ed Smith has not given up on such hopes himself. He certainly still hopes to play for England again. Meanwhile, I was not disappointed by this book, nor did I feel that the fifteen pounds I spent on it was wasted or bestowed upon an unworthy cause. There are basically two big reasons why I liked it.

The first reason is simply that Ed Smith writes not just about sport, but, as his title suggests, about the psychology, sociology and history of sport, and about psychology, sociology and history in general, merely illustrated by sport, in the sort of relaxedly middlebrow way that I particularly enjoy. Recently I have been doing some teaching, having always wanted to, and there is a lot of the teacher in Smith and in his family. You can entirely see why he is now a county captain.

Smith is, for instance, very illuminating on the subject of what makes a champion sportsman, and what does not. What does not, it seems, is an easy ride in the sport when you were young, fueled by pure talent, but unaided by the strength of character that you didn't need when young, because you were so talented. I recall Geoff Boycott making the same point during a cricket commentary. Boycott said that boys who outclassed their school mates often came a cropper when they moved up to professional cricket, because suddenly they were up against people as naturally gifted as themselves, but they hadn't acquired the mental toughness they also needed. Never having had to fight before, they were unable to fight now. Other less gifted boys, on the other hand, having toughened themselves up with defeats and harder-won victories in their youth, often did better later on. Smith confirms all this so eloquently that I rather suspect Boycott of having read this book himself. But maybe Boycott was just thinking of himself, and of how he personally made the maximum possible use of less that supreme talent, and maybe Smith owes the insight partly to Boycott.

Smith also mentions in particular the younger brother syndrome. Many a sporting younger brother, he says, learned to give of his best, and to prevail against formidable and grown-up as opposed to feeble and youthful opposition, by practicing on his stronger elder brother, in a way that required the maximum possible effort and strength of will. Basketball legend Michael Jordan had an elder brother, for instance, of whom Jordan said: "When you see me play, you're watching Larry." In learning to defeat Larry, Jordan learned to beat the world.

I particularly recommend the bit where Smith tells the story of a certain Billy Beane, who oozed sporting talent when young and who sailed into professional baseball like the superstar that all assumed he would inevitably become, but who, six years later, became "the first player ever to say" that he now wanted to be a scout instead. At which he proceeded to excel! Prepared by the bitter disappointments of his own failed playing career, Beane then became supremely good at bossing the very game that he could not himself play successfully. Struggle as a player, then triumph as a manager, is a pattern repeated in sport again and again. Says Smith: "We never think more deeply than about our profoundest failings. They often form the foundations of our clearest analytical insights." You can see how a bumbler like me, who nevertheless now aspires to teaching excellence, would like that, the exact opposite of the those-who-can-do-those-who-can't-teach cliché. I have reproduced this Beane story at my education blog, here. Recommended, if you do not know this story already, and, actually, even if you do.

Smith also summarises the story of how baseball triumphed over cricket in the USA, which I have copied and pasted here, the point being that there was once upon a time actually quite a lot of cricket in the USA to be triumphed over. It was the Civil War that made the difference, Smith says, because baseball was less complicated for relaxing soldiers to set up and play than cricket. Otherwise the USA might just as well have used cricket to get back at the accursed Brits by beating them at it, in the manner of the West Indians and the Indians and Pakistanis - in fact, come to think of it, in pretty much all the countries outside Britain that now play cricket - rather than by shunning it and playing something else.

I like what Smith says about amateurism. Of course all that nonsense with initials behind your name if you were a professional but in front if you were an amateur was indeed fairly ridiculous (Smith recycles the "F. J. Titmus should read Titmus F. J." announcement that greeted the great spin-bowler Fred Titmus when he walked out to the wicket in his first match, as a professional cricketer). But, perhaps a baby has been lost, along with much snobbish and unjust bathwater. Mark Ramprakash, for instance, is another type of sporting failure, the supremely effective county or provincial sportsman who could not "scale up" to the international game, despite appearing to have all it took and much more. Perhaps if Ramprakash had learned not to take it all quite so seriously, says Smith, he might have made the step-up to test cricket work better. Ramprakash apparently really enjoyed all the practicing he did for his Come Dancing triumph, and was struck by how much everyone else involved enjoyed it too. Maybe if he had made a point of enjoying his cricket more, and his test cricket playing in particular, he might have done it even better.

I really enjoy reading such ruminations, and in general, I consider this book to be a fine addition to the clever-stuff-for-the-intelligent-layman-who-can't-spare-too-much-time-for-reading-but-who-wants-to-be-diverted-and-entertained-in-the-train genre, and its appearance soon in paperback is inevitable, especially given that Penguin is already its publisher. It will be a nice little earner for Penguin as a stocking filler next Christmas, is my bet.

There is another reason why I was happy to have parted with my fifteen pounds for this book. It turns out that, ideologically speaking, Ed Smith is one of us.

Chapter 7 is entitled "Is the free market ruining sport?", and Smith's answer is that far from ruining sport, the seriously (i.e. lashings of money with lots of noughts on the end) free market that has recently emerged in many sports in the age of television has actually brought some interesting and formerly neglected facts about sport to light. The oft-observed way that, in cricket, it is the batsmen who get the knighthoods and the plaudits, but that, on the other hand, it is bowlers who more often than not win the actual games, is supported by what the English counties are now prepared to pay. Effective batsman are relatively easy to come by, and thus relatively cheap, but good bowlers are, if not priceless, then the next best thing, very highly priced, more so than almost all the merely good batters. In American football, the now much freer market in players has revealed interesting facts about who the M(ost) V(aluable) P(layer)s really are. Yes, the quarterbacks of course get paid fortunes. But so too do the hitherto undervalued offensive linemen who protect those same quarterbacks. Very good "left tackles" also now earn comparable fortunes, despite many fans still having to struggle to remember what their names are.

Most revealing of all, ideologically, is Smith's final chapter, which is entitled "Cricket, C. L. R. James, and Marxism". James's famous book about West Indian cricket, Beyond a Boundary, tells of the emergence of West Indian cricket into international prominence, thanks to such legends as the great Learie Constantine (the first West Indian cricket superstar), and then that golden generation of the Three Ws (Weekes, Worrell and Walcott), the spin duo of Ramadhin and Valentine, the uniquely brilliant Gary Sobers, and, just a bit later, the founders of that great dynasty of West Indian fast bowlers, Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith. And James does it not just by writing about the cricket, but about the world that the cricketers emerged from.

Smith notes the current malaise of West Indian cricket, but, making use of the story that James tells so memorably, doubts that it can be easily cured, because the circumstances that made that earlier success are no longer present. Post-colonial resentment and lack of other outlets for intense personal ambition caused West Indian cricket to explode. Neither explosive is now present in nearly such an intense or pressurised form. Merely coaching West Indian cricket better won't be any substitute, Smith reckons, noting that most truly great sportsmen are pretty much self-taught, under only the most relaxed and laissez faire of tutelage (that teaching vibe again), if any. Sporting greatness, in other words, is about individual self-expression, as well as about the social circumstances that stir such ambitions.

Smith nails James as a characteristic twentieth century type, namely the believer in and chronicler of human freedom who nevertheless refuses to see that in calling himself a Marxist he is supporting not a means of liberation but one of the great modern sources of tyranny:

James's book is about achieving excellence in cricket despite being outside the ruling establishment and all its privileges. In fact, that is an understatement. It is about achieving excellence because of exclusion from the ruling establishment. It is about being the underdog, and how that can be more inspiring than being governed by the prescriptive rules of conventional wisdom.

So far so "Marxist", in the class-warfare sense. But then Smith offers another quote about what C. L. R. James's leftist assumptions necessarily lead to when they get into power, from George Watson's The Lost Literature of Socialism:

Socialism necessarily means government by a privileged class, as Lenin saw, since only those of privileged education are capable of planning and governing. Shaw and Wells, too, often derided the notion that ordinary people can be trusted with political choice. Hence the aristocratic superiority of the Bolsheviks, who reminded Bertrand Russell, when he visited Lenin soon after the October Revolution, of the British public-school elite that then governed India. Socialism had to be based on privilege, and knew it, since only privilege educates for the due exercise of centralized power in a planned economy.

Writers about cricket with pretensions towards literariness tend these days to divide either into old school traditionalists in the manner of Christopher Martin-Jenkins, whose fogeyishly antiquated solemnity is often mocked even by other Test Match Special commentators, or else left-inclined 'intellectual' types. Ed Smith dodges past these two stereotypes. He certainly is an intellectual, who likes to mention Thackeray and Wagner and Philip Larkin and Milovan Djilas as well as Bradman and Bannister and Mohammed Ali and Billy Beane. Yet he is neither any sort of blindly traditionalist fogey, not any sort of nitwit about the twentieth century's most mercilessly destructive tides of nitwit opinion. He's read Beyond a Boundary and entirely gets the point of it and entirely rejoices at the wonderful story it tells. But he also sees what is wrong with it.

In the acknowledgements at the beginning, we learn that among the people who read and commented on early drafts of the manuscript of Ed Smith's book was a certain John Blundell. I'm not sure, but I rather think that this is the same John Blundell who is the Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs. On the other hand, this particular John Blundell may be a sports psychology professor of the same name. But if it was John Blundell of the IEA, well done him. Put it this way: if it was him, it makes perfect sense.

(13)

It is often wrongly assumed that a supporter of capitalism has no business complaining if a beloved sports institution, like a cricket or football team, becomes a vast, worldwide brand, or if sports contests are held outside the venue from which the institution sprang. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper (to quote a line from Evelyn Waugh's Scoop). As a libertarian, the key thing for me is that autonomous institutions, set up and created under certain rules of association by their members, should continue to be run on said principles since otherwise, the whole point of the association is destroyed. Since no coercion is involved, there is no reason, for instance, why a group of socialists could not join together to create their own communes. The only proviso being that people who live in these places have the right to quit and form their own, 'break-away' groupings or just leave if they so wish. The same applies to say, professional football. I happen to think that the influx of non-British players and oodles of cash into the game has been a mixed blessing; just because I support the right of people to spend their money how they want emphatically does not mean that good things always happen when they do, nor is it contradictory for a free marketeer such as yours truly to wonder whether sports can be ruined by wrangles over money.

Take the current controversy over the idea of staging Premier League football matches outside England, for example, in order to appeal to the hundreds of thousands of folk who allegedly are desperate to watch English Premier League football. Well, sorry guys, the whole freaking idea of an English premier league is that the games are played in England, not Planet Zog. If fans in England are increasingly priced out of their clubs' games - which means that crowds often have all the passion of wet cement - and if players become exhausted by a 365-a-year playing season, then the game will suffer. And that, in the end, will damage the game that the heads of sports associations are supposed to be taking care of.

Yes, I know that the purist idea of autonomous sports institutions has been badly eroded in recent years by the attempts by governments to muscle in on sports. That is a key, if separate issue. But stay with me on this: in a free society, it is nevertheless the case that good things, like friendships, clubs and voluntary organisations, do not revolve around the desire just to make pots of money. Sport is something one enjoys and plays for its own sake, not just to win. As Michael Oakshott, the conservative philosopher said, some things, like being a member of a club or having a good friendship, have no external 'end'. As a supporter of Ipswich Town, I think that is probably just as well.

(13)

The 1950s was rather more than about Elvis, Monroe and The Bomb. Slowly, as Britain recovered from the war, the rationing, and the cheerless austerity during the late 1940s, life got better. It is fashionable, for a certain type of writer, to claim that nothing much exciting happened before the 1960s (a classic Baby Boomer conceit); in fact, arguably, the 1950s were as interesting and colourful, albeit with fewer drugs. One institution that came to the fore in that decade of Ealing comedies and curvy sports cars was Manchester United FC, a once unfashionable club (it used to be called Newton Heath). Old Trafford, its ground, was reduced to rubble by the Luftwaffe; a young Scotsman demobbed after the war called Matt Busby, who used to play for Liverpool and Manchester City, took over as manager.

The story of what happened during his extroardinary career at Old Trafford will be remembered as long as football is played. The fortunes of the Red Devils waxed and waned, but inevitably, the tragedy that hit the club in the February of 1958 is indelibly marked on the history of the club. Eight players, plus other passengers, were killed when the aircraft taking the team from a European Cup match crashed in the snow-bound airport of Munich. It is widely recognised that one of the dead, Duncan Edwards, was probably the greatest British footballer of his generation.

Here is a wonderful account of the last game the team played in Britain - against Arsenal - before the European game. It is hard for any English football fan not to wonder at what might have been; at least three, if not more, of the Manchester team could have played in World Cups in 1958, 1962 and 1966. What a waste.

At least it can be said that air travel has gotten a lot safer since. In the late 1940s, the entire Torino football team from the North Italian city were killed in a crash.

May they all rest in peace.

(20)

Oscar Pistorius is a South African who has had the lower half of both his legs amputated, and participates in atheletic events with the use of artificial limbs. He has been banned from this year's Olympic Games because the International Association of Atheletic Federations has rules that his artificial legs give him a 'significant advantage' over his able-bodied rivals. He uses carbon fibre blades to race.

A study, carried out by Professor Peter Bruggeman at the German Sport University in Cologne, compared Pistorius with five able-bodied athletes of similar ability.

"Pistorius was able to run with his prosthetic blades at the same speed as the able-bodied sprinters with about 25 percent less energy expenditure," the report concluded.

This is a small but significant point where an athelete using artificial limbs now has an advantage over normal-bodied atheletes. I doubt that his artificial limbs give him an advantage in day to day life, but in this narrow field, Pistorius does seem to get an edge. I think this is going to be the start of a wider trend.

(21)

Patrick Crozier has views on the saga of footballer Al Bangura

Many of you will be vaguely aware of the Bangura affair. Al Bangura is the Watford footballer who is about to be deported to Sierra Leone, where, according to him, he is likely to be killed. For extra colour there is some stuff about a voodoo cult and the bizarre ruling that his being a professional footballer with excellent prospects do not count because Sierra Leone is not one of the top 75 football teams in the world. Go figure.

I should point out that I am a half-hearted Watford fan but this does not affect what I am about to say. I would say the same if the guy played for L*t*n. All it means is that I am slightly more familiar with the case.

I have no idea if what Bangura says is true. Frankly, it could be a pack of lies for all I care. Given the stakes involved: the best job in the world or exile to some African shithole, it would hardly be surprising if he were telling the odd porkie. But it does not matter. The way I see it the guy has every right to be here. Not because he is fleeing persecution, not because he is a good footballer, not because he pays his taxes or 'enriches' British culture...

But because he is a human being.

I think everybody should be able to live everywhere, subject, of course, to the usual libertarian provisos about property rights.

My guess is that sense and political manipulation of the judiciary will prevail. This has the potential to become a real cause celebre - you can just imagine the stink if he gets sent back to Sierra Leone and does indeed wind up dead - and because of that I do not think it will happen. Or if he does get deported he will soon find a job somewhere else. I hear LA Galaxy are looking to strengthen their midfield.

But it makes me think about all those who are not professional footballers - the ordinary joes who just want to make better lives for themselves or to escape the hope-crushing Kafka-with-machetes world that is so common in Africa. They have to face the more ordinarily-Kafkaesque world of the immigration system without the support of football clubs and their umpteen thousand supporters. For them the difference between prosperity and poverty hangs on a civil servant's whim. The more honest must be tortured by debates over when to tell the truth and when to lie like crazy. It must be agony.

(22)

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a work colleague about the kind of sport shown on the BBC television channels (not Sky or the satellite stuff). One thing that came up in conversation was how little boxing there was on the BBC. Was this just because Sky and the paid-for TV channels had bagged all the top fights? It seemed so, but was there something else going on, like a PC revulsion on the part of the BBC top brass about puglism? It seemed a bit odd. When I was a youngster, there was always some boxing match in the offing featuring the likes of Barry MacGuigan, or Joe Frazier, Lloyd Honeygan, Nigel Benn, Frank Bruno ("know wot I mean, 'Arry?") Chris Eubank, Mike Tyson, Lennox Lewis, Sugar Ray Leonard... the list was endless. Some of the matches were brutal and there were tragedies: Michael Watson was seriously maimed in a fight; Ali, of course, suffers from a severe form of Parkinson's which must, surely, be linked to the injuries he sustained. Boxing has always had a sleazy side too; some of the money-men involved in the sport probably have spent a lot of time brushing up against the law. In the early days of the big fights in Las Vegas or London's East End, there was more than just a whiff of organised crime involved.

But - there is a but here - boxing is more than all that. Competitive pugilism involves a lot of skill, just as martial arts do; it is a terrific way to keep and get fit and it is also a good way for potentially wayward youngsters with lots of testosterone to channel their aggression and learn to act like a man in a fair fight under the guidance of a referee. And for all that boxing can be and is a brutal sport, I have watched some matches that had me sitting on the edge of my seat in excitement: I particularly remember the epic fight, in 1985, between MacGuigan and Predoza. Absolutely electrifying fight. And I defy anyone to watch an old video of Ali, in his fights against Patterson or Frazier, and not admit to be astonished by the man's athleticism and skill.

British boxing is now in the best state that it has been in for years. Boxers like Ricky Hatton and others are blazing a trail; the countries of the UK look to be able to field a decent bunch of entrants for the Beijing Olympics next year. And even the BBC, which recently seemed to be turning up its nose at the sheer vulgarity and general non-PCness of boxing, seems to be covering boxing quite a lot all of a sudden, invalidating my earlier wonderment about whether the BBC had killed the sport from its programmes. No longer. Good. Boxing has been through a fallow time in Britain over the past few years and there remain legitimate worries about the potential injuries that can be inflicted. But if you accept - as a genuine liberal must - that grown-up adults can and should be able to consensually fight and accept the consequences, there should be absolutely no suggestion that boxing be banned, any more than say, wrestling or other contact sports which can cause injury, including life-threatening ones.

There is also a cultural issue worth throwing into the mix: boxing seems to be one of the few sports that have drawn in young Muslim men in Britain, apart from cricket. That has to be a good thing.

(17)

Samizdata readers who are bored senseless by team sports can scroll down - Okay, this evening yours truly watched as England's football team lost 2-3 to Croatia in the qualifying stages of the European Championship to be held next year. As a result of the loss, England will not take part in the competition; England's manager, Steve McClaren, who seems to be out of his depth in the role, will either resign - not yet at the time of writing - or be sacked. Many of the players, who often earn vast salaries to play for their Premiership teams, played with a lack of guile and commitment that was embarrassing to behold.

I would like to put on an act and claim I do not care about all this, that it is "just a game", blah, blah, but that would be lying. I enjoy watching football but England's football team was abject, terrible.

I wonder whether there are every any political or cultural implications of things like this - I am not sure. But the crapness of the football team does rather reinforce the glum mood of this country right now: lost data, Northern Rock and a rapidly cooling economy. Football is the English national game - even more than cricket or rugby union. But it might not stay that way much longer.

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These - suddenly - are great days for England rugby, but astonishing days, too. In front of a media-packed room yesterday, Brian Ashton, the England head coach, was asked: "What would it feel like to be Sir Brian?" And his genuine look of astonishment said it all.

- Owen Slot of the Times reflects on the transformation achieved during the World Cup by the England team (but Bryan Habana may prove too much of a handful for England next Saturday).

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Maybe you recall that this time four years ago much was made here of the Rugby World Cup. This was because England fans like me genuinely reckoned England could win the thing. England went into the tournament on the back of two great wins in the Southern Hemisphere against the might of Australia and New Zealand, and when the tournament began they were the top ranked side in the world. If England played as well as they were capable of, they would win in some style. Actually, they did not play quite that well, but they still won, by the skin of their teeth and a famous Jonny Wilkinson drop goal in the final minute of extra time.

This time, it was all completely different. The only Samizdata coverage of this event so far has been Johnathan Pearce's piece about how the shirts worn by New Zealand and Scotland in their group match were impossible to distinguish (I felt just the same).

I for one make no apology for this. I think that the way to enjoy sport is to pay close attention when your team is winning, but otherwise to relax and treat it all as only the game that it is.

England arrived at this current tournament in a state bordering on shambles. They won their first game against the USA, a rugby union minnow, but scored no points at all in the last half hour of the game while the USA even managed a try. And in the next game England hit rock bottom, being utterly annihilated by South Africa by the crushing scoreline of 36-0. Meanwhile, the other Southern Hemisphere sides were storming through their early games, winning by cricket scores. Any thought that England might be able to make a serious defence of their title was, frankly, ridiculous.

But England then played two further tough but winnable group games, against Samoa and Tonga, both rough and physical teams, both teams capable of ripping less than completely alert and committed defences to pieces with creative back play. England won both games. The manner of those victories, and the inevitable jelling and bonding that happened under what now looks like very astute leadership, meant that by the time England played their quarter final game against Australia, they were ready to make a real contest of it. The Australians must have told themselves not to underestimate England, but resisting that kind of mind-set is hard. England won a remarkable if rather ugly and scrappy victory, 12-10. Wilkinson, after four years of nearly continuous injury of one sort or another, who had missed that South Africa game because he was still, yet again, injured, was now well and truly back in business, and kicked all of England's points.

France, meanwhile, following their own humiliation in the first game of the tournament, which they lost to Argentina, also had to bounce back strongly to make any progress. By the time they played Ireland they had pulled themselves together and they beat the under-performing Irish handsomely. Then, hours after that amazing England Australia game, they pulled off an even more extraordinary quarter final upset, beating the mighty New Zealand All Blacks.

What the hell do the All Blacks have to do to win one of these things? New Zealand were the red hot favourites, as I had told all my friends, but, as I had added, they always seem to find a way to lose somewhere along the line. The last time they won the World Cup was the first time in was held, in 1987.

My take on this New Zealand loss was that until they came up against France, and unlike France, they had not been seriously tested, by anybody. The team that came second in their preliminary group, Scotland, didn't even try to beat New Zealand, preferring to rest their first team for their key game against Italy, allowing New Zealand to stroll past them much as New Zealand did against the other weaker teams in that group, like Italy. (That being the game with the indistinguishable shirts.) And then, with no serious matches behind them, New Zealand came up against a rejuvenated France, and couldn't quite prevail. Caught up in a close finish, they looked like fishes out of water. Not being able to win at a canter, they proved unable to win at all. Their fly half had chances to win it towards the end with a drop goal in the Jonny Wilkinson manner, but by the time he tried this, the best chances had gone and his despairing kick in the final minutes, from way out, was well wide.

So it was that England played France last night at the Stade de France. Fans had to wait until 9 pm, local time, for the game to get under way, that being because people in Australia and New Zealand had to able to watch their teams play one another without having to get up too early. What they made of the semi-final that actually transpired I do not know.

England beat France in their 2003 semi final, but this time France were playing at home, and seemed far better prepared. England, on the other hand, this time seemed a far less formidable outfit, and flying on fumes.

Yet, England won again. They won much as they did against Australia. It was tense and ugly, and ferocious. Once again, the boot of Jonny Wilkinson was the difference, taking England from 8-9 down to a 14-9 win with a penalty kick and a drop goal in the last few minutes. Or then again, maybe the difference was that England scored the only try of the game, after about a minute and a half, when Lewsey got the luck of the bounce and leapt over the French full back to score in the corner, Wilkinson for once failing to convert.

My nerves already shredded by the ordeal of trying and failing to watch the England Australia game, I was grateful for a dinner invitation from Perry de Havilland which would spare me from having to pace about my kitchen like a caged kitten, trying to watch this game, and failing again. Having given my orders to my TV hard disc, I dined contentedly at Perry's, only occasionally nipping upstairs to see what the score was. When I first checked, it was 6-5 to France. Half an hour later, into the second half, it was 9-8 to France, and I was getting seriously tense. If England were still within range towards the end they could win, and Perry and the rest of us did watch the final fifteen minutes, and we witnessed Wilkinson's decisive kicks. We also watched ten minutes of crunching England tackling, including one miracle ankle tap by Joe Worsley on a French back who was about a yard away from scoring the try that would have finished it. Presumably England had been tackling like that for the entire game, because France scored no tries at all. That doesn't often happen, and was the last thing anybody expected for this game. As I finish this posting, I am now watching the recording. All has gone well with that, and I will have a treasurable DVD of this remarkable contest for ever.

How is it that England are now doing so well at rugby? Last time they won as favourites. This time, they are in a position where they could win it once again, having been written off as hopeless after their earlier games. Well, I don't really know, but I've been reading a very interesting book by the England coach the last time around, Clive Woodward, which sheds quite a lot of light on this question. I hope to be telling you about this book here, soon, preferably before the final next weekend. (I hope to, but: I promise nothing.)

I now anticipate that South Africa will win this tournament fairly comfortably. It is being said that Argentina could upset the South Africans today, much as they have already upset France and Ireland, but I don't see that happening. I think that the South Africans, having themselves had one of those salutary frights in an earlier game (at the hands of the Fijians), will roast those beefy Argies by a big margin. And although England have improved a hell of a lot as this tournament has gone on, I don't think they've improved enough to beat South Africa. But then again, I didn't think England would beat Australia, or France.

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I have quite enjoyed watching the rugby so far; the Argentinian side has been a revelation; some of the South Pacific sides have played with their customary bravery and gusto; even England, after a stuttering start, look a bit better. The side that is - supposedly - fancied to win the contest this year by many observers are the New Zealand All-Blacks.

So you can imagine my befuddlement yesterday afternoon when I watched the game with friends down in deepest Suffolk. The shirts of the 'All-Blacks' were covered in a sort of grey-blue, while the Scots, instead of their old, neat blue shirts with the old Thistle emblem, instead had some weird grey-blue stripes on top of some other colours. At a distance, it was actually pretty hard to tell the two sides apart, colour-wise. I understand all the marketing stuff that goes on in sports these days but is not a fairly basic notion that you can tell one side apart from the other? I mean, during the thick of a rugby match, for example, it might actually be a good idea for teams to be easily able to recognise one another. As a friend of mine put it yesterday, the referee should have ordered one side off the pitch to change into recognisable shirts.

The whole thing was bizarre. Mind you, New Zealand won by a large distance, to no-one's great surprise.

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(Alert: if you are bored by sport or just want to read about politics and supposedly more serious stuff, scroll down).

The England football team need to win their match this week's match against Israel - yes - to qualify for the European Championship tournament next year. I guess it says something about the state of what is often regarded as the country's national game that England are in this situation. But this week, I have tried to freeze out the dire state of our national game and have been reading a bit about a man from England's glorious football past, both in terms of how he played the game, and the sort of person he was and still is.

Bobby Charlton. It is a tired cliche, but they just don't make em like that any more. His thoughts in his new autobiography about colleagues Denis Law and the late George Best are wonderful and in the case of Best, who was without doubt a sporting genius, very moving.

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The presence of Andrew O'Hagan, the novelist and columnist, remains something of a mystery to me in the Daily Telegraph. This week's offering is a bleat about why we stingy Brits cannot get more excited about the 2012 London Olympic Games:

A wonderful Olympic Games - such as those held in Sydney - requires a vast harnessing of common belief, as well as a momentous investment of private and public sector funding. If we cannot rise to these occasions, we should not have bid for the Games. If we don't get our collective finger out, the terrible (and unsporting) truth is that we will end up looking like a cheap little place with no quality or inspiration to offer the world, and that is sad, too sad to bear, when we are faced with such a gold-getting opportunity.

Ah, yes, we must get our "collective finger out". We must stop moaning about the cost of these wonderful Games, put on a cheery smile, put a big hand in the wallet and pony up. Well sorry, Mr O'Hagan, that is not quite good enough. If the Games are quite as wonderful as he claims them to be, they should have had no trouble getting funding via the market. Within a few yards of the Games, there is Canary Wharf, with its huge investment banks and legions of financiers versed in the arts of financing long-term infrastructure projects. For example, if the facilities built for the Games could be used for 30 years or more, then why don't the organisers issue 30-year bonds, rather like in the days of the 19th Century railway boom? It always makes me suspicious when some character like this says what a tremendous idea X is, but then immediately demands public funding for it, as if no one would pay for X out of their free will. And that of course is the problem; the OIympics will not be commercially viable - not if the incompetents who run it can help it.

As the late, great Milton Friedman once put it in Free To Choose, it is - I paraphrase - so much more fun spending other people's money.

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The other week, I wrote about the Bridge card game ploy known as the Yarborough - taken from the third James Bond story, Moonraker. The names given to various card game gambits can be wonderful. Consider this one:

The author has an amusing, though unkind, name for a holding of Ace King. He calls it ‘Kournikova’ because it is very pretty but never wins.

Well, I rather liked her.

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The new logo for the 2012 London Olympics has been unveiled and it has produced howls of outrage. Yet I beg to differ. I think it is perfect.

What does it look like to you? To me it is obvious: a collapsing structure of some sort, perhaps a building at the moment of demolition. The sense of downwards motion towards the bottom of the page is palpable.

Breathtaking. I mean what truly magnificent symbolism. The entire Olympic endeavour has been a massive looting spree with already grotesque cost over-runs (and it is only 2007), so surely something that conjures up images of collapse and disaster is really on the money... and speaking of money, at £400,000 (just under $800,000 USD) for the logo, it perfectly sums up the whole 'Olympic Experience' for London taxpayers.

No, if ever there was 'truth in advertising', this is it. Well done Lord Coe, I salute you.

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Some of the more innovative and exciting buildings these days are linked to the world of sport. This may not be surprising given the vast sums of money - alas, sometimes taxpayers' money - that swirls around sport these days. Take this picture of the Barcelona FC stadium, for example. Ever since the Roman days, in fact, sports stadia have been among the most impressive buildings in human civilisation (the arena at Arles, in the South of France, has a spooky, imposing quality of its own, for example).

But of course today, if you are a sport-loving Englishman like yours truly, today matters because the FA Cup Final is being held at its traditional home, Wembley (for non-Brits, this is in west London). The new stadium looks pretty damned impressive. The project to build it has not gone at all smoothly (a sign of the possible difficulties we might expect from the London Olympics). But the wait is worth it. It is magnificent.

One of my happiest days as a youngster was in 1978, when my local team, Ipswich Town, beat Arsenal 1-0 to win the FA Cup (the Blues won the European UEFA Cup three years later. Ah, those were the days). Even watching the game on the television, you were struck by the atmosphere. In 2000, when Ipswich were promoted in a playoff, I went with friends to the stadium in the last fully competitive game to be held before the old stadium was pulled down.

Update: a pity the match between Manchester United and Chelsea did not live up to the billing. Chelsea won. Well done to them (I think one or two Samizdata contributors will be rather chuffed about that).

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Guy Herbert this morning posted a piece commenting on Australian Prime Minister John Howard's decision to "ban" the Australian cricket team from touring Zimbabwe later this year. I generally have little time for Mr Howard, but in this case I can not personally be very harsh on him. What clearly happened is that the Australian Cricket Board (which these days prefers to call itself "Cricket Australia") begged him at length the make such an announcement, and he eventually gave in despite considerable resistance, and he did this because the alternatives open to him were probably worse. I have no disagreement with Guy that the outcome is essentially a dishonourable one, but the other easy options were worse. Some background.

In international cricket, there are only three countries for who the game is directly profitable. These are India, Australia, and England (in decreasing order of profitability). The other countries that regularly play international cricket make money by playing the national teams of these three countries, and then selling television rights and other sponsorship opportunities for these matches. Thus it is very important to (say) Sri Lanka for (in particular) India and Australia to regularly tour Sri Lanka and play matches.

In order to assure its members of some sort of regular cricket and regular income, the International Cricket Council (ICC) has in recent years created a mandatory tour program, requiring each of its members to play each other both home and away over a five year period. Reactions to this rule have varied, and compliance with it has been variable. The rule allows two sides to postpone a series if both are in agreement, which has allowed India and Australia to at times get their way by offering more money or more matches if the matches are played at some undefined "later". However, if a team takes a hard line, then (at least theoretically) the other side must tour, or must pay a fine to the ICC which will be then forwarded to the host team as compensation for the lost revenues from the matches that were to have been played. The ICC's rules allow for two situations in which a fine is not payable: firstly in cases where there is a genuine issue of safety - tours of both Sri Lanka and Pakistan have been called off for this reason in times of high political tension and terrorist threat - and in cases where a government forbids a tour. This second rule has come into play more in cases where Zimbabwe were potentially the touring side, most notably when Zimbabwean players were refused visas by the government of New Zealand.

Zimbabwe are a full member of the ICC. In the mid 1990s Zimbabwe had quite a decent cricket team (of mostly but certainly not entirely white players) but in the years since then Zimbabwean cricket has gone the way of most other things in Zimbabwe. At the demand of the government, white players were pushed out of the team, as were any non-white players who dared to say anything critical of the government. Officials who ran the game and actually cared about cricket were replaced with compliant government yes-men. The organisation of cricket in Zimbabwe became a shambles, and we are not sure right now to what extent the domestic cricket is even taking place. (The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians has recently been complaining about being unable to get scorecards for the domestic Logan Cup, which it has documented with no trouble for over a century). Inevitably, the standard of the national team has dropped from "decent, but not world beating", to utterly woeful. Their performance in the recently completed World Cup was dreadful, and they have dropped to 11th in the world rankings, way behind the rapidly improving Bangladesh, and behind even Ireland, a side just consisting of part time Australian and English expatriates and who are not a full member of the ICC.

However, through all this Zimbabwe has maintained its full membership of the ICC. Zimbabwe has been "temporarily suspended" from playing test matches due to its declining standards, but it is still playing one day international cricket, and other teams are expected to tour in order to play these games. Australia was scheduled to tour Zimbabwe this year.

The obvious thing to do would be to expel Zimbabwe from the ICC, not necessarily on political grounds explicitly, but simply because cricket in Zimbabwe is no longer being administered and organised properly, that the board is no longer independent of government, and because selections are no longer taking place on the basis of merit. However, there are two reasons why this has not happened. The first is that there is a "third world" versus "first world" divide in international cricket, and some aspects of the administration of the game are a post-colonial nightmare. For many years Australia and England (and, prior to their expulsion from international cricket in the apartheid days, South Africa) had the right of veto over any decisions made in the ICC, and the other countries still have a lingering resentment of this. Once this veto was abolished, the Asian cricketing powers were eager to elevate other countries to membership of the ICC so as to gain a voting majority against the former "colonial" powers, and this is one factor that led to the elevation of Zimbabwe in the first place. Expelling Zimbabwe would increase the voting power of the "first world" bloc, and many people in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka do not want this.

Secondly, what are the objections to Zimbabwe playing international cricket? For one thing, Zimbabwe is ruled by a dictatorship that restricts civil liberties. Well, other members of the ICC include Bangladesh and Pakistan, who are not exactly wonderful on this score either. South Africa is ruled by people who consider Robert Mugabe to be one of their old comrades in arms. If Zimbabwe were kicked out of world cricket on these grounds, then this would "set a bad example" to Pakistan and Bangladesh in particular. Did I mention that the governing body of cricket in Pakistan is traditionally a branch of the army and the head of its board is usually a general? That complicates matters further, and rules out the "We should expel Zimbabwe because the government controls cricket in the country" argument. The government of Sri Lanka appoints that nation's cricket board too (although not through the army). As for "Zimbabwe selects players on something other than merit", well, South Africa does that too. (Affirmative action with respect to black and coloured players). One would think that "Zimbabwe should be expelled because Zimbabwean cricket is a shambles" might be enough, but the organisation of cricket in a number of countries is a shambles (most notably Pakistan again, also (sadly) the West Indies). The ICC is also a shambles, having demonstrated in its organisation of the recently completed World Cup that it is an organisation that could not collectively get pissed in Porto)

Australia was scheduled to tour Zimbabwe later this year. The Australian players did not want to make the tour. The Australian government definitely did not want the tour to go ahead.

However, until recently it stated that as Cricket Australia is a private organisation, then it is not the government's job to decide. The Australian board mainly cares about making as much money as possible, but in the crunch it did not want to tour either, and really would have just preferred that the whole issue would go away. However, it did not especially want to upset the ICC, and it did not really want to pay a fine. Quite typically, the board asked the government to solve its problem for it.

When it initially got this request from Cricket Australia, the Australian government made comments about how it did want the tour to go ahead, and about how it might be willing to "indemnify" Cricket Australia against a fine from the ICC. What this means is that Cricket Australia would have cancelled the tour as this is what the government wanted and that the government would then have paid the fine on its behalf. This would have been an easy enough thing for the government to do - after all it was only taxpayers' money,. However, when the government said this, it had not comprehended the full implications, which was that the fine would be paid to the Zimbabwean board in compensation, and that as the Zimbabwean board is controlled by Robert Mugabe, paying the fine would essentially mean giving a gift of $2 million directly to Robert Mugabe.

Once the Australian government comprehended this, paying the fine was not a feasible option. The Australian government was not going to give Robert Mugabe a $2 million gift. The only other option was to take advantage of the ICC's rule that a government ban could stop a tour without a fine. In defence of John Howard, I believe he genuinely did this as a last resort. The alternative was worse.

However, from the point of view of Cricket Australia, there was another alternative, which was to simply withdraw from the ICC. The ICC is very culpable concerning Zimbabwe. The participating teams in the recent World Cup and other ICC tournaments have been given a share of the profits of the tournament. This includes Zimbabwe. The ICC is already partly funding Robert Mugabe, and Australia is partly implicated simply by participating in the ICC's tournaments. The recent World Cup was such an organisational debacle that there is no great loss in not participating in future such events. If Australia were to leave, the ICC certainly could not stop Australia playing its traditional series against England, and if they tried then the national boards of England, New Zealand and probably other nations as well would follow Australia out of the ICC. Australian cricket is also based on expectations of receiving money from playing India frequently (next January's series between Australia and India is anticipated to be extremely lucrative), but it is hard to imagine that India would not find a way to continue playing Australia - they need the revenues they receive from playing such games

What Australia should have done was called the ICC's bluff. It may have suffered some short term financial insecurity as a consequence, but it would have regained control over its own destiny and would have at least fixed these kinds of problems for good.

This would have been good, because there is another cricketing crisis in the background. When Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer was murdered in March after Pakistan's elimination from the World Cup. most of us speculated that the murder was in some way connected with subcontinental bookmakers, as cricket's problems with match fixing and betting were well known. I expected that this would confirm and the details would leak out relatively quickly, but it did not happen. One thing I did not take adequate notice of was a series of strange articles that were published about the religious devotion of certain members of the Pakistan team, in particular captain Imzamam-al-Haq. Apparently a significant portion of the Pakistan team were devotees of the Islamic Tablighi Jamaat movement, which stresses living a pure and authentic Islamic lifestyle and which is aggressively evangelical. Apparently the team was factionalised between devotees of this movement and non-devotees, and there were prayer rooms set up in team hotels and Tablighi Jamaat clerics mingled with the team and were present in the dressing room. Allegedly Bob Woolmer saw this as divisive and detracting from the team performance.

There have been various leaks and observations since Woolmer's death suggesting that he must have been murdered by someone he knew and who was connected to the team. The possibility is very real that he was murdered by someone in or closely connected to the team, and the reason that he was murdered was mixed in with fundamentalist Islam rather than bookmaking. There are now doubts that the final e-mail sent by Woolmer (resigning his position as coach) before he died was written by him (it does not sound like it was written by a native English speaker). which again suggest that the murderer may have been some what connected to the team, and somehow had access to his laptop. (Of course, this story has already long passed six impossible things happening before breakfast, so perhaps it was some bizarre combination of the two). The fact that we still do not know who killed Woolmer after two months does make me wonder if some sort of cover-up has gone in within the Pakistan team, and if so the "Islam" explanation becomes more likely and the bookmaking explanation less so, I think

I do not know what happened, obviously. The story gets stranger and stranger. It may be that the state of the Pakistan cricket team is symptomatic of the decay and radicalisation of the country of Pakistan every bit as much as the decay of the Zimbabwean cricket team is as symptomatic of the decay of that country. If so, countries such as Australia and England should not be playing Pakistan either. However great the rivalry between Pakistan and India, one cannot imagine some of these revelations increasing the eagerness of India to play Pakistan regularly either. If the ICC mandates regular tours of Pakistan, then this may well be another reason why the ICC is not an organisation that it is advantageous for cricketing authorities in Australia, England, or elsewhere to be connected to any more.

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John Howard, Australia's Prime Minister, is quite rightly critical of the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, and does not like the idea of the Australian cricket side touring there. He has had to struggle with his conscience:

"I am jammed between my distaste for the government getting involved in something like this and my even greater distaste for giving a propaganda victory to Robert Mugabe.

Obviously if there is a way legitimately that the tour can be cancelled and there not be an exposure by Cricket Australia to any fine, then we'll go down that path."

What a pity. Mr Howard plainly understands that the administration of sport is not the government's business; but he feels bound in the pursuit of maintaining Australia's national image to intervene in private sphere. Talk of the tour being a victory for Mugabe is just justifying cant: a ban is a much bigger target for racialised anti-colonial rhetoric. The quasi-ban - notably exercised by bullying and bribery rather than any lawful power - is a lurch of Zimbabwe-style arbitrary government and propagandising state action.

Western politics is not so far from the world of Comrade Bob, and we forget that at our peril.

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There is an old and wise saying that 'an armed society is a polite society'. It is also the case that a private society remains a private society as well. That is, the importance and respect paid by governments to a citizen's right to privacy flows on to the rest of society. In contrast, when a government disregards the right of its citizens to keep matters private, other organisations in society will take their cue from the government's lead.

Take gambling for example. The online sports betting industry in Australia has sprung up like mushrooms after autumn rain in Australia since the advent of the Internet. People used to like to have a wager on a football or cricket game in the friendly environment of a pub, but since the online bookmakers have opened, the betting habits of Australians have increased markedly.

It is not only Australians that have been bitten by the sports betting bug either. But it is illegal in many parts of the world, and that has created more problems then it has solved. When a market is not allowed to be filled by honest business folk, it is instead filled by organised crime figures and all the baggage that this brings. One of the biggest items of luggage is the curse of match-fixing in popular sports.

It is in countering this that the right to privacy has come under strain as global sporting bodies try to grapple with the curse. Cricket has been dealing with this problem for over a decade now, and the net result of that is that there is a special anti-corruption unit to deal with it. Also, they have done deals with the legal betting agencies to try and trace irregular pattens of betting, and betting by players. The privacy policy at Centrebet, Australia's largest online betting agency, say this:

Cricket Agreement
Centrebet has entered an Agreement with the International Cricket Council, to provide the International Cricket Council Anti Corruption and Security Unit (ICC ACSU) with betting related information to assist it in investigating conduct connected with cricket.
The ICC ACSU may request from Centrebet any information on betting activity relating to cricket and any identification information held by Centrebet pertaining to:

1. An individual employed by, contracted to or associated with the ICC;
2. An individual employed by, contracted to or associated with one of the National Cricket Boards who are Full Members, Associates or Affiliates of the ICC;
3. An individual whom the ICC ACSU believes is connected to person in (1) or (2) above where the ICC ACSU has reasonable grounds to suspect that the individual in question has breached, or is intending to breach, one or more of the Rules of Conduct as set out in the ICC Player's and Team Official's Code as amended from time to time or incite another to do so; or
4. Any person whom the ICC ACSU has reasonable grounds to suspect has engaged in conduct prejudicial to the interests of the game of cricket and/or who may have relevant knowledge concerning corruption within cricket.

Centrebet will not provide any information unless it is satisfied in its discretion that the ICC ACSU has reasonable grounds for requesting the betting related information.
By placing bets on cricket, you consent to the use and disclosure of your personal information for the purposes, and in the manner, described above.

Give Centrebet due though, they at least agree not to provide any information unless they smell a rat; that is a lot better then giving the ICC Cricket people open slather. But the new Australian football deal threatens to do just that.

In the wake of a player-betting scandal a the start of the season, the Australian Football League has agreed to a deal with a host of big online bookmakers that has exactly the same problem; anyone involved in betting that is in the game now, has to do it through illegal agencies. The betting agencies have promised to do 'regular audits' of their accounts.

It all comes back to the 'right to privacy' of the individual versus the right to have honest sporting events for the entertainment of the public. However, in sacrificing one, sports administrators have increased the dangers to the other. It is a conundrum worthy of a government. And given that betting on Australian football takes place overwhelmingly in one jurisdiction, it is possible that this infringement in the public's right to private betting will soon be enforced, ever so arrogantly and hamfistedly, by the power of the Australian government.

We have come a long way from the day when a gentleman's word was his bond.

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He is an admirable character in many ways. He has achieved tremendous success in his professional life; he is by all accounts a devoted husband and I have read that he is good company. It therefore rather a shame even for the most one-eyed follower of Chelsea FC that Jose Mourinho is such a petulant jerk. It takes quite a lot to make me sympathise with Alex Ferguson, the long-standing manager of Manchester United, or for that matter, his highly-paid football stars, but I think the Chelsea boss has achieved that feat.

Class continues to be a sore point in English sport (I am not really qualified to know about how this works in Scotland or Wales). Football has traditionally been thought of as a working-class game although these days the cost of buying a season ticket are beyond the reach of all but the fairly affluent. Cricket is a mixture; rugby union is thought of as middle class, tennis is the same, yachting is for the posh, ditto polo, etc. (I am not quite sure if Formula 1 fits a neat mould any more. It used to be quite posh, since only rich people could afford to drive fast cars). But in football, there is still a strong working class aspect. So I really do not understand why, if the Chelsea manager is going to insult someone, he brings up poverty and humble origins as a reason to abuse someone. In fact, if a person comes from humble origins and becomes an international sports star, like George Best, Tom Finney or Bobby Charlton, that usually counts in their favour.

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As sporting competitions go, it may not be one of the most visually enthralling, but the America's Cup yachting race festival - held this year in Valencia in Spain - has to be up there as one of the most prestigious and oldest. Started in Victorian Britain, the prize to win he massive trophy got its name from the fact that, for more than 150 years or so, America managed to win the series of race matches without a break until, in 1983, the Australian-backed team led by skipper John Bertrand beat a yacht helmed by legendary US race maestro Dennis Conner.

I love the shape and design of 12-metre yachts, and the J-class yachts that were raced in the 1920s and 1930s are arguably some of the most beautiful creations to be struck from the hand of man. I often find that people who do not know much about sailing like to put prints of J-Class vessels on their walls. I think there is something about the aesthetic of such a racing boat that appeals to us in much the same way that a sleek aircraft does. In many respects the design of a modern yacht has a lot in common with the design of aircraft, so perhaps it is not surprising that some of the top aircraft designers, such as Thomas Sopwith, were keen sailors too.

Largely due to the lack of time and of course money, I do not do as much sailing as in my younger days but I hope to get in some time afloat later this year, possibly including the race around the Isle of Wight, part of the Cowes Week yatchting series. I always seem to return from a yachting holiday or race feeling absolutely knackered but also refreshed by getting completely away from the office. You love it or you hate it. For me, sailing is as addictive as nicotine or booze. I intend to take the shore-based Yachtmaster navigation course this winter and eventually go for the full ticket.

Anyway, I will be interested to see if the USA can win back the America's Cup trophy this year. I do not think Britain stands much of a chance, unless some rich-as-Croesus character decides to fund a serious challenge for the trophy.

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Golf combines two favorite American pastimes: taking long walks and hitting things with a stick.

P.J. O'Rourke

I was reminded of this remark while watching the final stages of the The Masters. Britain's Justin Rose is currently just behind the leader. One of these days, I tell myself, I am going to pay a visit to Augusta and soak up the atmosphere.

(15)

When I decided that I would blog the cricket World Cup in detail, I thought I would be reporting on cricket matches. Right now, I should be sitting in a pub watching Australia play South Africa, the biggest game for my team so far. However, I am at my computer writing at length about peculiar historical events. When I started I thought I was writing the following piece for my own blog. However, as it went on, I realised I was writing a background piece to what was being discussed (as much in the comments as the article, and as much by myself as by Brian) in Brian's piece on Bob Woolmer's murder yesterday. The piece starts with some history, but this is crucial to understand the weird and pathological events of the game today, if indeed they can be understood.

For Samizdata readers, there is one point that I sort of assume knowledge of, but which may not be obvious to people who do not follow cricket. I get to it at the end of the post, but I may as well emphasise it now. Cricket has an odd structure, which stems from a century in which it was unable to decide if it were an amateur or professional game. Cricket is today a professional game, but the principal professional teams are national representative teams, which play together all year long. Australians must play for Australia, Indians for India, Englishmen for England. If a player falls out with management, that can end a career, whereas in baseball or soccer he would simply find another team. This also means that if a very good player has the misfortune to come from a small poor country, he will not make nearly as much money as an equally good player from a larger or richer country. It also means that a quite good player who comes from a country with a strong team might not get much of a professional career, whereas the same player would easily do so if he came from a country with a weaker team. It also is partly responsible for the fact that playing strength, expertise in the game, money, and good governance are all too be found in different countries. These imbalances are one thing that makes the game as prone to corruption and criminality as it now seems to be.

In soccer, the World Cup is played between teams of players who spend most of their time (and make most of their income) playing for clubs. In cricket, it is played between the same teams who play together for the rest of the year.

In 1983, India unexpectedly won the World Cup in England. This was a huge event for India, and it led to India and Pakistan asking for and gaining the right to host the 1987 World Cup. This was a big thing for the cricket World Cup, as it had been a largely English event (hosted by England, under English local playing conditions) until that point. The 1987 event ended up on the subcontinent at least partly because the England board had to some extent lost interest, and they were not too bothered by somebody else taking it off their hands. (It was not too long later that the cricketing boards of the world - including England - started arguing bitterly over the right to host it - but interest in it was limited at that point).

India followed up the 1983 win with a win in the seven nation World Championship of cricket, held in Australia in 1985 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the state of Victoria (or some such excuse). At the time, this event was not regarded as much less than a World Cup (which was, as I said, England's event) - the key thing is that all seven test playing countries were participating. That 1983 win had something that the Australian organisers would not have preferred but which must have gone down well on the subcontinent - an India v Pakistan final, won by India.

Thus India in Pakistan went into the 1987 event believing that they were the teams to beat, and that the event represented a coming of age for subcontinental cricket. The two teams did indeed play well, topping the points tables in the two groups, and each playing home semi-finals. The expectation of everyone was that India and Pakistan would meet in the final.

This did not happen. Australia and England each won their respective semi-finals and met in the final, with Australia winning the tournament. (Expectations in Australia were so low that nobody had even purchased the television rights to the tournament until midway through it - and then after Channel Nine did so, it did not bother to show any of the semi-finals live, and then chose to show a movie rather than the second (England) innings of the final. Australians did not get to see Australia's first World Cup victory on live television). Some people in India compared the final to a wedding without the bridge and groom. The event was in truth a huge success, and probably the first major subcontinental media saturating cricket event, of a type we have had many of since. The victory by Australia seemed to many to be a complete fluke at the time, but looking from 2007 it seems almost fated - the first of a great many Australian victories that have filled the last 20 years. I remember reading in an English newspaper a couple of months after the event that gave no credit to Australia whatsoever, blamed the victory mostly on Mike Gatting's reverse sweep, and that it was a game that "England would have won nine times out of ten". You cannot imagine an English commentator saying that about England v Australia matches these days, but that kind of attitude might help to explain why we still enjoy beating England so much. 1987 was also probably the time when the curious inability of home sides to win the World Cup started to become clear. Nobody had expected England to win any of the three previous tournaments in England, and England did actually do well enough, especially in 1979. However, India and Pakistan could not do it in 1987, and then Australia could not even make the semi-finals despite being pre-tournament favourites in 1992.

But as I was saying, 1987 was the first big subcontinental cricketing media event.

The media has loved such events to promote the Indian team, promote the Pakistan team, promote the rivalry, and promote the media and products. In 1996 the tournament was back in India and Pakistan, but much the same thing happened. Unfortunately from the organisers point of view, India and Pakistan ended up meeting in a knock out quarter final. Knock-out quarter finals have not been used in a World Cup since. This is probably not a coincidence. India won this, but were beaten by Sri Lanka in a semi-final and went on to win the tournament. That rather romantic result made the tournament, but it was a more bad-tempered event than 1987, the low point being India defaulting the semi-final to Sri Lanka after a crowd riot when it became obvious Sri Lanka were going to win the match.

The two World Cups since then have been played in England and South Africa, and although the Indian money and sponsorship was present in both cases, it did not overwhelm the events. This was partly due to the cultures of the host countries, and partly due to the dominance of countries other than India and Pakistan. Pakistan made the final in England in 1999, but were overwhelmed by Australia in the final. That final was notable for two titanic struggles between Australia and South Africa in the Super Six round and the semi-final. In 2003 in South Africa India made the final and generally played well, but that tournament was notable for the truly awe inspiring dominance of Australia. No other side was ever in the hunt. There were stirrings of controversy and suspicion in those tournaments when occasional upsets occurred. However, in the cricketing world at large, there were unending one day internationals involving India and Pakistan (many played in the United Arab Emirates, which was apparently a hotbed of bookmaking and corruption) more and more Indian television money, Indian sponsorship, and at times dubious results and match fixing scandals. (The most publicised of these were the ones in which players and officials from countries other than India and Pakistan became implicated. The most notorious of these occurred in 2000, when South African captain Hansie Cronje was had a telephone conversation recorded in which he was talking to an Indian bookmaker and agreeing to fix matches. In the subsequent scandal, Cronje was given immunity from prosecution in return for testimony in which he told all. Cronje repeatedly changed his story, appearing to be trying to tell as little as he could get away with and then being found out repeatedly. Eventually a web of match fixing appeared, and it became clear that Cronje had hundreds of undisclosed bank accounts throughout the world. Despite Cronje's inconsistency, he kept his immunity and after getting a life ban from international cricket that he bizarrely but unsuccessfully contested in court he died mysteriously in a plane crash in South Africa in 2002).

This year's World Cup was given to the West Indies as a compromise at the end of a very bitter struggle for the rights to host the 1996 World Cup that occurred in around 1993. England considered that the 1996 tournament was "their turn", and India and Pakistan wanted to host the tournament for financial reasons. After a heated and apparently very bitter meeting, the tournament was given to the subcontinentals, with an agreement that a "rotation" policy would be instituted going forwards, with the following tournaments given to England, South Africa, the West Indies, Australia, and then the subcontinent one more (it was a bit vague after that). The Indians last year suggested that given the bulk of money in cricket now comes from India, they should not have to wait until 2016 to next host the tournament and should host every third tournament in future. The Australian board (presumably upon being offered a large sum of money) made way, and the 2012 tournament was given to India and Pakistan with the 2016 tournament going to Australia. There will be a fight over the right to host the 2020 tournament between England and South Africa, as the Indians are going to clearly want 2024 and money will likely speak, all assuming that international cricket does not implode by then.

Anyway, as a consequence of that deal of more than a decade ago, this present tournament is being held in the poor countries of the English speaking West Indies. It is clear now that Indian money and influence has dominated the planning and organisation of this tournament. As an example, the four major sponsors whose names appear on the grounds at every game are international companies, but with an Indian twist. We have "Hutch" - the Indian mobile phone company that has just been sold by Hong Kong Conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa to Vodafone. Hutchison runs mobile phone networks in lots of other countries as well as India, but under the brand "Three". It is their Indian business that is being promoted. (The business is going to be re-branded as "Vodafone" shortly. If that had happened first, an international business might have been able to get some value out of the sponsorship. Then we have "Hero Honda". This is another global company - the Japanese car company. But it is not just "Honda", it is the Indian subsidiary specifically. We have "Pepsi", obviously a global brand, but one with a long history of sponsoring Indian cricket. India, not coincidentally is a market where Pepsi does far better in its global war with Coke than it does in most places. And we have "LG", the Korean chaebol and the closest to a generally internationally aimed sponsorship of the four. But it is a chaebol very much aiming its sales at mid income markets like India. If Samsung were to advertise, that would not necessarily be aimed at India, as Samsung sees itself as much more a first world company. LG suits the Indian market.

This year's World Cup was, as I said, organised for the benefit of the subcontinental and particularly Indian markets far more than any in some time. And from that perspective something went terribly wrong. It was supposed to be easy for the best eight teams including India and Pakistan to go through to the Super Eight stage of the tournament, which is to take up four weeks of the six and a half week schedule. However, four days into the tournament Pakistan managed to be eliminated, and India managed to lose unexpectedly, putting their place in the Super Eight in jeopardy. Pakistan's coach Bob Wollmer was then murdered, with ramifications we are still trying to figure out. India then had a struggle to make Super Eight, needing to win against both Bermuda and Sri Lanka. They beat Bermuda easily enough, but yesterday lost badly to Sri Lanka, almost certainly ensuring that India will not progress further in the tournament. (To do so, Bermuda will have to beat Bangladesh tomorrow, which is inconceivable, not withstanding the fact that so far this is a tournament in which six inconceivable things seem to be regularly happening before breakfast.

A crucial break has opened up in international cricket in recent years. All the money has been generated in India, but the Indian team and its oldest rivals have simply not been as good as teams from other parts of the world. Teams from other parts of the world (most notably Australia) have been much better. In most professional sports, the market would correct this, and in some ways it has in cricket too. (The best side in the world is Australia. Australia and India play one another a lot, and the Australians are paid a great deal to do this. Australians are also paid a lot of money to be sponsored and to make advertisements by Indian companies). However, cricket's curious structure in which players play for national representative teams that play together for most of the year, and players are unable to transfer between teams has prevented this happening to an extent that would probably be healthy. (The subcontinental teams have of course been able to hire Australian and English/South African coaches in an attempt to improve their playing strength. Australian Dav Whatmore led Sri Lanka to the World Cup in 1996, and this has led to Pakistan and India to also import coaches. (Whatmore now coaches Bangladesh, whose victory of India last week completely threw a spanner in the works). After Bob Woolmer's murder, one does tend to think that they may difficulty hiring more, however. In particular, if I were Indian's Australian coach Greg Chappell, I would be getting on a plane back to Brisbane, and fast.

This strange structure has encouraged corruption, and the nature or the countries involved (India and Pakistan) has fed this hugely. As it happens, the early elimination of the teams representing and of most interest to the nation for whose benefit the tournament is essentially being held is having and will have huge financial ramifications, for sponsors, for television companies, and for bookmakers and gangsters, and for the International Cricket Council. One man has been murdered, but I think we have only seen the beginning of the fallout. The losers go up to some of the richest men in the world, but they are not really the problem. Rupert Murdoch can afford to shrug his shoulders. People with financial connections to the Bombay and Karachi underworlds cannot do so so easily. The question we are waiting for the answer to is just who, precisely, fits into this category of people, and how many of them are players, coaches, and administrators of the game of cricket.

Cross-posted from Michael Jennings

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What I only guessed to be a possibility on Tuesday night, and repeated as a guess here on Wednesday, has now been officially confirmed:

Jamaican police today confirmed that British-born Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer was murdered.

Next question, as Michael Jennings commented here yesterday, and which he also copied-and-pasted to his own blog: How about Hansie Cronje? Just to remind you of what Michael said:

I have always been very suspicious about the death of former South African captain Hansie Cronje in a plane crash in 2003. When someone as mixed up with gangsters as Cronje dies mysteriously, one tends to think the worst. I wouldn't have thought that Woolmer was mixed up with gangsters. However, nobody would have believed it of Cronje (who had a reputation for being honest, upstanding, and God-fearing) until he was caught red handed. Secondly, perhaps the situation is that to enter the Pakistan dressing room is to be mixed up with gangsters.

I don't think that Woolmer was mixed up with gangsters if by that is meant that he was personally involved in match fixing. More probable is that he was about to publish in a book what he had merely observed. But, who knows?

If this was a Poirot murder mystery on TV, the real killer of Woolmer would turn out to be someone entirely unconnected with cricket or with cricket betting, who killed him or who had him killed for entirely different and perhaps purely personal reasons.

But this is not Poirot on TV. This is for real, difficult though many are now finding all this to believe. Today, the entire Pakistan team was questioned and finger-printed by the Jamaican Police.

International cricket matches involving Pakistan now become more than somewhat ridiculous, and are likely to remain so for quite some time, even supposing that cricket's administrators permit them to continue. It makes no sense at the moment to shut down the entire Cricket World Cup. What purpose would that serve? (At least Pakistan are now out of it.) Nevertheless, Ireland's 'surprise' win against Pakistan on St Patrick's day now looks more like a gift than an achievement.

England are looking well below what it would take to get very far in this competition, even if they do get past lowly Kenya tomorrow. Yesterday New Zealand thrashed Canada, and Holland were far too good for fellow minnows Scotland. Commentators will want to avoid words like "murdered" when describing such games.

(11)

Yesterday, I came across this story, about the late and much lamented former England international cricketer and cricket coach for Pakistan, Bob Woolmer:

Speculations are rife about foul play being involved in Pakistan coach Bob Woolmers death. Reports indicate that some current senior Pakistan team members might have fixed both matches, against West Indies and Ireland.

It is being debated in cricketing circles that he could have been killed to cover up match-fixing by the Pakistani team. The Pakistan team would not be allowed to fly back home till the investigations are over.

And, although I never blogged about this yesterday, I did talk about this yesterday, while surrounding by Iain Dale who at least pretended to be interested, and by three young Conservative ladies who almost went to sleep with excitement. This was on DoughtyStreetTV last night, by way of mere introduction to saying how very much I had enjoyed reading this short but sweet recollection by Peter Briffa, about how Woolmer was one of his teachers at prep school. We have not, I said, heard the last of this story. I also said there would be a tax cut, although I cannot recall if I actually said it might be income tax. So, I had a pretty good night of it.

Because, the Woolmer story has now erupted from the recesses of the internet and gone global:

NEW DELHI: Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer, found dead a day after Pakistan's shock defeat at the hands of Ireland, was murdered, police have confirmed. Although the Pakistan Cricket Board has been claiming that the autopsy conducted on Woolmer was inconclusive, sources, according to Times Now, have confirmed that investigators have indeed said the coach was murdered.

In fact, the Jamaican Police is said to be already ascertaining the whereabouts of some of the Pakistan players at the time the murder could have taken place. Sources confirmed to Times Now that further questioning of Pakistan players is on the cards as well.

The confirmation comes soon after allegations by former Pakistan pacer Sarfaraz [wrong spelling – should be "Sarfraz"] Nawaz that Woolmer was murdered by the betting syndicate. The outspoken Nawaz has said that almost everybody in control of the game is involved in betting and Woolmer was perhaps about to reveal all in a book.

Since they spell Sarfraz Nawaz wrongly, I cannot help wondering if they have any other of their facts wrong, such as little details like: "police have confirmed".

For, on the other hand, there is this, from Woolmer's wife:

"No I don't see any conspiracy in his death. I am aware that his death is being viewed as a suspicious death. He had nothing to do with the match fixing controversy and any such person being involved is highly unlikely. We never got any threats as far as I know."

I await developments with extreme interest. Not least because, whatever the truth of these now very noisy rumours, they do rather put this ruckus in a somewhat different light, do they not?

As for the mere cricket, try reading this.

UPDATE: The BBC now confirms that Woolmer's death is being treated as "suspicious".

(1)

Freddie could have drowned out there

An anonymous source at the Rex St Lucian hotel in St Lucia, discussing the fact that England's cricket vice-captain Andrew Flintoff celebrated England's stunning first up World Cup loss to New Zealand (in which Flintoff was out first ball) by having an eight hour bender, commandeering and then capisizing a small boat and having to be rescued at sea at 4am.

Regardless of the England heroics the World Cup has turned out to be a fascinating event so far, with Bangladesh possibly announcing their coming of age in international cricket with a stunning victory over India, and Ireland celebrating St Patrick's Day by knocking former champions Pakistan out of the tournament with a rather mind-boggling win. Personally I think another upset is on the cards today. England are capable of beating Canada.

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I am watching a F1 motor-racing guy drive a racing car with a map of the Earth on it. It is a Honda and apparently the idea is to break with the usual sponsorship of tobacco firms etc and instead "raise awareness about ecological issues", according to the television commentator. So let me get this right: a F1 car that does more than 200mph and uses a fair amount of petrol - that evil greenhouse effect stuff - is attempting to "raise awareness of ecologicial issues". Think of how much Co2 is pumped out by all these F1 racing teams from Ferrari, Benetton, McLaren, etc. Think of how much of the stuff is pumped out transporting the drivers, mechanics, press flacks and of course the crowds to places like Melbourne or Monaco. The idea that motorsport has anything to do with saving the planet from doom is preposterous. Has this most red-blooded of sports, once famed for dudes like Ascari, James Hunt or Fangio, become as pussified and guilt-ridden as everything else? F1 cars are supposed to be in bright colours, with emblems of cigarettes and naked women on them, like old WW2 American military aircraft. It is all part of the essential naughtiness involved in driving a car very fast round a track, which if you think about it, is one of the more pointless ways to spend an afternoon, and all the more wonderful for it.

You have to hand it to these guys in the Honda racing team. The Japanese are unfairly accused of not having much sense of humour, but this is one of the best jokes I have seen for a while. Keep it going guys.

(7)

The ninth cricket World Cup commenced today, As I write this, the West Indies are playing Pakistan in Jamaica. Sixteen teams will play a total of 51 games between now and the final in Barbados on April 28. My recently neglected personal blog shall be turning into World Cup Central for the next seven week. I shall be blogging every match, and fellow Samizdatistas Scott Wickstein, Brian Micklethwait, Philip Chaston and Jonathan Pearce shall be joining me as guest bloggers for the duration of the tournament. As well as match commentary there shall be analysis of the teams, the format, the points system, the politics of the International Cricket Council, the cricketing cultures of the participating nations, and whatever else comes to mind. I did this also four years ago: people who are interested might want to look here (and scroll down). However, wheras four years ago there was a lot else on the blog as well, this time it is going to be mostly or entirely cricket.

However, a brief primer for the tournament.

• The World Cup is a one day cricket tournament. This form of the game was invented in the mid 1960s in England, and has been played internationally since 1971. The traditional form of the game is played over five days. Whereas in test cricket each team bats twice and there is no limit as to how long each can bat for (other than the time limit of the game), in one day cricket each team is allowed to bat for a maximum of 50 overs (300 balls) and is only allowed to bat once. This means that the game takes a total of seven hours playing time. One day games often start mid afternoon and are played (under lights) until about 10pm. Players in one day matches wear coloured uniforms and play with a whilte ball. Traditional test cricket is played with both teams wearing white and with a red ball. The more serious a cricket fan, the more he is likely to prefer traditional five day test cricket to one day cricket, particularly if he is Australian or English. Australians would probably rather win the Ashes than win the World Cup. (Australians certainly hate losing the Asehs more than losing the World Cup). On the other hand, if India win it will will be a huge event for more than a billion people. If India make the final, the entire Bollywood entertainment industry will decamp to Barbados in the hope that some of the glamour of the victory will rub of on them if India win the tournament. (This happened when India made the final in Johannesburg four years ago, but alas for them, India did not win).

• One day cricket in recent times has been dominated by batsmen, with scores of 300 or even 400 runs becoming more and more frequent. The conditions in the West Indies should suit the bowlers more than has recently been the case in Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa. This means the strong batting sides (Australia, South Africa, India) make find themselves brought back to the pack by sides with canny bowling and clever tactics. This may favour sides such as New Zealand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and perhaps the West Indian hosts, none of who would not be favoured if the tournament was in South Africa. Conditions at times will also favour spin bowlers, which will make the tournament interesting, and may allow sides such as England and Sri Lanka to surprise a few of their opponents.

• There are 16 teams playing in this year's tournament: West Indies; Pakistan; Australia; Sri Lanka; South Africa; England; New Zealand; India; Scotland; Canada; Kenya; Bermuda; Ireland; Zimbabwe; Netherlands; and Bangladesh. Only the first eight of these teams have an chance of winning the tournament. It is unimaginable that any of the other eight could win it. The tournament organisers know this, which is why the second round consists of eight teams and the first stage is relatively short. It is extremely unlikely that any of the second eight teams will make the second round. It is quite unlikely that any of the second eight teams will win a game against any of the first eight, although such events have occurred in previous tournaments. Previous World Cups have had formats in which the lesser nations have stayed in the tournament longer, and have had many one sided mismatches. However, there is very little between the eight first named sides. It would not be a huge surprise if any of the eight won the tournament. Going into the tournament, the World Cup seems one of the most open on record. This is completely unlike the last tournament, where Australia were obviously the best side from day one. (Their performance in winning eleven games straight in that tournament was awe inspiring, but it did not make for an exciting tournament

• At seven weeks and 51 games, the tournament seems endless. The two finalists will each play a total of eleven games. The reason for this is that television rights for the World Cup is the major source of income for the International Cricket Council, the sport's governing body. The vast majoirty of other cricketing events make money for the sides participating and in particular the side that hosts them. When the ICC is making the money, they milk it for all it is worth.

• The World Cup has been played eight times before. Australia have won it three times (1987, 1999, and 2003), the West Indies twice (1975 and 1979), India (1983), Pakistan (1992) and Sri Lanka (1996) once each. The tournament has been hosted by England four times (1975, 1979, 1983, 1999), South Africa once (2003), India once (1987, with some games in Pakistan), Pakistan once (1996, with some games in India and Sri Lanka), and Australia once (with some games in New Zealand). No side has ever one the tournament at home, unless you count Sri Lanka in 1996. (They played all their important games away from home, so I personally do not). The tournament is being played in the West Indies for the first time.

• For team by team analysis, you have two choices. Either look below the fold, or head over to my blog. You will find the same in either case.
  

• The West Indies are hosts of the tournament. The English speaking countries of the Carribean have fielded a single cricket team for about 80 years. This team slowly rose through the ranks of cricketing nations for its first decades of existence, and was extremely competitive from around 1960. In the mid 1970s it rose still further, and through having great fast bowlers and spectacular batsmen it dominated international cricket until the early 1990s. Since then it has suffered many defeats, but the team still contains some very impressive players. In full cry, present West Indian captain Brian Lara is one of the most awe inspiring players in world cricket. However, there are questions about his and the team's attitude. One sometimes thinks the players would rather visit nightclubs than cricket grounds. The West Indies will probably flame out at some point, but they may well play some great cricket before doing so. If they make the later stages of the tournament, this may concentrate their minds well enough to do well in those later stages.

• Australia are the defending champions, and are attempting to win the tournament for the third time in succession and the fourth time in total. Australia have lost a number of good players since the last World Cup, and have several injuries to key players. The lost of fast bowler Brett Lee is a big blow. Andrew Symonds and Matthew Hayden are important players, but will be back hopefully fit in time for the later stages of the tournament. Australia's batting is strong regardless of this, with Adam Gilchrist and Hayden destructive at the top of the order, Ricky Ponting in the middle order, and Sydmonds and Michael Hussey as finishers. However the bowling looks weak. Glenn McGrath (playing in his last tournament) was a great player but is not any more. Stuart Clark is a fine test bowler, but is untested in one day internationals. Andrew Symonds is unlikely to bowl much due to his injury. Brad Hogg is an effective spinner (and played a big role four years ago) but is curiously out of favour with the selectors and is low on confidence. Australia have lost their best finishing bowler in Lee. In truth though, Australia's middle over bowlers lost the plot about a year ago. Sides with decent batting can score an outrageous number of runs between the 20 and 45 over marks when Australia are batting. This has been obvious for at least a year, but team management has carried on as if there is no problem. Australia have been thoroughly found out in recent games, and go into the tournament having lost five games straight. They are very vulnerable to smart opposition who can outthink them and take advantage of the conditions. Although Australia are still favourites with bookmakers (although their odds have lengthened considerably over the last couple of months) I do not expect Australia to make the semi-finals. I hope I am wrong, but I do not really believe I am. It is almost beyond description how much I wish Shane Warne were playing.

• South Africa are second favourites with bookmakers, and have by far the best form of any team coming into the tournament, having destroyed Pakistan and India at home in their most recent series. Their batting side is very impressive, with players like Jacques Kallis, Graeme Smith, and Herschelle Gibbs having taken them to very large scores in recent games. Their bowling is good, but relatively unimaginative, being based around pace. This may not suit them in the West Indies. Their captain Graeme Smith is rather unimaginative and not a greet tactician. If there is a side that is going to power through the tournament and win it easily, the the South Africans are it. However, they stand to be surprised by a side that out thinks them at some point. If this happens prior to the semi-finals, it does not matter, as they should make the semi-finals easily enough with their present game. If it happens in the semi-final or final, they lose. History does not help. They have often played well at early stages of previous tournaments, but have then been out thought, out sledged, and overwhelmed by the occasion later on. And I am not sure what to make of their ability to be eliminated from previous world cups in truly bizarre circumstances, other than to see it at a tremendous source of amusement. They cannot possibly beat the previous world cup, in which they were eliminated after a rain shortened game was tied on the Duckworth-Lewis rule after the captain got his calculations wrong. Or can they?

• New Zealand are a side with a history of making the most of rather limited resources. Cricket is a very poor relation to rugby in New Zealand, which is a small country. None the less, its cricket team has a history of being very well captained and coached. In World Cups it has often played very well early in the tournament, but upon reaching the semi-finals the lack of depth and the lack of really top notch players has showed. The present side fits this description well Captain Stephen Fleming is the best captain in world cricket (and a good batsman). All rounder Jacop Oram has been playing superbly recently, and the middle and lower order have been batting with a wonderful never say die attitude. (New Zealand come into the tournament having beaten Australia 3-0 at home). Shane Bond is one of the great tragedies of modern cricket: a wonderful, technically correct seam bowler who would be one of the best bowlers in the world if injuries had not shortened his career. The conditions in the West Indies will suit him, and he will once or twice take five wickets and win a game for New Zealand. However, he is only allowed to bowl ten overs and the rest of New Zealand's bowling may not be good enough to finish the job. The Australia v New Zealand game from four years ago probably summarises the problem. Bond took 6/23 and reduced Australia to 7/84, but he was not allowed to bowl any more overs and Australia recovered to 208 and won the game easily. That kind of thing may happen again. New Zealand will make the semi-finals, but probably don't quite have the class to win the tournament.

• Sri Lanka revolutionised one day cricket with their performance in winning the 1996 World Cup, in which the quality of their batting and their strategy of attacking from the first ball when fielding restrictions in place surprised much of the rest of the cricketing world. (It shouldn't have, because they had been playing the strategy effectively for at least six months going into the tournament). It also marked their transition from the easybeats of world cricket to a powerful, dangerous side. Since then they have beaten and embarassed a lot of other teams, have annoyed and frustrated a lot of opposing players with their ruthless and forceful attitude to the game, and have caused considerable controversy by selecting spin bowler Muttiah Muralithuran, whose bowling action is considered by many to be of questionable legality. Still. they are a smart and canny side who can exploit difficult batting conditions. Whatever the merits of his action, Muralithuran will be a dangerous bowler in these conditions. Jayasuriya is back in the side for one final swing at the World Cup. There is plenty of batting talent in the side such as captain Mahela Jayawardene, Marvan Atapattu, and Kumar Sangakkara. Sri Lanka are going to be very dangerous indeed in this tournament. I wouldn't be very surprised if they won it.

• Not much can be said about Pakistan other than that they are Pakistan. They produce a large number of greatly talented and exciting players. However, the players seldom appear united on the field. They have an endless series of match fixing scandals, drug scandals, dressing room rebellions, weird political intrigues involving corrupt government ministers, and goodness knows what. Going into the world cup, the most recent problem is a drug scandal (steroids). Pakistan also lack the bowling strength of a few years back. There is nobody of the talent of Wasim Akram or Waqar Younis. The most exciting bowler than do have is Shoaib Akhtar, who was involved in the doping scandal, was "acquitted" and is now out "injured". In their most recent series Pakistan were horribly beaten by South Africa. The only captain who could ever make Pakistan play as something resembling a united team was Imran Khan, who took them to World Cup glory in 1992. Many of us have fond memories of a very young Inzamam al Haq playing spectacular shots under the MCG lights in that tournament. Inzamam is today captain of Pakistan, and in the years since has been consistently one of the world's finest batsmen. However I cannot sensibly see Pakistan overcoming their problems to get far in this tournament. On the other hand, sense and the Pakistan cricket team seldom seem to go together.

• India are the great enigma of world cricket. They won the World cup completely unexpectedly in 1983, when unbackable favourites the West Indies failed in the final . That inspired a huge party in India in response, but that would be nothing compared to what would happen if they did it in these days in which modern media and economic growth has drenched India in cricket to an extent that is hard to describe. India have great batsmen in Sachin Tendulkar, captain Rahul Dravid, Virender Sehwag, and fine spin bowlers in Harbhajan Singh. Their seam bowling is perhaps a little weaker and I am not sure they are a great tactical side, but if everything comes off they are likely to be extraordinarily likely to beat. They have a frustrating inconsistency about them, however. Some days (particularly in test series against Australia) they can be brilliant. In others deeply disappointing. Their form is mixed going into the tournament: they have recently beaten South Africa and the West Indies, but were badly beaten by South Africa over Christmas. That was in very different conditions though. I think if India get momentum going, they will be hard to stop. but it is very questionable whether they will get momentum going.

• And last, England. England are widely being predicted as being a dark horse in the series. after playing utterly terribly for most of the Australian summer, England turned around at the last possible moment in the Commonwealth Bank series, winning four games straight to take the tournament. The return of captain Michael Vaughan appears to make a huge difference to England. With him they believe in themselves. Without him they do not. Generally, though, England are well led, fit, and well coached. They played outstandingly to win the Ashes about 18 months ago.

  That is the rub, however. Other than the last four matches, England's good performances in recent years have come in test cricket. In one day cricket, they have generally been terrible. I do not think they have enough tactics, enough game planning, and enough skill in one day games to win the tournament. Perhaps they will make the semi-finals. I think though that strategically better teams will come through in the end.

  On the other hand, Vaughan is a very good captain. And the conditions will suit Monty Panesar. So who knows?
  

That is team by team analysis? Who do I think will win. Okay. Predictions.

Semi-finalists: South Africa, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, and India.
Finalists: South Africa and India
Champions: South Africa

However, the tourament is the most open I can remember. In the last five minutes I have changed the side I have predicted to win from Sri Lanka to India to South Africa. I really have no idea.

(2)

Watching cricket is one of the best ways of avoiding working known to man

- Someone from the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) is worried about the impact the Cricket World Cup will have on the economy.

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As regulars of this site will know, even the most ardent sports fans on this blog - Brian Micklethwait, Michael Jennings and yours truly - despise the Olympic Games. Or, more exactly, we despise how the Games in the UK are funded out of taxes, and despise the crooks, cretins and gullible fools who imagine that the benighted taxpayers of Britain are making some sort of "investment" by paying for the Games. The other evening, flicking through the channels, I saw Sebastian Coe, now a peer and a former Tory MP, go on about what a smashing "investment" the Games respresented, as if he was talking about a punt on the Nasdaq or a purchase of BMW bonds. That an alleged Tory should use the word "investment" to talk about something that could not stand up on commercial grounds and requires the looting powers of the state to function is depressing evidence of the calibre of Tories today. For all their faults, former Chancellors Nigel Lawson, Geoffrey Howe or even Norman Lamont never insulted our intelligence by abusing the English language in this way.

It is possible that the Conservatives have made the crude calculation that the blasted Games, which surge in cost all the time, are going to happen anyway, will be an expensive mess, and the best thing to do is to make supportive noises, not appear to be grouchy, and pin any blame for cockups on the Labour government. From a narrow tactical angle, this is possibly sensible. There are some battles not worth fighting; while the cost of the Games could run above 10 billion pounds, the overalll size of UK public spending is several multiples of that and the Tories or any decent opposition must focus its attention on that. Although a huge figure, the cost of the Games represents a rounding error compared to the total public spending burden. Even so, it would be good to see the Tories flaying the government over the fiasco that this event threatens to become. Over at the Social Affairs Unit blog, the writer Jeremy Black makes some good points on what this government's opponents should be doing.

Oh well, at least writing about this takes my mind off Ipswich Town FC's miserable footballing year and England's loss of the Ashes. Sigh.

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There is a pull-out supplement in the latest Spectator, entitled "The Connoisseur's Guide to the Cricket World Cup 2007". Peter Oborne is very gung-ho about cricket just now (no link because the bit I am about to quote is stuck behind a registration wall – I read it on paper):

Never have there been so many outstanding international teams. Go back to the previous 'golden age' before the first world war and there were just three Test-playing nations: England, Australia and South Africa.

So far so routine, this being from a piece by Oborne entitled "A new golden age", which he does explain. Basically, not only are there more good national teams now, and more excellent players, but they also play cricket that is entertaining to watch, unlike what was played a generation ago. But then comes this kicker, and in brackets if you please:

(Actually there should have been four: until 1914 the United States was well capable of competing at the highest level, and a cricket tour of the United States formed the background to Psmith Journalist, one of P. G. Wodehouse's best novels. Unfortunately, the Imperial Cricket Conference, which governed international cricket, excluded America because it was not part of the British empire, so it went off and played baseball instead. This snub to the US at such a promising stage of its cricketing development, is one of the tragedies of history.)

I did not know that (more about this sad story here). I am not used to feeling spasms of hatred toward those who presided over the British Empire, although I often learn about things that make others understandably angry about these people. But I did when I read that. We have talked here before about cricket in the USA, but I do not recall this particular circumstance being mentioned by anyone. Apologies if someone did and I missed it. For while I would not put this particular tragedy of history down there with the Slave Trade and the Holocaust and the depredations of King Leopold, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the rest of them, this certainly does seem like a definite pity to me.

Talking of cricket, and what with cricket's World Cup fast approaching, Samizdata's travel correspondent Michael Jennings has been, well, talking of cricket. He has done a podcast with Patrick Crozier, about Australian sport in general, and Australian cricket in particular, what with cricket being the biggest sport in Australia. Did you know that Aussie pace ace Brett Lee (who will sadly be missing the World Cup because of injury) does commercials on Indian telly, and has had a pop hit in India? You do now.

And for more about how sport and politics intersect, do not miss this sports report by Guido Fawkes.

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We are coming into the final stretch of the college basketball season and it seems a good time to make the following observation.

The only category of education that presently has its accomplishments tested on a competitive basis (that being sports) is also the only category of education that is motivating and developing disadvantaged students to achieve their highest personal potential at what they are being taught.

Does it surprise anyone that the only part of education where student achievement can not be rigged (better/best football team, etc.) is also the only part of education that is producing marketable graduates from the disadvantaged communities? Or that it accomplishes this with less need for quotas and reduced expectations than any other category of education? In many cases these kids are able to move straight into national and international professional careers straight from high school. And when they do attend college, the academic education they receive is a by-product of their athletic educations.

And is it any surprise that a very disproportionate share of disadvantaged students gravitate to the only service of the education industry that is intractably merit judged and race indifferent at every single level of education from Pee Wee league to NCAA?

What better model could we ask for when we look to improve the motivation and education of disadvantaged students in other categories of learning?

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"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard for all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting."

From Orwell's collected essays, which should be on everyone's bookshelf.

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It is good that Perry has supplied us Samizdatistas with a category called How very odd! to describe our oddest postings, because how else would you describe the calculation that England are now, still, the second best test match cricket side in the world?

On the other hand, England really are that bad at one day cricket.

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I know a lot of Samizdata contributors and readers are cricket buffs. So, what do you all think about the Twenty20 limited overs format now that it has had some more exposure since last being discussed here?

(13)

The following item is for sale. One bucket of whitewash. This has recently been obtained by the English cricket team at a knockdown price during their tour of Australia.

The English cricket team wishes to sell this precious prize of English achievement in auction as quickly as possible. However, only purchasers of a more unpopular standing may need apply. They are therefore awaiting bids for this most useful of items.

Please note: only politicians or journalists may apply.

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And a "Long Tail" discussion is about the England cricket team presumably.

- Michael Jennings commenting on this at my blog this morning. Last night, England's 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 managed a total of four runs between them.

(6)

Buskashi is an Afghani game, akin to polo, that involves riding, sticks and the carcass of a goat. The carcass is soaked in cold water for twenty-four hours, so that it does not disintegrate, and then a large pack of horsemen compete to win the boz (renamed carcass) and the horsemen (chopendoz) compete to grab the carcass and throw it in a circle (the hallal).

This Afghani sport will not win any votes from animal lovers, but their fierce competitiveness has now blooded another arena: cricket. Refugees in Pakistan whiled away the long hours by learning to love cricket and have now brought the sport back to Afghanistan. Each province has a team and there are strong competitions to determine the best teams.

We know that the best team is not the Royal Marines, who emulated our Ashes tour:

ENGLAND'S cricket shame plunged new depths after a team of Royal Marines were hammered - by the Afghan National Army.

The crack soldiers crashed to a resounding eight wicket defeat after being bowled out for just 56 in 14 overs without one playing reaching double figures.

Afghans have only been playing the game since about 1992 but that did not stop the novice opponents knocking off the runs inside 12 overs

Are we seeing the birth of a new Test playing nation? I can think of no greater accolade to symbolise the departure of a country from misery and despair. We should be glad that the military skills of the Royal Marines far outweigh their cricketing skills.

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I oppose arts subsidies not only because arts subsidies are thieving from people who do not want art thank you very much, although it is that of course. I also oppose arts subsidies because I really like art and I think arts subsidies damage art, by separating artists from audiences and by separating nob audiences from yob audiences, the aristocracy from the groundlings. With arts subsidies, you get High Art in one tent - precious, clever, obscure, self-regarding and pretentious, and expensive; and Low Art, brain-dead trash, in the other bigger tent. Without arts subsidies, they all go into the same tent and you get, well: Shakespeare basically. Shakespeare, nineteenth century classical music, the great nineteenth century novelists, twentieth century cinema (before that too got to subsidised into Posh and Trash), twentieth century pop music, all that is artistically vibrant, fun and profound.

So, arts subsidies are really bad, both morally and artistically. And the good news is that, at any rate here in Britain, they are about to be "cut", which is a cultural word meaning "not increased very much". And who or what do we have to thank for this semi-excellent circumstance? Why, the Olympic Games:

The Treasury has warned of a tough spending round and the Culture Department has let it be known that there will be no extra money for the arts so long as the country is paying for the Olympics, a bill we will be paying well beyond 2012.

This means, at the very best, seven lean years of standstill subsidy for the arts and, at the worst, selective cuts that will drive some ensembles out of existence.

This is especially good news when you bear in mind that "so long as the country is paying for the Olympics" and "well beyond 2012" actually mean "for ever".

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It was a sensational win by a great team

- Shane Warne, discussing the Australian cricket team's stunning final day comeback to win the second Ashes test and take a 2-0 lead in the series. On the final day, Australia's two old and tired bowlers, Glenn McGrath and Warne himself, took a total of 42 overs, 18 maidens, 64 runs, 6 wickets, and those numbers are (in case you are wondering what on earth they signify) extremely good .

(1)

The trick with sport is to enjoy it when it goes well, and when it goes badly, then it is only a game.

So, let me and all English cricket fans enjoy this, while it lasts:

The big surprise there is Paul Collingwood. Collingwood (or "Coll'wood" as Ceefax calls him) is one of those cricketers who is distinguished not so much by his skill as by his determination. He is skilled, of course he is. But the mental application to make the most of his skill is what made the England selectors back him to come good as an international cricketer. Until he made that score, the more casual observer of the game just did not think him capable of such a thing. Yet Collingwood, amazingly, is now the first Englishman to have made a test match double century in Australia since Walter Hammond did it in 1936. He and Pietersen put on 310 for the fourth wicket, their previous stand having been the only England bright spot in the first game.

Suddenly, Australia's bowlers looked tired and old. The combined bowling analysis of McGrath and Warne for the last two days, neither of whom now seem to be fully fit, reads as follow: 83 overs 14 maidens 274 runs 1 wicket. Those two have been the backbone of the Australian bowling for the last decade, and those numbers are (in case you are wondering what on earth they signify) not good.

At midnight, or whenever it is, we will all probably be coming gently but firmly down to earth, when the Aussie batters begin to grind out a similar score, on a pitch which is apparently giving little help to bowlers.

But now there is at least hope for England. After the thrashing they got in the first game, a couple of days like the last two that England have had does wonders for team morale, and must also have somewhat deflated the Aussies. What if England's bowlers also do better than in the previous game, and the Aussie batters do worse, when play resumes in a few hours?

Maybe this Ashes series will turn out as exciting and closely fought as the previous one, and for as long as that lasts, I can enjoy it. Yes, it is all only a game. But it is better not to have to be telling oneself this all the time, as was so very necessary throughout the previous game.

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The Ashes are about to start. God it is wonderful.

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The UK Olympic Games of 2012 are shaping up nicely to be the expensive, possibly corrupt affair that many of us crusty cynics claimed it would be over a year ago. There is only the grimmest of satisfaction to be gained from having been proved so emphatically correct. Given the history of publicly-financed construction projects in recent years, or even projects in which public finance is only a part, the predictions should not have been difficult (think of the Scottish Parliament, or Wembley Stadium, or the Channel Tunnel, to take just three).

The likely bill - to the taxpayer - of these Games is likely to be far higher than originally projected. It is almost certain that this fact was known to British politicians and sports-establishment types who lobbied to hold the Games in Britain over a year ago. If a company had bid for a contract with the same degree of financial acumen, probity and sense as the idiots in the UK public sector, rather long gaol terms, fines or hefty compensation packages might now be the order of the day.

We are remembering the late, very great Milton Friedman a lot at the moment, digesting his contributions to the fields of technical economics, monetary theory, politics, education and much else. But I think that his often disarmingly simple statements about the role of the state and the dangers of government will endure the longest, if only because they carry truths from the start of human history:

There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you're doing, and you try to get the most for your money.

Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I'm not so careful about the content of the present, but I'm very careful about the cost.

Then, I can spend somebody else's money on myself. And if I spend somebody else's money on myself, then I'm sure going to have a good lunch!

Finally, I can spend somebody else?s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I?m not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get. And that's government. And that's close to 40% of our national income.

I think the Olympic Games falls into the final category. I do agree with Stephen Pollard on the possibly sensible idea of cancelling the Games, even at this stage. The lead article in the Times (UK), by contrast, is remarkable for its breezy indifference to the cost of the Games and the fact that the money for it will be screwed out of the pockets of people who regard the whole spectacle as an expensive joke.

Oh, and before any commenters of a pro-state sympathy start to wonder, no, I am not a sport-hater. I enjoy watching football, cricket and other sports, and play one or two sports myself (not very well, I will admit). However, I do not expect my fellows to support my enthusiasms. Is it too much to ask the same of others?

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This evening The Ashes start to burn again. I have Australia as heavy favourites.

We all had them as heavy favourites last time around, last summer, after game one when McGrath ruined England in the space of hardly more than a few minutes. And if McGrath had not trodden on a ball just before game two, we would have all been right. Having been the Aussie match winner in game one, he was never the same bowler for the rest of the series.

Since then, on the bowling front, England have lost the excellent and under-rated Simon Jones, and for Australia McGrath is now fit again. Gillespie, the weak spot in the Aussie bowling in 2005, has been replaced. For England, is Saj Mahmoud good enough, or will the Australians rip him apart as he has already been ripped apart in one-day cricket? They are just the ones to do it. Ditto Monty Panesar.

On the batting front, England have lost Vaughan and now Trescothick. Meanwhile Australia, who batted poorly in England, look likely to bat batter. Katich is now gone, and Hussey will surely strengthen them. Hayden, Langer and Gilchrist did badly in England and will surely improve, and if they do not, Jacques is ready in the wings.

Australia have surely lost any thought that to win they only have to show up, and all in all, I think, as I thought before the 2005 series only more so, that England have a chance, but only a chance, and this time around only an outside chance. When you consider that, despite doing better than Australia for long periods in 2005, England only just managed to squeak to their two wins (England were one dodgy caught behind from being 2-0 down), having been heavily defeated in game one (by McGrath – see above), it will not take much to change the 2005 result.

England might still win, or draw and keep the Ashes, if Harmison and Pietersen both play out of their skins, and if Flintoff is his usual excellent self despite also being the captain, and if Panesar does well, and Bell, and Strauss, and blah blah blah if if if, and if Australia again underperform (perhaps through more bowling injuries), all of which might still happen. But there are far two many ifs for my liking. But I hope I am wrong and I live in hope.

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Golf. There's a sport to stir up hot passions or deep waves of apathy among certain people. British blogger Clive Davis is clearly not a fan of the sport once described, I believe by Oscar Wilde, as a good way of spoiling a good walk (okay, it may have been said by one of those other smartypants writers who are quoted for their supposed wit and wisdom, but whatever). Clive does not care much for the sort of people who often play golf and for the way it is often used by political types - mostly rightwing ones - in the United States. He has a point. Golf bores are tedious, just as football bores, rugby bores, athletics bores, horse racing bores (now that is really boring) or F1 motor racing bores, are, er, boring. However, Clive's post hits a duff note in having a poke at Michael Douglas, in my view. Douglas, as well as being outrageous enough to have married Catherine Zeta-Jones, is a golf nut! Aaaaggghhh. I do not know why Douglas seems to bring out a certain hostile reaction in some folk. His Gordon Gekko remains, for me, one of the highlights of 20th Century cinema (yes, really). And I distinctly recall that Douglas, shortly after 9/11, decided to fly over to the UK for an Anglo-US amateur golf tournament, shrugging off worries about security to slug it around the links. He won my respect for that move.

Golf is both a team game and an intensely individualistic one and the latter point may explain its enormous popularity in certain parts of the world and also explain its appeal to a certain demographic. Although the number of people has expanded a lot in recent years as people get richer and due to the influence of the mighty Tiger Woods, it is still overwhelmingly viewed as a sport for the gin-and-tonic slice of the population (although I see nothing actually wrong with that). It is also a social game in that it is often the sort of game that allows people to discuss business and so on as they go around the course. My brother, a lawyer, seems to get briefed most of the time when he is on the fairways. (He once beat his boss and made a mental point not to do so again).

And I suspect this taps into the continued links between sport and class in the English-speaking world, especially in Britain. Golf, rugby union and arguably, cricket, is middle class, while polo or yacht-racing is seen as posh, and football (soccer) and rugby league is working class. I often find that people often reveal themselves quite a lot when "their sport" gets "invaded" by non-typical supporters. In the last soccer World Cup tournament in Germany, for example, I remembered reading comments by football regulars denouncing all those Home Counties types for showing a sudden interest in the English team selection, although perhaps England would have fared better had Ericsson paid some attention to their views. And the same goes, I recall once, when I went along to a sailing regatta and overheard some old salt muttering about "Chavs" becoming interested in sailing (an unlikely prospect, as far as I can tell. I cannot quite envisage this part of the English population wanting to navigate a yacht or change a spinnaker at speed in a heavy sea).

Anyway, as I write, it is around 3pm. Time for the football to begin.

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Following on the pubs being leant on to fingerprint their customers and take names and addresses, another egregious example of police and licensing authorities clubbing together to force a business to stop its paying customers behaving in ways officialdom does not approve of.

West Ham are under pressure from Newham Council and the Football Licensing Authority to limit persistent standing inside Upton Park, and several supporters have been banned from attending the next two home games at Upton Park for persistent standing.

Those who have been sent letters informing them of the action, will miss West Ham's Premiership games against Blackburn and Arsenal on the next two Sundays.

"Persistent standing"? I am no soccer fan as I abhor the tribalism of team sports, and it is really, really, dull to watch - almost as dull as horse- or motor-racing. I would not know about this at all but for Duleep Allilrajah's column on Sp!ked. But is not leaping up and down, along with shouting and singing as part of a crowd, a significant part of football supporting? And unlike cheering and community singing, standing or sitting has no effect on the world outside the stadium. What has it got to do with anyone but the club and its supporters?

Perhaps if I had taken more notice of soccer before now, I would have known of the existence ot the Football Licensing Authority, too. It is a public body created under Thatcher, for those tempted to idealise Britain before Blair. But we should all take notice of it now, because its imperial ambition is charted out on its website, a clear mission to tell everyone involved in doing or watching sport what to do:

In December 1998, following a major review, the Government announced that we would in due course become the Sports Ground Safety Authority. It presented legislation to this effect to Parliament but the 2001 General Election intervened. Ministers are committed to reintroducing it when they can find a place in the Parliamentary timetable.

One small mystery. Why should the Borough of Newham connive at undermining one of the poor borough's richest sources of trade and employment? Could it be that the bureaucrats who seek such petty restrictions will get paid and pensioned from taxes raised in other places regardless of how blasted into feebleness the people in their care remain? Or are they just getting into practice to discipline the Olympics?

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Surprise, surprise:

London's 2012 Olympic dream suffered a huge setback last night amid fears that the entire project will fall prey to soaring costs and interfering politicians.

You mean there are people who only worked that out last night. Olympic costs soar. Politicians interfere. These are fundamental natural forces. Everybody knows that. It is merely that lots of people do not care, because they will not - or think that they will not - be paying.

Jack Lemley, the American engineer drafted in to oversee the gigantic building project, quit suddenly two weeks ago saying that he wanted to spend more time on his construction business.

Makes a refreshing change from spending more time with his family. No doubt his construction company still loves him very much.

But last night, Mr Lemley, 71, the boss of an international engineering and consulting company, revealed that politics had driven him out and warned of soaring costs for the Olympic project.

In a body blow to hopes of a successful games, Mr Lemley told Idaho Statesman newspaper: "I went there to build things, not to sit and talk about it, so I felt it best to leave the post and come home."

Very wise.

He said the London construction projects seemed likely to come in late and cost more than expected due to politics, and he feared that would ruin his reputation of delivering projects on time and on budget.

Which makes you wonder how much it will cost to replace the guy. And what kind of a jerk he will be.

The remarks have enraged Olympic organisers who privately say that Mr Lemley had left partly because of ill health and had agreed not to comment more about the project.

Privately as in don't-say-I-said-it-but-do-say-it. Mr Lemley owes these people nothing, and certainly not his silence.

If only ...

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The other day, my article about the antics of footballers and the shifting balance of power between players and clubs prompted one or two commenters to argue that this shows that market economics and sport do not always mix. The argument, so it goes, is that a sport like football or motor racing needs to operate an almost egalitarian policy when it comes to limiting the power of any participant, because otherwise the most powerful clubs and participants will dominate a sport so much that they destroy the very competition that makes sport enjoyable. Example: the current dominance in the English Premier League of Chelsea, which is now backed by the vast and dubiously-acquired oil wealth of its Russian owner. Another example: Ferrari and its dominance for nearly a decade of Formula One motor sport.

But while such observations have merit, it ignores the fact that sporting institutions like the Football League or Formula 1, the America’s Cup yachting race or whatever are voluntary associations of likeminded people who want to create a set of rules in order for people to have, well, fun. Those voluntary bodies can change their own rules if a participant’s behavioural dominance starts to squeeze the very competition such institutions hold. People effectively choose to submit to rules, just as members of a symphony orchestra voluntarily submit to the dictates of a conductor. In an open society such as ours, we get a profusion of autonomous institutions set up for the purpose of say, staging sports competitions where there are tight rules on behaviour of the participants but where such participants are free to leave.

I personally think that if, say, Chelsea tried to squash all competition beyond a certain point, it could drain interest out of the sport and possibly force the league officials to cap things like the use of foreign players and perhaps even limit the size of a squad that any club can have. And that would be “autocratic” of the league but also no assault on the “freedom” of Chelsea since that club draws is raison d’etre from being a club participating in an intensely rule-bound voluntary association.

Also, if a sport gets bent out of shape and the interest wanes, there are things like “breakaway leagues” or new competitions designed to revive interest. The case of motor sport is instructive: in the last few years, there has been a rising chorus of criticism that F1 motor racing is dull, unglamorous and market-driven (and although no-one will admit this, also very safe). So you get a rise in interest in alternatives, such as rallying, motorcycling, saloon car racing, classic racing, revival meetings, and so forth.

There seems to be a sort of parabola of development in sports. As technical excellence and physical fitness of players increases, some sports can reach a sort of stalemate end-point (Brian Micklethwait made this point about squash and the World Cup soccer tournament recently). But so long as sport remains outside the maw of the state and people can arrange their own events, there is no reason why people who become bored by the spectacle of spoiled-brat soccer stars or processional motor racing cannot do something about it.

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Even by the megalomaniac standards of modern Premiership soccer, this allegation, if true about former Chelsea player William Gallas, is astonishing:

Chelsea say they sold William Gallas because he threatened to score an own goal if he was selected for their first game of the season.

The Stamford Bridge club have released a statement explaining their reasons for allowing the French defender to join Arsenal on transfer deadline day.

Gallas, 29, allegedly refused to play again for the Blues.

Chelsea claim he said he would score an own goal if he was forced to play against Manchester City on 20 August.

This story has had the amazing effect of making me feel a tincture of sympathy for the charmless Chelsea football manager, Jose Mourinho.

The market for footballers and other sports remains a strange one. Footballers have, in the space of under 50 years, gone from the position of being treated almost like serfs with capped wages to swaggering characters thinking they are able to command whatever salaries they want, on any terms. But I suspect that this process is hitting the buffers. There has been a great boom in professional soccer and the surrounding business over the past two decades but one suspects that that has now reached a sort of plateau

Football has to compete with other forms of entertainment. The less-than-stellar performance of England in the World Cup, coupled with lingering sourness and the antics of certain players, may have sated the public appetite for shelling out vast sums for a season ticket to a game. And when a player becomes so deluded about his importance to a club that he actually threatens to damage it by scoring own goals and so on, then he has to be pushed out. Chelsea had no alternative. if this guy had been a bond dealer at a bank and had threatened to hurt the company if it failed to do what he wanted, that person would probably be sued to an inch of his life.

(0)

I would like to compare the situation of Iran and the price of oil with teams in the AFL [Australian Football League] languishing at the bottom of the ladder.

(Article link found at Yobbo's)

(20)

Artur Boruc, a Polish goalkeeper playing for with Celtic, has received a police caution for "a breach of the peace" after he made the sign of the cross during a game. I can only marvel at how Muslims can march through London carrying signs threatening death against people who do not share their beliefs can get a police escort, whereas a devout Christian making the sign of the cross in public can get a police caution. The Polish player was not making rude gestures at a hostile crowd [see update & link below - perhaps he was] or trying to threaten anyone, he was just making a personal gesture indicating a set of beliefs.

I may be a godless rationalist myself but I sincerely hope Artur Boruc not just ignores the police caution but robustly reject it and continues to demonstrate his beliefs as he sees fit. If some Rangers fans cannot stand that and become violent, then perhaps that is where the police's attention should be more properly focused. Moreover I hope his club supports him regarding this matter and if it does not then I hope he takes his talents elsewhere.

However I am rather bemused that the dismal Ruth Kelly is 'surprised' at this development seeing as how she is a leading member of the political class which put the legal infrastructure in place so that exactly this can happen.

Britain has nothing even vaguely resembling the First Amendment or the US Bill of Rights generally, instead relying on common law that springs from a highly imperfect cultural tradition of liberty. As this culture has been in effect 'nationalised' and largely replaced by fifty years of highly malleable legislation, there are now few legal tools left to secure individual rights against the state in the UK. Consequently we are left with just hoping for the state to act in a restrained manner as there so now so many laws that can be used to suppress freedom of expression (including not just social but also political speech) that the state can prohibit almost any action it wishes if it really wants to. Moreover public bodies have now been given so much discretion to exercise power 'in the public interest' that almost any petty-fogging official can seriously mess with your life if he or she is so inclined. And we can thank the likes of Ruth Kelly in both of the main political parties for this.

Update: Although I stand by my general contention regarding the state of the law and freedom of expression in the UK, there may be a bit more to this specific story than the Telegraph article suggested.

(24)

Right, I am taking a break from scribbling about the iniquities of inheritance tax, dumb airline security and so forth to link to this terrific article by Ed Brayton about golfing phenomenon and American icon, Tiger Woods. Even if you do not give a two-foot putt about the game, this article is a fine study of the sheer force of will that has propelled a man to become the master of his sporting world:

I have to admit to being absolutely fascinated by Tiger Woods. I've followed his career closely, despite doubting him initially. I remember watching the press conference when he announced that he was leaving Stanford and turning pro. I particularly remember watching Phil Knight, CEO of Nike, talk about the $40 million contract they had signed with Woods, and I remember laughing out loud and ridiculing Knight when he said that Tiger Woods would transcend the game of golf the way Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali transcended their sports.

No way, I said; not a chance. No matter how good he is, no matter how much he dominates the sport, golf will never be anywhere near as popular as basketball or boxing and that will limit his fame and his standing in relation to the rest of the sports world. Golf is too much an exclusive sport, too tied in with the rich and the well born to have the kind of universal appeal that other sports have. And it's solitary, one man by himself, with no defense to be played and no one on one competition to fuel rivalries. Yeah, I'm glad I didn't put any money on that prediction.

Brayton's blog, Despatches from the Culture Wars, is definitely worth a regular visit, too.

(64)

I am listening to the test match cricket commentary, and I can tell you that cricket is about to become extremely big news, of the front page variety.

England are playing Pakistan, at the Oval cricket ground in London. England are two up, but Pakistan are looking favourites to win the final game, despite a good England batting fight back.

Or, they were. Because now something far more serious has happened. A while before the tea interval, Pakistan were punished by the umpires, for ball tampering. (Ball tampering in this case means deliberately and excessively scuffing up one side of the ball, to make it swing more.) The umpires changed the allegedly tampered ball, allowing the England batsmen out on the pitch to choose the replacement ball, and England were awarded five penalty runs. The Pakistanis were found guilty of cheating, in other words. There appears to be no evidence one way or the other to back up or disprove this judgement. (Where are those cameramen when you want them? They were all over it when Cook was given not out when he looked to have hit it, earlier in the day.) The Pakistanis carried on with the game at that point, but now the Pakistan side are refusing to take the field after tea.

"Under law 21," one of the commentators is saying, "if a side refuses to come out, the umpires shall award the match to the other side." This has never happened before in international cricket.

The umpire at the centre of this row is Darrell Hair, and he has a history of battles with Pakistan.

This incident is bound to feature in comments about the wider significance of such rows, in the context of the whole Muslims versus the Rest, the West, thing, whatever you call it. (The unpleasantness that happened during the last game, when England bowler Sajid Mahmood was accused by Pakistani spectators of "treachery" is also going to get another big airing. How different it all was at Lords.) However, umpire Darrell Hair has a history not so much of being "anti-Pakistani" but of being "anti-Asian". (He once, for instance, no-balled Muttiah Muralitharan for throwing.)

I was hoping that by the time I had finished writing this, the players would be back on the pitch, but the situation is unchanged, in other words it is getting worse by the minute.

Hang on. The commentators are talking about "thumbs up signals". "It looks as if play is about to begin." "Some sort of deal has been brokered." "The covers are coming off, so there is now going to be play." Yes, by the sound of things, a burst of furiously rushed diplomacy has bodged together an agreement to proceed with the game, and to sort out this mess as a separate thing. What's the betting that the phrase "independent inquiry" has been used? Not that that would be a bad idea. Get on with the game – which could prove to be another very good one, by the way - and try to sort out this mess latter.

The commentators are also complaining about the "lack of communication" between the people running the game and the spectators at the ground, and with the commentators. "Not at any stage have the people sitting here been given any explanation of what is going on." "What's going on now?"

Bloody hell, Pakistan are walking off again. The umpires are not coming out. Maybe the umpires are incensed that their judgment has been overruled. Yes, Darrell Hair is, to be exact. "Darrell Hair is refusing to stand." See what I mean about history.

"What is going on down there? Really, it's very poor indeed. This really has been a debacle this afternoon."

If it weren't for the Muslims versus the Rest vibe, this would now be really rather funny. As it is, it could become as big as Bodyline or something.

Commentator Christopher Martin-Jenkins is now saying that the Pakistanis have behaved incorrectly. There would, he says, have been a big investigation of this incident, and the correct time for the Pakistanis to put their case and communicate their extreme displeasure would have been then. They should not have, in effect, gone on strike.

The situation now is that Pakistan are willing to play, but the umpires (and umpire Doctrove is apparently standing side by side with Hair), in accordance with law 21, see above, have declared the match over. Their attitude is that a temporary refusal to play was enough to end the game. Pakistan are now protesting that they are now ready to play. Too late, say the umpires.

Commentator Boycott says that Hair is a "bull in a china shop". Right in terms of the letter of the law, but all over the place on the spirit.

The light is rather bad, and there will, presumably, be no further play today.

(23)

In order to get 'into' a sport, it usually helps to have grown up with it. I grew up with shooting, sailing and rugby in so far as those where the things I took to during my (mostly) English school days. Although I also served time doing part of my education in the USA, American Football, Baseball and Basketball never really appealed... not that I really have anything against those games, I just do not 'relate' to them myself. Strangely, the only times I have ever played soccer was in the USA as that seemed a more understandable sport to me, perhaps for the simple reason that although it was never a school sport in my neck of the woods in the UK, the ambient presence of 'footie' is hard to escape in England.

I do enjoy watching soccer and although the prospect of the World Cup did to some extent sweep me up, but the more matches I watched this time, the more this strange sinking feeling came over me. No doubt it is just me but there just seems to be something desperately unheroic about the game these days, at least at an international level. Perhaps the fact that every time I watched Italy, the eventual winners, play, they seemed to be taking more dives that Jacques Cousteau. I for one find athletes rolling around on the ground play-acting terrible injury when someone so much as brushes up against them such a pathetic and unmanly spectacle that perhaps the Italian team should replace their national flag by flying a petticoat from the nearest flagpole. Although Italy seem to be the worst offender in this regard, it does seem to be an increasingly widespread tactic (that said, anyone playing against Croatia need engage in no injury play-acting given that team's 'robust' approach to the game).

Overall, I cannot help but feel that the whole thing was rather unedifying.

(37)

A few hours ago (but still today - it now being the small hours of Monday morning) I finished watching the soccer World Cup Final, and a right old bore it was, I thought. Thank goodness my kitchen contains so many other amusements. I have to admit that the complaints of Americans who say that there is not enough scoring in soccer, and a deal too much despicable play acting, now strike me as thoroughly persuasive.

The more fraught and important the occasion, the duller soccer games now seem to be. It was very noticeable how much more entertaining the group games were in this tournament than the later games, when the seriously effective sides were the only ones left, and when all those exotic Africans and Americans and whatnot, with their "brought a breath of fresh air to the tournament" unpredictability, had all gone home. The more important the games got and the higher the stakes got, the more boring they became for the increasing numbers of disappointed neutrals. It did not help that the semi-finalists in this World Cup all came from European countries within a day's drive of each other. As the end of the tournament neared, all the players still in it knew each other's way of playing inside out, because all of them play for the same handful of big European clubs.

The television commentators did their best to explain that the Italians showed colossal resolve and determination and great defensive skill, and that they were "worthy winners", blah blah blah. But the commentators could not disguise the mediocrity of the occasion, which ended, inevitably, with a penalty shoot-out. During this, one French bloke made a mistake, no Italian did, and that was that.

When I was a teenager at school, I used to play squash. If you are only as good as I am at squash, then squash is a great game. With a racket slightly smaller than a tennis racket, and a small black rubber ball, which you take it in turns to smack, against a wall with a net painted on it, so to speak, squash maximises the exercise you take, while making ball boys entirely superfluous, what with the ball always bouncing back towards you for you to pick it up and resume smacking it.

But squash has one huge drawback. The better you are at it, the duller it gets. The room-stroke-court in which it is played is made the right size to suit players like me. In it I can just about reach the ball much of the time, but am also quite often unable to reach it. For a player like me, against an opponent of a similar standard, it is possible for us both to play genuinely winning shots and to have a really good game, at the end of which the loser is able to say in all sincerity: well played mate.

But at the upper reaches of the game of squash, things are different. If you are a really good squash player, you can always reach the ball, no matter where your opponent hits it. At the supreme pinnacle of the game of squash, where the two best squash players in the world are to be observed through transparent walls bashing that little black rubber ball against one of the transparent walls, the idiots who assemble to watch this absurd spectacle might as well be watching paint dry for all the excitement that it involves. Each point, to be settled, demands a mistake by one or other of the players, and each point means sitting there and waiting for one of the two squash players in the world who are least likely to make a mistake, to make a mistake. And the loser of this hideously prolonged contest, when he does finally emerge, leaves it with the feeling that it was his failures, rather than the other chap's excellence, which defeated him. Squash did appear briefly on British television, a few years ago. Not surprisingly, it soon departed.

Might soccer be heading that way too?

The invention of the penalty shoot-out, and its seemingly greater and greater frequency on soccer's biggest occasions, suggests that it is. The penalty shoot-out is a perfectly crafted drama during the course of which mistakes, with consequences that can be observed on the scoreboard, can, at last, be confidently expected. The players, most of whom never normally take penalties, and most of whom (apart from the late substitutes) are exhausted by having just played half an hour of extra time, nevertheless take it in turns to do so. The goalies, who do so much less during regular time these days, what with the other twenty fellows being ever more likely to cancel one another's efforts out, are still fresh and alert, despite it being so very hard to stop a penalty taker scoring. A mistake, as happened this evening, or a brilliant save by the goalie (much rarer), duly occurs, and the end is mercifully brief. How long before an entirely new version of soccer is invented, which just goes straight to the penalty shoot-out?

Given the dreariness of the actual soccer that was played, especially towards the end of it, the abiding recollection of this last World Cup, for me, has not been of the soccer itself, but of the misbehaviour of various players, like England's own Wayne Rooney and, this evening, the French Captain, Zinedine Zidane, both of whom were red carded. This evening, Zidane was sent off for pushing his head into an Italian chest. Not a happy way for such a fine player to end his carrier. (Nothing else half as dramatic as that happened the entire night.) Even more repellent than the pushes or kickings that can now get you sent off a soccer pitch are the despicable deceptions practiced by the players to try to get each other thus ejected. Who knows what disgusting thing was said to or done to Zidane to make him behave so stupidly this evening? We cannot know, but we can guess. And what we can all see very clearly, as has already been remarked upon in the comments on earlier World Cup postings here, are all the players who deliberately fell over and rolled about in agony, clutching their faces as if napalmed, when the other fellow had just pushed them gently on the shoulder. This afternoon, I recall reading on some blog or other about the Portuguese National Diving Team being eliminated, and good riddance to the little runts. That is not the kind of atmosphere than a great sport, such as soccer most definitely is, at least in the sheer scale of its global popularity, should be radiating.

Many are now commenting on the "irony" - the point being that it is believed to be pretty much a coincidence - that Italy, who have just won the World Cup, are simultaneously mired in a match fixing scandal back home. People are wondering how the one circumstance might have affected the other. The scandal back home, it is being said, "made them all the more determined", etc. How about: Italian soccer is mired in a cheating scandal because lots of Italian soccer players cheat, and Italy won the World Cup because, at least partly, Italian soccer players get more cheating practice back home, and are better at it than the other teams. They hone their cheating skills more than, e.g., England, and are better at concealing their tricks than, e.g., the Portuguese.

Perhaps if England had played rather better and/or done rather better, instead of being defeated in a penalty shoot-out by the little runts of Portugal, I would be writing in a different vein. I cannot say. But surely an occasion like the World Cup Final ought to be entertaining for others besides the lucky supporters of the winning team, and something more than pure torture for the unlucky losing supporters.

The contrast with Wimbledon, the men's final of which was also played this afternoon, is extreme. Do not tell me that less is at stake for the individuals involved. The loser this afternoon, Rafael Nadal, I happened to hear them say, got about a third of a million quid, so goodness knows what the winner, Roger Federer, walked away with. (Twice that amount, I subsequently heard on the TV news.) But at the end, Nadal, so wound up and pugnacious while the game lasted, was throughly gracious to his victorious opponent.

My main memory of this tennis match is going to be of the half dozen or more utterly amazing passing shots and returns of service that Nadal played, each one of them more exciting than anything that happened in the World Cup soccer final, aside from the Zidane thing. It seemed impossible that he could even manage a return at all, yet a fraction of a second later, smack, and a bullet-like winner was rasping its way past the elongated frame of the usually omnipotent Federer. Unlike with squash, the better tennis players are, the better it is to watch them at it. So when the two best players in the world (Federer and Nadal by common consent, it seems) are both playing at their very best (which only happened intermittently this afternoon - think Borg McEnroe) it is a great spectacle.

I am sure that if Nadal or Federer played soccer their ferocious will to win would cause them to become just as sneaky and duplicitous as the other soccer players. I cannot believe that soccer is sneaky merely because it attracts people who are sneaky to start with, although no doubt that is part of the story.

Part of the story may also be that soccer is a contact sport, unlike tennis, and that this brings out the worst in players, what with the line being so very fine and so hard to draw between legitimate effort and violence. But, rugger is even more of a contact sport than soccer, yet rugger players now seem to behave themselves far better.

And maybe the very rarity of goals in soccer World Cup Finals makes them all the more the causes of ecstasy when they are scored. More goals might mean no goal ever counting for as much as a goal counts now.

Maybe, as I say, it is just that England performed so badly. And maybe I am finally becoming an adult, who no longer cares that much who wins sports tournaments.

Meanwhile, soccer is by far the most popular sport on earth, so the people in charge of it must be doing a lot of things right. Nevertheless, I cannot help thinking that those who make the rules of soccer need to sit down and do some further work.

(11)

I feel that the referee handled the Rooney thing badly - failing to whistle at all during the long physical assault on Rooney by three Portuguese players, then applying the law to what might have been an accidental stamp in the most draconian way. He'd also failed to give England a cast-iron penalty - but otherwise, I felt he had as good a night as might be expected in such a difficult match.

- James Hamilton proving, by being just a tiny bit too rational and even-handed about it all, that he is not entirely English

(26)

Football, whether you love it or loathe it, is now a huge global business. It stands to reason, then, that the temptations on the part of some folk to bend the rules to make themselves rich are considerable. There are currently extremely serious allegations surrounding a number of big-name Italian clubs, including AC Milan and Juventus, to the effect that officials and others collaborated to fix games. And all this while the game's main showcase, the World Cup, is going on.

And then there is this story today:

Juventus team manager and former defender Gianluca Pessotto has been seriously injured after falling from a building at the club's headquarters.

"Gianluca suffered multiple fractures, but his life is not in danger," said Juventus spokesman Marco Girotto. It is unclear where exactly the 35-year-old fell from - early reports suggested he had fallen out of a second-floor window, but now it seems he may have fallen from the roof of the building. Club officials said they were unable to give details and were looking into all possibilities.

Oh I bet they are. Consider the final paragraph of the story:

Juventus are currently facing charges relating to the massive match-fixing scandal rocking Italy. The scandal began last month with the publication of intecepted telephone conversations between former Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi and Italian Football Federation officials discussing refereeing appointments.

Italian clubs are now a major part of the corporate structure of that country. Questions about the trustworthiness of Italian corporate leaders have already been stirred by the scandal of collapsed food group Parmalat, a scandal that was a European equivalent of Enron or the Fannie Mae debacles.

Football needs trust to survive. The antics of players who writhe in fake agony after being tackled in a bid to get an opposing player sent off, or who fall over in the penalty area to get a goal (Italy arguably did this in the match yesterday against Australia) are part of a cancer eating at the game. I can put up with the antics of footballers off the pitch and I do not get upset at their huge salaries - they operate in a market after all - but without trust, without a sense that the players concerned are giving their all to win, then the game is in grave danger. Similar scandals have besmirched cricket and remain a shadow over horse racing. I hope the Italian authorities prosecute any guilty folk severely. If found guilty, some of the clubs could be relegated from the top-flight league and forced to sell some of their star players, presumably at a loss (I wonder if Ipswich Town can afford any of them?).

What a mess.

(4)

Last night, at my own personal blog, I found myself getting really quite exercised about this utterly banal and ignorable headline...

...which I snapped yesterday afternoon. And in a very Samizdata-ish manner, a style that has been eluding me somewhat, of late. So, here is a link to my rant from Samizdata.

I got up at 6 am yesterday, which would be early for most people, and is about the day before yesterday for me, and I spent all of the morning and half the afternoon working extremely hard. Now it is 6 am today. I am up again, and face a similar day. So maybe my rant resistance is, just now, lower than usual. Maybe now, unlike usually, I am angry.

But it was not all rant. I also found myself weaving in my favourite cock-up of the World Cup so far, which was committed last night by an English referee, during the game which saw the Aussies going through to the last sixteen of the competition.

(4)

Best joke of the World Cup so far. Italy versus Ghana. An Italian gets an early yellow card for a nasty tackle, treading on the guy's ankle. As Ghana's Essien hobbles to his feet and we are shown the replay, John Motson says:

Yes, that's the one FIFA want stamped out.

Not to say cracked down on.

It is now nearing half time, and although there have been no goals, it has been what they call end to end stuff. Ghana could well surprise. What have I said? Italy score! Someone called Perlo. Sorry, Pirlo. Earlier Toni nearly scored for Italy, and deserved to, slamming it against the underside of the bar with the Ghana goalie well beaten. Half time: 1-0 Italy. More goals to come surely, unless everyone gets heat exhaustion.

Earlier in the day, the first really crazy game. Japan 1-0 up over Australia with hardly any time to go, and I have to go out on an errand. Fine by me. You do not want to be sitting next to a computer (i.e. a fan heater) all day in this weather. And it must be far too hot out there in Germany for anything much to happen before the whistle. Out and about, only moments later, I hear yelling in a pub, look in, and find the Anglosphere celebrating Australia's third goal.

What will Michael say?

Next up for the Aussies: Brazil. No worries.

(33)

After a few months of rather dodgy weather, summer has at last arrived in London. The evenings are long, the weather is warm, and the mood is good. It is a lovely time to be outside in the beer garden of a nice pub, with a pint of Kölsh lager or something similar. It would be nice to perhaps spend some of the weekend following up on this: sitting in a pub, watching a little sport perhaps on a TV in a quiet civilized audience somewhere.

Unfortunately, it is a slow weekend from a sporting point of view. International cricket has been going for a month or so. England have already played a three test series against Sri Lanka in which the cricket was rather variable, both sides playing well at some points and quite badly at others. (The eventual 1-1 drawn series was a fair result). There are some one day internationals coming up, but the international season doesn't get back into full swing until England's test series with Pakistan commences on July 13. In English domestic cricket, Australia's cricketing genius on the field and A class idiot off it Shane Warne is playing brilliantly as captain of Hampshire, clearly determined to improve on the second place in the County Championship that the county achieved last season when Warne was largely absent due to being off playing for Australia.

And of course, the peace of the true sporting fan is going to be horribly distracted by the fact that the soccer World Cup is being played for the next month.

In the first few weeks of my first stay in England in 1991, I found that English people would utter the words "Nineteen Sixty Six" into all kinds of conversations, usually spoken in hushed tones remniscent of some sort of religious rapture. I found this deeply peculiar, and after it happened four or five times I finally asked one of these people what had happened in 1966, because the English kept bringing it up in this odd way. The response I got was initially disbelief that I was asking this question (the same sort of disbelief that I would get later when I revealed that I was not intimitely familiar with British politics or minor British television personalities of the early 1970s), and when it was figured out that I was serious it was explained to me that Britain had won the World Cup in 1966, and they were still getting joy out of this. I found this kind of sad, but I let them keep it up. I had had some idea that the English (and indeed other Europeans) had some sort of affection for this game.

Then, as now, I could not treat any of this with even the remotest seriousness. As to why Europe and many other parts of the world are so preoccupied with this stupid game that is disdained by all real men, I have no idea. People kick around a round ball and seldom score goals, but spend an awful lot of time falling over and pretending to be injured. Meanwhile, spectators fight out three thousand years of European ethnic disagreements in the stadium. I am unable to even regard it as a sport. I cannot take it seriously enough even for that.

And the lead up to a major tournament like the World Cup is so ridiculous. Rather than declaring themselves to be chavs by wearing a backwards Burberry baseball cap plus three gold chains and an iPod shuffle outside their shirts as they would in normal circumstances, people declare themselves to be chavs by attaching four England flags to the outside of their cars. It is really awful. The newspapers are full of nothing but the tournament. Conversation is about nothing else. The pubs become full of rowdy people who get aggressive when England (inevitably) lose. I just want to sit outside and drink my pint in the sun, but I cannot.

The most I can hope is that it will be over fast. For that reason I hope that England loses every game 10-0, in order that they are eliminated as quickly as possible and my summer can get back to normal. For the sake of God Almighty do not let England win the stupid tournament. The prospect of them being obnoxious about it for the next 40 years is so horrible that I would have to leave the country. If Sven-Goran Ericsson could also conclude his career as England manager by getting into a bizarre sex scandal with Wayne Rooney, that would be an added bonus. While on that, I would also like to see the Italians eliminated quickly, and hopefully in some really embarassing fashion. When they were elimiated by South Korea in the 2002 tournament they went on to demonstrate that they were the worst losers in all of human history, and I would like to see this again.

As for the event in total, I hope that the United States win it, ideally by beating France in the final. That would be the best possible outcome, as the Americans wouldn't actually care, the French and the English would, and we would be spared any nation at all from being obnoxious about it for the next three decades, as would be the case in the event of any other winner.

Sadly, my own nation seems to have lost the kind of civilized attitude held by the Americans. Australia have qualified for the World Cup for the first time in 32 years. On the previous occasion when Australia qualified (in 1974), they were given a parade down the main street of Sydney before heading off to Germany for the tournament. On that occasion the team was heckled and whistled at by bystanders for playing a girls' game, but sadly that sort of attitude is now gone. Australians are watching the tournament with interest, although they wouldn't pay much or any attention to soccer on any other occasion. Somehow they think that since much of the rest of the world cares about this idiotic event, they should too. I can't imagine that things in Australia are as bad as here - for one thing I don't think our bogans will be attaching multiple Australian flags to their white Ford Falcon utes, which is something. However, people are, sadly, watching. I don't really care one way or another if Australia do well, although in truth they are in quality so far from the decent soccer sides that if will be a good result if they score a goal in the tournament. That said, I rather wish the Australian media left the event in the obscurity it deserves.

For Australians' mind should be focused, and they should be thinking about something much more important than this trivia. There is an actual sporting event taking place at the end of the year, and this one does matter. The shame of Edgbaston must be expunged. The Ashes must be regained.

(38)

Most Americans it seems do not give a hoot about the World Cup starting in Germany next weekend. That is a shame, because they have a good team and a chance of making it through to the second round. They may not be the most talented team in the world but they are very good at making the most of what they have got.

That is in stark contrast to Australia, where it seems that despite not knowing much at all about soccer, the country is going over the top with enthusiasm with an over-inflated idea of the national team's chances. Team USA has a hard group, but with Italy in turmoil, the way is open for an American ambush. They have the ability and nous to do so.

Much of the credit for that can be credited to their manager, Bruce Arena. The New York Times has done a interesting feature on him, and his team. You'll have to be quick to read the full story given how quickly the NY Times shoves things behind its firewall, but here's a taster...

"I get the sense that Arena truly appreciates the predicament of the American soccer player," says Andrei Markovits, a professor of German studies and comparative politics at the University of Michigan and the author of a book on the development of American soccer. "These are great athletes, but they are disrespected by their peers around the world and unknown by their own countrymen. Arena understands this, and I think it gives him tremendous legitimacy."

Sitting on the deck of his home in northern Virginia in April, Arena listened to this assessment and said he agreed with it. "I'm not willing to say we can't beat anybody we play," Arena said. "At the World Cup, we're not going to be the dominant team. It doesn't mean we can't be the better team." And: "I don't want to blow a lot of hot air... but I'm pretty successful at what I do. There's reasons for it."

The primary one, perhaps, is a recognition of frailty, an honest appraisal of flaws and limitations. Arena's approach to coaching the national team begins with this acknowledgment: "We don't have the best players in the world."

In particular, the Americans lack a dominant goal scorer and lyrical playmaker. The last time Arena checked, Ronaldinho played for Brazil and Wayne Rooney wore the red, white and blue of England, not the United States. Basketball is played with jazzy improvisation in this country, but soccer's suburban orientation often creates a fife-and-bugle regimentation. This is why Arena bristles at suggestions by columnists and by officials within the United States Soccer Federation that the Americans should play artistically like the Brazilians or hire a Brazilian coach.

"One of the stupidest things I've ever heard," Arena said, noting that the MetroStars, now the New York Red Bulls, didn't exactly set Major League Soccer afire when Carlos Alberto Parreira, Brazil's current coach, was in charge there.

"What we're good at and why we've been successful is that we know what we are," Donovan, the American playmaker, told me. "A lot of countries pretend to be something they're not. A lot of teams like to pretend they're like the Brazilians. Well, you don't have the athletes the Brazilians do. You don't have the soccer knowledge and skill they do. We understand that. We're not the most talented team in the world, by far. But we are one of the most competitive, with the best spirit, the fittest, and with some of the best athletes. And we use that to our advantage."

When Arena chews on the matter of American soccer style, he appears to have bitten into something bitter. For him, the country is too big, the melting-pot influences too various, the youth development system too disconnected from professional clubs to say that this is the way the Americans play soccer. Style will have to develop over time, if at all, Arena says. "Europe is kind of the size of the U.S. Is there one playing style in Europe?" he asks. "If we were the size of Holland, it'd be a hell of a lot easier."

But, he adds, "one day, when we get it right and become the best, it's because we did it our way, no one else's way."

The American style, as Arena sees it, is defined by an ability to adapt, to shape strategies and formations according to various factors: the players available on a particular day, the opponent, the weather. Style depends on the qualities his players possess, not on predetermined notions about how they should play. In the 2002 World Cup, the Americans sat back and counterattacked in the wilting heat against Mexico, using three backs to cope with players' injuries and suspensions, and then charged hell-bent at Germany in the next game, certain that the Germans were not the better team.

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Tickets for the Ashes series of cricket Test matches in the Australian summer went on sale yesterday to unprecedented levels of demand. Interest in cricket contests between England and Australia, which have a long history (the first series of Test matches was in 1877) is at an all time high in the wake of England's winning the 2005 series. The return contest in the Australian summer of 2006/07 has been eagerly awaited ever since.

The demand for tickets was expected to be strong, but Cricket Australia's ticketing system was overwhelmed by the public's response. I was not surprised by that.

As is now traditional, the travelling English support is likely to be tremendous. Even when English sporting teams have been uncompetitive, their travelling supporters have stuck by them; in 2006 England's football and cricket teams are doing quite well and naturally England's supporters want to be there for the good times. Thanks to the Internet and air travel, now they can be, and in greater numbers then ever.

This is not exactly welcomed by Australia's cricket administrators. They fondly imagined that they could sell out their stadia to domestic audiences, rake in the cash, and wave the patriotic flag and all the usual sentimental blather. They forget that, for all its history, cricket is an entertainment, and a business. Cricket administrators sell entertainment in the form of television rights and seats at stadia.

And of course when you mismanage your pricing, one of two things happen. Either you don't sell your tickets at all, or they become so valuable that profits can be made by reselling them. The latter is happening in this case. And Cricket Australia CEO is not happy about it:

Scalpers have also cashed in by immediately placing their buys on EBay for prices thousands of dollars more than their retail value. "Scalpers using EBay are a disgraceful insult to normal, loyal cricket fans who should have access to these tickets at face value," James Sutherland, Cricket Australia's CEO, said. Organisers have told people purchasing black market tickets to beware and say they have asked experts about tracking the passes.

Scalping on this scale indicates that there's a severe underestimation of the financial value of the tickets. It's a bit rich, also, to see an implied threat against purchasers of EBay tickets as well. Once Cricket Australia has sold the tickets, they are the property of whoever owns them, and the owner has the natural right to use them, sell them on EBay, or use them as Christmas decorations if they so wish.

It is disappointing, but not entirely surprising, that the CEO of a private commercial organisation such as Cricket Australia does not know, or understand, the basics of property rights.

(10)

Go here for video of Boris Johnson's amazing football tackle (actually more like an American football block), in that bizarre pro-celeb England Germany match about a month ago. Apologies if this has already been alluded to here, but a search through the archives suggests not. "Finest hour" is, however, an odd way to describe it. More like finest five seconds.

Talking of great sporting moments, ideal for the delectation of internetters, can anyone direct me to any video of Kevin Pietersen's equally amazing (and equally subversive of established order and decency) reverse sweep of Muttiah Muralitharan, last Friday? There are plenty of photos of this extraordinary stroke, but you need video to get the full flavour of what Pietersen did.

Immediately after this, Pietersen got out. But nobody cared, because that shot was one of those "worth the price of admission alone" moments. Not that I was there, or paid this price. I just heard about it on the radio, and then saw it on the TV highlights, which I sadly do not yet have the ability to process and pass on.

More ruminations from me about the wondrous enrichment of cricket fan memories offered by the internet here.

(12)

The First Test between Bangladesh and Australia is going right down to the wire, and the final day's play tomorrow will see a very tight finish. There is a good chance that Bangladesh might pull off one of the biggest upsets in Test cricket history. Australia need 95 runs to win, with only two established batsmen left, and six wickets in hand.

In truth, Australia are fortunate to even be in the game at all, because they were comprehensively outplayed in the first two days of this Test match. Needless to say, this state of affairs has caused plenty of amusement for English cricket fans and other wicked folk.

But regardless of the result, this match has been, to use a cliche, good for the game. It comes as the editor of Wisden Cricketer's Almanack has released his latest offering in which he takes a small minded view of the game and denounces the 'globalisation' of cricket. The way in which Bangladesh were rushed into playing Test cricket was misguided and done for the wrong reasons, but the game is slowly but surely taking a foothold in the country, in terms of playing success.

That is good for cricket. It is even more good for Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world. Bangladesh is famous for being poor, having lots of disasters, and not much else. When the Champions Trophy one-day International cricket tournament was held in Dacca in 1998, one observer said to a shocked editor of Wisden Cricketer's Almanack that the event was the most positive event in the country's history since Independence.

With the football World Cup two months away, there may well be quite a bit of tut-tutting in the media about how sport and nationalism are a dreadful combination. And there is something to that. However, I think that sport and national pride, which is something else entirely, is a positive thing. No matter what actually happens tomorrow, the future of Bangladesh cricket looks bright, and I think that is a wonderful thing.

(19)

For the last ten days or so, and for about another week, I have been and will continue to be semi-unplugged. Unplugged because my pay-by-the-month internet connection was disconnected a while ago, by some insonsiderate person pushing the wrong button at my internet service provider, but only semi-unplugged, because I have at least been able, thank goodness, to revert to the previous pay-by-the-minute arrengement which preceded my current although currently interrupted arrangement.

I am, therefore, able to link to particular places on the internet that I already know how to get to quickly, such as to this blog posting which I did for the Adam Smith Institute, in which I explain the effect of my present internet miseries, but I am not, as I explained at greater length in that posting, comfortable about just going a-wandering. I can switch on, go somewhere, download it, switch off, and read it. But, I deeply fear switching on, going somewhere, reading it, going somewhere else, reading that, looking something else up, deciding to write something, looking up other stuff, deciding to write something else and making a start with that, . . . you get the picture. It might not cost all that much, especially at the weekend, but in sad old Britain where local phone calls still cost, it could cost me a whole lot too much for comfort. If I did the sums, I might well decide that my state of only semi-linked-ness is a false economy, and that I should just plug myself in regardless and do whatever I feel like doing. But I do not want to have to be worrying.

So, this has been what Americans call a "learning experience", or what we know on this side of the pond as a considerable nuisance or words to that effect.

However, the particular combination of circumstances – not being permanently connected, but still being able to connect temporarily – has provided me with something you seldom experience in life, namely the contrast between two important stages in my life, with the full knowledge of what both states were like. It really has been a learning experience.

The difference between merely being temporarily connected to the internet and able to peck at its mere surface, guided by specific recommendations from others, and being permanently connected to the internet and able to roam at will with no further cost penalty was, for me, all the difference, when I first made the jump from the first state to the second. It was when I finally made this switch that the internet finally made sense to me. I was already blogging, a little, but this was when the blogging penny really dropped, because at this point I stopped having to worry about it. This was when I got myself, I gradually found out, a new job. I had spent the eighties getting established as a "desktop publisher", and the nineties getting ever more bored with being a desktop publisher. Finally, I had reached the next stage, and I am now enduring again what the previous stage was like. I imagine it as like having got happily married, but then being temporarily deserted by one's wife or husband, in other words an entirely different experience from never having been happily married in the first place, because you know exactly what you are missing..

Getting anything done at all is hard, like wading through treacle. You would be amazed at how many of my current activities – laborious, playful, or, as most often, a mixture of the two – turn out to be improved and informed by me being able to connect to the internet. Hardly any piece of internet writing is not the better for me being able to look something up, connect to something, throw in a tangent to something, even just look up the spelling of something. (Given that I used the internet constantly, I also used it as a spellchecker for complicated names. Yesterday morning, I spent several pence finding out how to spell Cecil B. DeMille.) Often some links at least are essential. I have spent most of the last week trying to puzzle out what it would make sense to write about, apart from writing about what the last week has been like. I have written more than usual about sport, because sport doesn't matter, and if you do not include all the links that you should in a piece of writing about sport, what the hell. It's only sport.

Sadly, however, my two favourite sports teams, the England cricket team and the England rugby team, had a very bad last few days, just when I really needed them both to excel. England lost badly to India this morning at cricket, and catastrophically to France in Paris yesterday at rugby. Do your own damn linking if you want the gory details. (On the other hand, how about - and here I will supply a link for this is worth a few pennies of any cricket fan's money - this?!?!? I found out about it via Ceefax!)

I thought that reading books would provide solace, but books provoke writing, or should, and writing requires links. Just reading no longer seems good enough, and neither is writing in a state of unpluggedness. Maybe these activities should suffice, but they don't.

You can imagine my feelings about junk mail. Receiving it is bad enough. Paying extra to get it is something else again.

In desperation I am now getting out more. I have invited myself to supper with various friends this week, and on Thursday I will be visiting my aged mother. And I will do various other things of an out and about nature. But it's not the same.

(22)

Like my co-Samizdatista Jonathan Pearce, and like Mark Holland of Blognor Regis, I have also been watching the Winter Olympics. In truth I find the winter Olympics to rather more fun than the summer Olympics, partly because it is genuinely a more lighthearted event with more of a party atmosphere than the summer games, and partly because power in the world is rather turned upside down. (Here is a competitor from Norway - he must be good. Here is someone from the United States of America - he will be mediocre). Mostly though, I think it is the simple insanity of many of the events that I find most enjoyable. Winter sports lead to extremes of human achievement that (a) one is amazed that they are possible, but not so much as (b) one wonders why anyone would actually do this, and how the sport was invented in the first place, for surely the first twelve people to try it must have ended up killing themselves.

Mark wonders just how Britain has a luge team, or as he puts it...

Anyway, I get to wondering how on earth a chap from Pinner decides to take up the sport. I mean, say for instance I'd been so inspired by the top luging at the Calgary Olympics that I'd immediately thought, "That's the event for me!" where am I supposed to go from there? If I'd have gone to my games teacher, Mr "Manly" Stanley, and said, "you know how this football and rugby doesn't interest me at all, well instead I fancy taking up sliding down an icy tube at 130 km/h whilst lying on a glorified tea tray". What's he supposed to do? Phone up the local British Luge Federation affiliated club? That's not going to happen is it.

Actually you are not supposed to land on your head and break your neck. You are supposed to land upright on skis and continue down the mountain. Landing on your head and breaking your neck does appear to happen relatively frequently, however. Again, the question of why anyone would do this does come to mind, and the question of why the Australian taxpayer pays for it comes to mind even more.

And to answer this, we have to go back to the 1976 summer olympics in Montreal. For the first time in a very long time, Australia won no gold medals. This was widely perceived as a national catastrophe. Government ministers descriped it as "disgraceful", and it was generally assumed that the rest of the world was laughing at us with derision. (I am assuming that this is pretty much the first that any of our non-Australian readers have heard of it, but if by any chance you were laughing with derision at Australia in 1976 for this reason, I would like to hear about it). It was decided by the federal government that something had to be done about this, and a state funded organisation named the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) was set up to indentify potential Olympic medal winners and coach them to gold medal winning glory.

And at its stated aim, this seemed to work. Australia won a few gold medals in each of 1980, 1984, and 1988, and we were generally happy.

However, something happened in the world in 1989. The cold war ended. Suddenly, many experienced sports coaches with experience in running state funded success at all costs sports academies were out of work. While the United States and West Germany even did their best to poach the best scientists and engineers from the former communist bloc, Australia poached many fine East German sports coaches, and invited them to do what they had previously done best. Like East Germany and the Soviet Union, Australia was interested mainly in appearing as high up the medal table as possible, and didn't care so much in what sports or events the medals were won. They got down to the old East German trick of identifying sports and events where the competition was weak, an concentrating on those events. (One side effect of this both in East Germany and Australia was a greater concentration on women's events, where there was often less depth in the fields). Plus, they established an incentive scheme in which sports which won Olympic medals received increased (taxpayer) funding and those which did not had their funding cut. (In particular, Australia specialises in weird track cycling events too obscure for anyone capable of winning a stage in the Tour de France from having the slightest interest in. Like most cycling teams, the Australians have had their share of drug scandals as well).

At its stated aim of winning lots of gold medals, this scheme was hugely successful. In the summer games, Australia went from 3 gold medals in 1988 to 7 in 1992 to 9 in 1996 to 16 in 2000 (possibly boosted by home town advantage) to an utterly outrageous 17 in Athens in 2004. (In the last two games, Australia managed to finish higher than all nations other than the United States, Russia, and China). Rather than giving Australians the chance to cheer a few times in a couple of weeks, the AIS had managed to give us an East German like procession of medals. The funding system had grown out of control in terms of total budget, and the incentive sheme had led to a concentration of funding on a smaller number of more successful sports.

And, while Australian does contain mountains with ski resorts, and while substantial numbers of Australians do ski recreationally, winter sports are not something we traditionally devote a great deal of time to. However, the incentive scheme of the AIS applies to winter sports just as it does to summer sports. The same process of identifying sports with weak fields in which we might win medals went on, and one of the events that came up was the women's aerials. This actually requires similar skills to certain gymnastic events, and the required skiing skills are only moderate. As the AIS already had a gymnastic program, retired female gymnasts were encouraged to take up skiing. And it worked, Australia produced a number of fine woman aerial skiers, which culminated in Alisa Camplin winning the gold medal in the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002. (Just as an observation, in her career Camplin has suffered a broken collarbone, broken hand, separated shoulder, torn Achilles tendon and nine concussions). As this was successful under the incentive scheme, funding for women's aerials (and winter sports in general) was of course increased at the AIS, and Australia once again hopes to win medals in the event this year.

Thus a government program expands, even one devoted to encouraging women to do extremely dangerous reverse backflips in freezing conditions. Really.

Update: Someone in the comments has asked me just how much money exactly the Australian government spends on this. Perusal of Treasury documents gives a budget of $111 million Australian dollars (at current exchange rates that is $US82m or £47m - the Australian population is about a third of the British population and about one fifteenth of the US population) for "Excellence in sports performances by Australians" (ie elite athlete development) for the 2005-6 financial year. There is also some money spent by state governments on similar programs, but the federal expenditure makes up the bulk of it. If you (generously) assume that Australia wins 20 Olympic gold medals (winter and summer) every four years, and the budget is $110m a year, then the gold medals are costing the taxpayer $22 million each. To me that seems a lot.

(6)

Thanks to modern safety improvements, motor racing is not quite as dangerous as it used to be - although it probably still takes nerves of steel to hurtle around a circuit in a modern F1 car - but if there is a sport that for me demonstrates sporting bravery at its most extreme, it has to be the downhill skiing and bob-sleigh events I am currently watching at the Winter Olympics near Turin.

Being only a moderately competent skier myself, I bow in awe when I see the pros hurtle down icy slopes at speeds touching 100 mph. Wow.

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One of my very favourite blogger quotes of 2005 was this, just after the July 7th London bombings:

A friend of mine visits a strip pub, once a week, down by the Gray's Inn Road. Despite the bombs, he went along this afternoon, as usual, and was the only guy with four strippers. But, he told me, he had to go - 'otherwise the terrorists would have won'.

In that spirit, I will tell you, not about how I feel about Those Cartoons - no need for any link, see just about everything else here at the moment - but about the Six Nations. Rugby. American Football without the poofy protective clothing. Or: "All those men's bottoms", as my now very elderly but still just about functioning mother put it to me yesterday, explaining why she prefers regular football to rugby football.

Yesterday, Ireland stuttered to victory against Italy in Dublin, and England powered to victory against last year's Grand Slammers Wales, at Twickenham. But what lifted this first weekend of the tournament out of the ordinary was the game today at Murrayfield. It was between Scotland, who have been squabbling with Italy for the Wooden Spoon with the brave but still learning Italians for as long as any of us can remember, and the team that many people are (or were) tipping for the next World Cup, namely the hosts of that tournament, France. France did superbly against the Southern Hemisphere sides they played before Christmas.

So, France to beat Scotland by thirty points, right? Wrong. At one extraordinary moment in this extraordinary game, Scotland were 20-3 up, and although France finally pulled themselves together a bit and got some points, they didn't get enough, and Scotland hung on to win 20-16.

The moment of the match, which Scottish sports TV shows will no doubt be wallowing in during the next few days and weeks, was the try that Scotland got at the beginning of the second half, to go 20-3 up. It was a classic men's bottoms try of the sort my mother would have found very unappealing, but to rugby fans of any proclivity it was a thing of beauty. Scotland got the ball on the French twenty two, and then they did something that usually only England can do. They got together in a great scrum, as you can do in rugby union, with the ball tucked up someone's jumper, metaphorically speaking, and then shoved themselves and the ball for twenty five yards and over the French line. The French are not just elusive and speedy threequarters. They have fearsomely belligerent forwards. But they could not stop that Scottish drive. Amazing. It says a lot for France that they scored all the points that followed, because a thing like that really takes it out of you.

I wrote a bit on my personal blog about the Six Nations last week saying that "animal spirits", as I called it, can make a hell of a difference in this tournament, as they can in almost all sports, and thereby cause huge upsets. I predicted, that is to say, the unpredictable. So I am now feeling very smug.

For the point is, this Scottish team that just beat France was exactly the same bunch of miserable bloody no-hopers that all the other teams � even Italy sometimes - have been rolling over for the last half decade. All that changed is that they swapped their misery-guts All Black coach for a Scotsman. He must have reckoned that he had to try something different, and what he tried was making the Scottish players happy instead of bloody miserable. By not snarling and bitching at them every time they fluffed it in training, presumably, but instead smiling and laughing and making a fuss, nicely, when they were doing it right.

Yesterday the Italians did their best to stop Ireland beating them, which is the only way they know how to win, given that they never have enough pace in their backs to cut loose and really win, as in really winning. The commentators were saying today that this was a very good "technical" performance by the Italians, which means that they have a sneaky foreigner (at the moment it is a French ex scrum half) who teaches them all the sneaky little tricks that the ref cannot see because of all those men's bottoms in the way, and they get to lose by fewer points. But until the Italians start converting star soccer players into star rugger players they are going to go on propping up this tournament.

And then England smashed Wales. Of course I am delighted that England won, and by what eventually became the handsome margin of thirty four points. But I have never seen an England Wales game with so little star quality on show. Remembering as I do the days when Bennett, JJ Williams, JPR Williams, Gerald Davies and the rest of them, above all Bennett's predecessor at fly half, the sublime Barry John, would dazzle their way past England, while England's dancing David Duckham was doing his considerable best to match them, and then having purred with pleasure at the gliding perfection that was Jeremy Guscott and most recently having exulted at the twinkling toes of Jason Robinson, I had to make do yesterday with a bloke called Cueto. Cueto is one of those slightly fat men who is actually faster than he looks, or than even seems possible for somebody that shape and size, and his try, scored quite early on in the first half to get England motoring, was the one moment of true, crowd-on-their-feet, individual class in the entire game. Of the entire weekend, now I come to think of it. He ran right past a little Welsh bloke, probably also called Williams but I really do not remember, who was supposed to be quick himself but who was made to look flat-footed.

Apart from that, it was just a case of the bigger and rougher boys trampling all over the smaller ones. Wales suffered a lot from "turnovers", which is when a bigger boy scrags you and takes the ball away. But there was no poetry in it that I could see.

It did not help that at least half the many England tries seemed to involve infringements of various kinds (Guscott called one of the offending passes "not all that forward", which got a laugh) of the sort that only commentators can see but which referees cannot seem to, despite all their cameras and communications devices.

The other memorable moment of the England Wales game was when the England scrum did another of those twenty five yard shoves. This time it did not result in a try, but you could tell at that point that Wales were going to lose. After you have been on the receiving end of some of that, your animal spirits evaporate. It is as if you are playing twenty people instead of fifteen, an effect no doubt strengthened in Welsh minds when, after an hour of a couple of other blokes playing, England brought on Lawrence Dallaglio and Matt Dawson as substitutes. They both played for England in the last World Cup final, but then took a bit of a breather. And they both celebrated coming on by scoring tries. Dallaglio, who looks good enough to play in the next World Cup as well, was helped by the ref getting in the way of the poor wretch of a Welshman who trying to stop him. Dawson was helped by knocking it on just before gathering it and running over to score.

Tonight, live in its entirety, on ITV regular non-digital telly if that is all you have, Super Bowl XL, the one with the poofy protective costumes. The Pittsburg Prettyboys against the Seattle Caf� Lattes. Just kidding, I love the Super Bowl. (Didn't mean to upset your feelings. Oops, linked to them after all.) And personally I love the fact that the Rolling Stones are doing the half time entertainment, although what with it being in Detroit, home of Motown, not everyone was at first quite so happy.

(4)

If, like me, you were vaguely annoyed that Livingstone acquired the Olympics, then you must hope that you are either away during the hell that will be the summer of 2012 (my holidays are accumulating now!), or you must campaign for new sports to appear in the Olympiad. The more violent, the faster, the more dangerous, the better. And free drugtaking, of course. Why not allow genetic modification for athletes. "It's at their own risk".

One candidate is the decidedly cool Rocket Racing League. This flying Formula One has not acquired lift as yet, but races are looked for in a year's time. The origins of this competition lie in the Ansari X Prize, with a nod to their barnstorming ancestors back in the early days of aircraft.

A debut exhibition race is planned for the X Prize Cup in September 2006. In the six months after that, the league expects to see races at an additional two air shows and two car racing events, with a championship event in New Mexico at the 2007 edition of the X Prize Cup.

The events will take a leaf from motor racing's book.

Rocket planes called X-Racers will compete on a sky 'track' in the design of a Grand Prix race, with long straights and the added dimenson of vertical ascents and deep banks. The race will run perpendicular to spectators and be about two miles long, one mile wide and 1,500m in the air. The X-Racers will be staggered upon take-off and fly their own 'tunnel' of space, each separated by a hundred metres or so.

Pilots will be guided by differential GPS (Global Positioning System) technology to help them avoid collisions.

Necessity may be the mother but thrillseeking is the father of invention: on second thoughts, the Olympics would ruin it. But I would still welcome a 'skytrack' in London, and you can submit your own idea for a rocker racer name on the website...

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The question has recently arisen as to whether it is ever right for a journalist to hoax a person into divulging certain facts or opinions that said person might not otherwise divulge. This week, the English Football Association told England soccer coach Sven Goran Eriksson that his contract would end immediately after the World Cup tournament in July, following comments Eriksson made to a News of the World journalist posing as someone else, the "fake Sheikh".

Now, in the increasingly trivial world of British public life, all this might be of interest only to those who follow team sports. I know that a good many readers of this site probably do not give a damn about sporting contests but who might be troubled about the News of the World's antics in this case. That newspaper conned a man into giving an interview. It deliberately misled Eriksson, who divulged some not-terribly-interesting facts about members of the England team and about his ambitions in the future. (Try to suppress your yawns, Ed).

Even so, some might argue that if the News of the World was trying to nail a terrorist suspect, say, that such subterfuge might be okay. Well, maybe. But what this latest episode has done is to further reduce the already-low reputation of the press, sow further paranoia about the media's activities and hence give further ammunition to those in power who want to shackle the media. And all for a pathetic story about a venal Swede with an eye for the main chance and the ladies. How terribly British.

This writer seems to agree that there has not been nearly enough anger about what the NotW did. I hope that newspaper is made to suffer for its actions, although I suspect nothing much will be done. Had that paper been a business conning trade secrets from a rival, criminal charges might now be on the cards.

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The recent death of the footballer George Best has seen an outpouring of sentimental remembrance about the skill and talent of one of Britain's greatest ever footballers. It has also seen a sober reflection of the darker side of Best's life. As Sue Mott pointed out:

As a sportsman, he was ruinously worshipped as a god. As society's golden boy, gloriously handsome, funny and highly intelligent, he enjoyed all life's little luxuries in conveyor-belt quantities. He was a Hollywood film star from Belfast and while we may now lament the wine, women and song, if you had been there at the time, could you have been the one to say: 'Shall we put the cork back in the champagne, George, I think we've had enough?"

It is a common theme of society that those who are blessed with extraordinary talents at one discipline are allowed special leeway in manners, morals and behaviour that are not bestowed upon lesser mortals. Had Best not been such a great footballer he would undoubtedly have been shunned by society as a drunk and a lecher. But because he was once a truly great footballer, he was treated as something different. People tolerated his drunkenness and women gave themselves to him sexually because he was genuinely seen as being cut from a higher cloth then other men. This may seem unfair, and in a way it is, but it was also the root of his downfall.

George Best, and footballers in general, though, are hardly the only sort of celebrity to take advantage of the special rules of society that are afforded to those touched by genius. And it has been going on for a long time.

Nearly 200 years ago, the poet Lord Byron made use of his fame as a poet to indulge himself in all manner of peccadillos, most of them sexual. That was perhaps not so uncommon for a Peer of the Realm back then, but it was mirrored by the behaviour of Percy Bysshe Shelley. A more dramatic example is in the personal life of Ludwig van Beethoven. Poor health, deafness, depression, loneliness and financial troubles made him a very difficult man to deal with, but he was indulged by many people precisely because he was obviously the greatest musical talent of his day.

Poets and classical composers do not have the influence on society in this day and age as they used to. The place of Byron and Beethoven has been taken by sports stars and actors and television celebrities. Some of these people, like Shane Warne are as gifted in his field as Byron was as a poet; and Warne has been noted for womanising on a considerable scale as well. Some are, in sober fact, non-entities, but we live in a vacuous time where everyone gets their 'fifteen minutes of fame'.

Many not so talented people have also exploited their celebrity to get away with actions that would not be tolerated in others; Hollywood is of course notorious for this sort of thing, where actors and actresses have their notions of their own worth and talent over-inflated by agents, publicists, and the media. A similar fate has befallen many popular musicians over the last forty years. This sort of bad behaviour takes many forms, not just in terms of sexual self-indulgence, but substance abuse, or simply by being a difficult and unpleasant person to be around. The life and times of John Lennon reflect this- he confused his musical talent with wisdom, and spent his latter years pontificating about a society of which his understanding of seems have been very limited indeed. However, because he was such a fine musical talent, no one was willing to stand up to Lennon and tell him that he was talking nonsense.

Why? Why do we allow this select group of people, not all of whom are that talented, to get away with this sort of thing. Why can't we "put the cork back in the champagne" as it were? There seems to be something innate to many people who must feel that they can reflect the glory of the star's achievements by indulging them in their foibles. This can not be healthy for us any more then it is healthy for the stars. Just look at George Best now.

(4)

Those smart fellows at the Marginal Revolution economics blog like to track all manner of strange and innovative ways in which Man engages in the age-old routine of truck and barter. Sport has spawned all manner of new business enterprises in recent years and now it is possible for investors to build assets by investing in the future market value of footballers.

Makes sense, really. These days football players, even quite mediocre ones - never mind great talents like Pele or George Best (RIP) - are paid enormous amounts of money in their careers. Rather like the bloodstock trade, I think. The idea of getting a financial stake in a player is also likely to bring investor pressure on players to be monitored off the field as well as on it (do we really want a potentially lucrative asset to be carousing down the pub?)

Personally, I am sticking to equities, bonds, cash and a bit of brick and mortar.

(3)

How quickly this (click on this picture to make the triumph even bigger!) . . .

. . . has turned into this:

After England sneaked the Ashes 2-1, they have now been soundly beaten 2-0 by Pakistan. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. If Warne don't get you then Shoaib Akhtar and Danish Kaneria must. I wonder what Al Qaeda will make of that.

All very catastrophic. Until you turn your mind to a real catastrophe. To put all of the above in perspective, spare a thought for cricket in Zimbabwe, a grain of sand through which to see the chaos of the world out there.

A year or two ago, there was a great exodus of international cricketers from Zimbabwe, but they were mostly white guys, with only the occasional black man involved. The Mugabe regime had no problem calling them a bunch of racists and Uncle Toms.

But just over a week ago, the new Zimbabwe captain, the impeccably black Tatenda Taibu, and a thoroughly gutsy cricketer by the way, having already expressed his extreme displeasure at what was happening to Zimbabwean cricket, and having lead another huge player rebellion, by the new multi-coloured lot, remember, resigned:

"I've resigned from Zimbabwe cricket as a whole," Taibu said from Harare on Thursday.

"I've had problems with the way Zimbabwe cricket is being run for the past few years," said the 22-year-old, the youngest captain in Test cricket history when he took over in May 2004.

Maybe that was what decided that Mugabe regime that something had to be done. Basically, a couple of Mugabe-ites had been given Zimbabwe cricket to "run", i.e. ruin, loot, etc., and the Mugabe regime (i.e. Robert bloody Mugabe) decided that they had to stop, or would at any rate make good scapegoats for what even they (Mugabe) now saw as a problem. So, the Zimbabwe equivalent of the men in big raincoats went round at 4 am to arrest the two miscreants. But, they had been tipped off and had fled.

Cricket people are complaining about the uselessness of cricket's global governing body, the ICC, in this matter. But you cannot really expect the ICC to sort out Zimbabwe cricket. The problem is not cricket in Zimbabwe, the problem is Zimbabwe.

Nevertheless, cricket, by dramatising so publicly the horror story that is Zimbabwe now, may actually be contributing something:

John Stremlau, professor of international affairs at South Africa's Witwatersrand University, said the Zimbabwe Cricket meltdown could become the catalyst for a much broader internal revolt.

"Inflation is more than 400 per cent, the US dollar to the Zim [Zimbabwe dollar] is running at 1 to 100,000 [on the black market] and everything's been criminalised and linked to the survival of the Zimbabwe cabal," he said.

"The mystery is when the tipping point will come and it'd be an interesting footnote to history if it was the flap over the cricket team."

Yes it would. The sooner Mugabe is tipped, alive or dead, into the bucket of history the better, and nobody is going to be particularly choosy about what tipped him. If cricket can help to see off this monster, good for cricket.

If that happens, then maybe the apparently myopic policy of other cricketing countries just carrying on playing with whatever cricketers Zimbabwe put into the field against them will have been justified, sort of. Results are what matter when you are dealing with something like Mugabe, not your mere conscience. Had cricket quarantined itself from Zimbabwe, this latest fiasco could not have happened, because any cricket problems in Zimbabwe would (a) not have attracted nearly so much outside attention, and (b) would have been blameable by Mugabe on outside interference.

Had Taibu not had the chance to prove himself to be the formidable cricketer and personality that he is, his resignation would not have counted for much. As it is, it just might count, as Professor Stremlau says, for rather a lot.

(26)

It has been a sad few days in British sport, which has lost arguably the most talented football player these islands have produced in George Best. He died, as many people will know, a few years after having a liver transplant necessitated by a long history of alcohol abuse. For those unfamiliar with his story, he was born in Belfast and played at Manchester United in one of its most successful periods in the mid- to late 60s but left top-class football aged only 27.

I am glad that in most of the coverage about him, the focus has been on the football rather than the messy personal life. And what a fantastic player he was! If even Brazilian maestro Pele called him the greatest player in the world, then who are we to demur? I was born in the year - 1966 - that Best gave what aficionados and team-mates reckon was Best's finest display, demolishing Portugese side Benfica with two goals, the second involving a mazy run past several defenders before sticking the ball into the back of the net.

Best was an alcoholic, which some people regard as a disease that one is born with rather than a condition over which people, possessed of free will, have control. Interestingly, I get the impression, by reading some of Best's own remarks, that he was a man in control of his own destiny and did not, as far as I am aware, choose to play the victim card. There is no doubt, though, that some people have found it hard to conquer the bottle, although others, such as Tottenham soccer ace Jimmy Greaves, managed to give up on booze and preserve their health and live into a ripe old age.

Anyway, I expect DVDs of Best's football brilliance to be hot sellers this Christmas. May he rest in peace.

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Via Stephen Pollard, I read this:

The cost of staging the London Olympic Games in 2012 is set to double. Senior officials organising the Games say construction costs have been seriously underestimated by Tessa Jowell's Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

Being a council tax paying Londoner I read on, with a tensed-up face, and I did not have far to go for the bad news. Here is the next damn sentence:

A rise in costs could spell financial disaster for Londoners.

And is this really going to help?

The Observer has learnt that the government has in recent days appointed consultancy KPMG to begin a reappraisal of its Olympic costs.

Which reminds me of that committee that Lenin set up to look into the problem of bureaucracy.

Building the Olympic Park in east London was projected to cost £2.37bn. The city's mayor, Ken Livingstone, assured Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that any overruns would be met by Londoners. On these figures that amounts to an extra £1,000 per household. This means a steep rise in council tax is on the cards in London, as the Chancellor is unlikely to meet any shortfall.

The price of that priceless look on Chirac's face is starting to become a bit clearer, and a lot higher.

(4)

In Spain, when Barcelona play Real Madrid, there is more then just three points at stake. And when Barcelona go to the Bernabeu and win, there is a lot of significance attached to it.

That is what they did on the weekend; Phil Ball looks at the history and the implications.

The most startling fact about Saturday's game was not so much the two wonderful goals scored by Ronaldinho but rather the fact that after the Brazilian's second and Bar�a's third, several sections of the Bernab�u began to applaud him, and by implication, the whole team. Florentino P�rez looked on from the Director's box in stony silence.

Madrid experts have been speculating all Sunday on this one, but the last living memory that any journalist has of the Madrid supporters applauding the eternal enemy was back in 1983 when Maradona ran Real's defence dizzy in the cl�sico of that year. Was this a sign of Madrid's sporting supporters, or was it just their way of protecting themselves psychologically?

Read the whole thing, as they say.

(3)

I have always had a soft spot for Wigan Athletic. Ever since they entered the former Fourth Division in 1978, they have struck me as plucky underdogs in football and in their home town. Association football in Wigan holds the same status as rugby union in Australia, I suspect.

Now, the Latics, under the inspired leadership of their manager, Paul Jewell, sit just under the superstars of the English Premiership. If they maintain the successful record that recently gained Jewell Manager of the Month for September, this team might be in the running for a spot in the Champions League. Such a success would confirm that the pyramid structure of the English leagues, helped by financial patronage, is not entirely dead.

However, Wigan tended to fade in the latter part of the season when they played in the First Division and, odds on, this will happen in the next few months. Still, let their fans dream of UEFA for this year, if nothing else.

(8)

Though I am without a car, and without a prospect of a car, I love Jeremy Clarkson. The motoring information is not useful, but the snide asides are glorious. And usually spot-on (if exaggerated for effect).

But here the striving for effect goes horribly wrong:

The Olympics are a test designed to quantify and celebrate human physical achievement. They are not an opportunity for a bunch of stupid, left-wing, weird-beard failures to make political points.

Jeremy, Jeremy, Jeremy. For once, you have missed the point entirely. The Olympics are only the grand jamboree they are because they provide an opportunity to make stupid political points for collectivist monsters with funny macho facial hair. (Moustaches mostly — you should recall cuddly Ken is a recovering moustache-wearer — though the beards do get a look in.) Any human physical achievement is the incidental means not the end.

For anyone who doubts me on this, imagine an alternative Olympic movement. There are no anthems; no national teams; no equipment the competitors cannot personally carry; sponsorship, fine, but of individual achievers not collectives. The venue is chosen by lot, 18 months in advance only, among those places that already have facilities adequate for staging the narrower set of events, so there's no auction using other people's money.

Would such an event still constitute a celebration of human physical achievement? Would there still be sporting heroes and heroines? You bet.

Would it be beamed 20 hours a day to the state television channels of all the world's nationalist socialist régimes (i.e. almost all the world's ré:gimes)? No. It would be relegated to the status (too high for my taste, but that's the market) of ordinary sports programming, with each sport taking its usual audience share. The main news would turn back to "Prime Minister greets Chinese Foreign Minister and signs Human Rights Treaty" news, where a quota of flags, anthems, parades, and national self-importance could be assured.

(9)

Last Monday, England won the Ashes. (If I tell myself this often enough, I will eventually believe it.) And when I mentioned this fact (for fact it is) here, I mentioned also the rather fine new stand that they have just built at the Oval, where that final clinching game of the series was played.

Today I walked across the river to the Oval and took some photos of this new stand. And I have done a posting about how it looks at my personal blog, together with some pictures snapped from the TV coverage. And then I found this really great picture of it that someone else took:

Last Tuesday, London celebrated England winning the Ashes, and I also went along and took photos of that. They are not perfect photos, if only because I had such a lousy view of the proceedings. I ended up taking a lot of snaps of the giant TV screen they had behind everything, just as if I had been at home. But, this giant screen yielded some fine imagery, with no interference patterns or surprise black horizontal splodges of the kind that I get when I photo my TV at home, and I am very happy with the photos I did manage to take. You can see my favourites ones here.

Some of favourite pictures were of the words they stuck up for us all to sing:

So there you have it. England won the Ashes because God was on our side.

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In circumstances which for an hour or two were excruciatingly tense, but which in the end bordered on farce, England today regained the Ashes, by not losing the final test at the Oval to Australia. Champion Aussie bowlers Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne gave England a fright by having them five down by lunch, and it looked as if Australia could soon be in and knocking off the runs. But a first test match century by Kevin Pietersen - what a day to pick! - soothed England nerves. Once it became impossible for either side to win, everyone wanted to end it - England and their fans to celebrate, the Aussies to say their goodbyes and get out of there. But the idiot laws of cricket, or lack of the right law of cricket to cover the situation, caused an absurdly anti-climactic period during which the umpires first said that the light had got too bad, and then faffed about while everyone else just stood about, before they eventually declared the game over.

Channel Four had no intention of just switching off their television coverage, but after all the foolishness, things got back on track, with the celebrations duly being drowned with red, white and blue confetti, jetting out of confetti machines.

It had looked, after more seriously farcical proceedings yesterday when not very bad light had stopped play for the second half of the day, as if the final day might, as a result, not be very tense, but McGrath and Warne soon saw off that idea.

Warne also got two more wickets at the end when it no longer mattered, bringing his tally in the match to twelve, and his tally for the series to forty, if my calculations do not deceive me. Despite ending up on the losing side, Warne has been the Man of the Series for me. Without him, England would have been out of sight in this game by the end of the first day. But Warne beat England back from 82-0 to 131-4, and it was game on from then on.

The turning point of the series, it is pretty generally agreed, was when Glenn McGrath, who dominated in the first test at Lords, trod on a ball and hurt himself just before the start of the second game. He missed that game, and was never the same deadly accurate bowler again, despite manful efforts. In that one moment, the series went from being Australia's for sure to anybody's, and it stayed anybody's until late this afternoon, when England finally got their noses properly in front.

Duncan Fletcher, the Zimbabwean who has been coaching England for the last few years, had to be told to smile at the end, and he fleetingly obliged. He must have been doing a lot right. He is good at avoiding the limelight.

But most of all, I think the difference was sheer luck. England played very well indeed, but they also had just that tiny bit more luck of the good sort, and just a tiny bit less luck of the bad sort. The commentators talk about how England "dominated more". But England damn near lost that second game, and coming back from 2-0 down would surely have been beyond them. England won four tosses out of five, which made a big difference. And just to take today, Pietersen was nearly run out, and was also dropped three times before he got seriously going - although you could say that this is only fair considering that Pietersen dropped every catching chance that came anywhere near him all summer.

I want to believe that Shane Warne is one of the very greatest players there has ever been, what with England having finally got him to be in a losing Aussie team. But Flintoff got the "Man of the Series" award. But I suppose they have to pick someone from among the winners. (Maybe Warne lost it by fluffing the easiest chance Australia had today to get Pietersen out, and with it, as it turned out, Australia's best chance of winning the match and keeping the Ashes.)

Read more here, a lot of it by our very own Aussie, Michael Jennings. Scott Wickstein reckons the Aussies did not show England sufficient respect. Maybe.

Finally, a word of praise for all the people associated with Surrey Cricket Club who were responsible for the vast, flat arch of a new stand that now graces the Oval. It has turned a great ground into a ground that is less great in size, but even greater as a place to go and to see.

(17)

Yesterday I expressed the hope that England would beat Australia at Trent Bridge, and today they did.

But England fans like me were once more put through the ringer. England should have had no difficulty knocking off the 129 runs they needed in their final innings. But the Australians fought like hell to claw their way back into the contest at exactly the moment when they should have been accepting the inevitable, and once again they nearly succeeded, England scrambling home by a mere three wickets. Warne and Lee are such ignorant fellows. They never seem to know when they are beaten.

The general opinion is that this is one of the greatest Ashes series ever. And this England win is good for that series in the sense that if England had lost this game, Australia would have retained the Ashes, no matter what happened at the Oval. As it is, the Oval game is winner take all.

The closeness of this Trent Bridge game makes it all the more regrettable that this otherwise fabulous contest was disfigured by yet another important and hideously mistaken umpiring decision. Australian batsmen Simon Katich was given out leg before wicket, at a time when he was batting very well and might have gone on to help set England a lot more than 129 to win. We all make mistakes. Umpires cannot be infallible. But on this occasion, technologically generated evidence made it clear to everyone before the unfortunate Katich had even walked off the pitch that the ball (a) pitched outside the leg stump, and (b) would have gone over the top of the stumps, and that the umpire was accordingly wrong on both counts to give him out.

Some erroneous decisions by cricket umpires take many minutes to deconstruct fully, but this Katich decision was immediately revealed to be wrong. So, if the umpires had had the same technology in their hands as the commentators now have, not only would a correct decision have been given at a crucial juncture in this very close match; it would have been given with almost no delay.

The current circumstances, in which umpires are made public fools of within seconds of giving their verdicts, cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely.

The LBW decision that did for Gilchrist also looked dodgy, but, assuming that I understand the finer points of the LBW law, the technology was able to show that this decision was almost certainly right. But that just means that the umpire guessed right, this time. He should not have had to guess. He should have known.

Cameras are already used to settle run outs, to the general satisfaction of all involved. Today, cameras were used to show that a possible run out was not, because England's wicketkeeper had knocked the bails off before the ball arrived, and again to establish that the catch which later on dismissed Andrew Strauss was properly held and had not hit the ground first. There was a bit of a delay, but not an excessive one given the importance of such decisions.

I understand how this situation has arisen. This clever LBW technology could not immediately be given to the umpires. It had to be refined and proved to be satisfactory. But now it has proved itself. We all � fans and players alike � now trust its verdicts more than we trust the umpires. Had the umpires had it in their hands today, who knows how the result might have gone? Who knows how many runs England might have had to chase in their final innings?

All of which made the characteristically sporting manner in which the Aussies took their defeat today all the more impressive. Considering how little practice they have had at it during the last fifteen years, they are good losers.

(6)

I like to interrupt TV coverage of test cricket with CEEFAX news of about other cricket matches, and this afternoon the news trickled through that England were (probably) winning � and then that they had finally won � the Ashes!

The ladies of Australia have had the same armlock on the Female Ashes as their menfolk have had on the Male Ashes in recent years, only more so. But today the English ladies beat the Australian ladies by 6 wickets to clinch a series win. With luck, England will get the Male Ashes back this summer as well. The men of Australia followed on today at Trent Bridge, and the men of England are well placed to get a win tomorrow and go one up with one to play in their series. Here's to us limeys making it a double.

I wonder if a lady will ever play international cricket for her men's team, so to speak. Cricket is not a game that is wholly conditional on brawn, although you do have to be fit, of course. Some of the greatest ever batsmen, like Bradman, Gavaskar and Tendulkar to name but three, have been quite small men. And bowlers, even quick ones, do not have to be giants either. And great slow bowlers can be quite small, and even physically handicapped. So, even if a female physique may be a handicap, it may one day be overcome.

Meanwhile the usual low-level politico-sporting storm rumbles and bumbles along about whether Civilisation ought, still, to be playing cricket games against Zimbabwe. At one time I was in the habit of making a bit of a fuss about such games here, because it was a way to make a fuss about Zimbabwe. But all the world that cares now knows that Robert Mugabe is ruining that unhappy country and the only question is whether someone can end his life and/or despotic reign before natural causes finally oblige. Other African rulers do not want anything done, because this might set a dangerous precedent. I mean, what kind of place would Africa become if merely being a thieving and destructive monster meant that you lost your job as tyrant? Very different, that is for damn sure. And since the rest of the world is disinclined to revive White Imperialism and barge in and rearrange matters without lots of local consent � the only new imperialists in Africa these days are the Chinese, and they are there for the minerals, not to take up the Yellow Man's Burden � it really does not matter what the cricketers do about Zimbabwe. Playing against the current politically deranged Zimbabwe team and thrashing it probably does just as much good (and just as little) as refusing to play against it.

(16)

I am watching that supreme embodiment of the Anglosphere culture at the moment - cricket, surely the finest game invented by Man. England are building on their first-innings batting performance against a rather shaky-looking Australia, although the Aussies have a chance to draw the match I think thanks to a superb batting effort by Shane Warne. Warne is normally and rightly famed for his leg spin, able to make the ball move in a bewitching fashion.

The Ashes series, as the England vs Australia Test matches are known, are currently shown on the Channel 4 terrestrial tv channel. The channel has made a huge success of its cricket coverage, I think. Its commenators are excellent, intelligent and don't interrupt the flow of play. Even the adverts shown during a brief pause in play don't irritate me like I thought they would. Simon Hughes, a true cricket geek, does a fine job of explaining key terms and tactics to novices. Cricket is a complex game and yet the presenters seem to make it accessible without dumbing it down.

Four of us Samizdata scribblers are split down the middle on this Ashes series, I guess. Two Aussies - Scott Wickstein and Michael Jennings - pitted against Brian Micklethwait and yours truly.

Update, despite the so-far snarky remarks in the comments sections, my joy continues to rise thanks to today's batting performance. Summary of the game here.

(11)

That is a variation on what Sir Alex Ferguson said after Manchester United sneaked a 2-1 win over Bayern Munich in the 1999 final, I think it was, of the European Champions Cup/League/whatever they call it nowadays, with two late late goals in time added on for injuries.

This morning, England were overwhelming favourites to wrap this up by a hundred odd runs, with only two tail end wickets to get. But nobody had told the Assie batsmen that they were tail enders. They batted like batsmen, in conditions which, unlike yesterday when seventeen wickets fell, suddenly looked perfect for batting again. Shane Warne, having got himself out like a pub amateur in the first innings, batted beautifully, until, unbelievably, he was out hit wicket. He kicked his stumps over! And with sixty more runs needed that looked to be it. England were about to win a meaningful test match against Australia by fifty odd runs. Hurrah! When was the last time that happened?

But Lee and Kasparowicz carried right on. There was a close LBW that might have been given. A dropped catch at third man. And suddenly Australia were only one edged four from a win that would have given them a 2-0 lead in the Ashes series and England the biggest kick in the stomach in many a year. But then, Kaspar fended off yet another short ball from Harmison, Jones the Gloves held onto it, show-off umpire Billy Bowden raised his finger, and it was suddenly 1-1 when 2-0 to the Aussies looked a certainty. Two runs. Two runs!! Second narrowest test match win ever, apparently.

This has been a terrific game, which quite blotted me off the Samizdata screen for the duration. The commentators have a concept which they sometimes wheel out called the "champagne moment" of the match. Well this match had two champagne moments at least that will live long in the cricketing memory. There was Warne's ball that bowled Strauss round his legs on Friday just before the close (Warne's bowling throughout was a wonder), leaving England jittery instead of confident coming into Saturday. And then there was the perfect slower ball that Harmison bowled Clarke with, with the last ball of yesterday, which seemed to make England's task this morning easy. There was the great game-turning over by Flintoff, which took Australia from 47-0 to 48-2 (Langer and Ponting) yesterday afternoon. There were eighteen sixes in this game, which is almost two per session, i.e. two more than you usually get.

And just to put the cherry on the cake, that geek-maniac Hughes who works for Channel 4 reckons that the final Jones catch was not out, because Kasparowicz's hand was not touching the bat when the ball hit it. That LBW, on the other hand... There have been the usual crop of umpiring disagreements with the technologically better informed commentators, and they really must give the umpires the same toys as the commentators have.

You do not have to know what hit wicket or LBW or third man means to get the idea. Just translate all of the above into your preferred sport, and slap a hellishly tight finish on the end.

It really is humiliating how much this nonsense still matters to me. I keep telling myself that it - test match cricket between Australia and England - is only a game. Which is true. And King Lear is only a play, and Asia is only a continent.

And because of this particular only-a-game game, the rest of this Ashes series is going to twist my guts around for many more weeks yet.

Plenty more on this game here.

(19)

Yes, yes, I know, his girlfriend is Sheryl Crowe, he is supported by John "doh" Kerry, which may suggest he is in need of ideological help, but can anyone doubt, after winning the Tour de France for 7 times in a row, that Lance Armstrong is one of the greatest athletes to have ever lived?

And he comes from Texas. If I was a Frenchman, that has to hurt.

(19)

I enjoy watching and playing a bit of golf - despite my rather large playing handicap (gulp) but a question that comes to me as I watch the British Open up in blustery St. Andrews, Scotland is this: why, for the sake of reason, why, do so many golfers were such daft clothes? One guy is sporting a pink shirt, pink eye shade and the sort of trousers that constitute arrestable offences in some parts of the world.

Why?

(25)

Some of the commenters here are upset that so many Samizdata contributors object to the Olympic Games being staged in London, as if we are all anti-sports or just plain miserable old farts. Not so. Writers David Carr and Michael Jennings of this parish, for example, both like sports like football and cricket. As do I (I play a bit of cricket and golf, besides other sports). The root cause of our hostility is simply that barring a miracle, the Games will end up costing the taxpayer a lot of money, and as believers in capitalism and limited government, we don't think sport is a legitimate government spending item in the way that say, defence is. In fact, if we cannot cut sports or the arts, say, from public spending, how can we honestly hope to roll back the state to the extent that we would like?

But to be more positive about all this, it is surprising that more has not been written about how the Games, and similar events typically paid for out of taxes, could not be made entirely reliant on the private sector. The Games will create a new set of facilities in East London, which hopefully can be used for decades. Great. Then let the expected future streams of revenues generated by said facilities be used as collateral for things like bonds to pay for the project.

Asset-backed securities are an increasingly common source of funding in our capital markets. Even pop star David Bowie, demonstrating the sort of business savvy common in the pop world, has issued bonds using his record sales as collateral. Why not issue "Olympic Bonds" with 20 or 30-year maturities to pay for the Games? Pension funds, which are hungry for long-dated, reliable income, would jump at them.

But of course the rub is that the backers of the Games may lack the confidence that the event will generate the kind of economic returns used in the sales pitch in the run up the vote on Wednesday, which is why there is a high chance that the taxpayer will have to fork out for the Games.

If any budding Olympic entrepreneurs out there want to prove me wrong and show how the Games can be entirely self-supporting, then comment away.

(14)

Three cheers and hip, hip, hooray for London will indeed host the 2012 Olympics.

Sing halleluiahs and hosannas for mere, prosaic words alone cannot even begin to express the happiness that courses through my heart like a swollen river. My cup runneth over and my soul doth soar like a lark ascending the azure, cloudless, sunlit summer sky.

If only another miracle would open up a hole in space-time through the next seven pointless, dreary years so that I could, this very day, cast my eyes upon the blazing, towering Olympic torch as it shines like a beacon of hope over my home town while I fervently pray from below that I may be touched by just a few humble rays of that glory. Then my life would surely be complete.

I want to jump for joy. I want to dance till dawn. I want to reach out my hands to every single one of my fellow human beings, gather them all into my arms and hug them like long-lost children. I want to capture the stars, leap over the moon and fly along the milky-way.

But before I do any of those things, I must quickly dash into the toilet and vomit my guts up. Excuse me.

(11)

Thanks to this Instapundit posting linking to this, and then following one of the links there, I have found my way to tifoc, sports blogger extraordinary, and well worth a read if you like cricket, soccer, F1, or just a different angle on things.

His posting of last Thursday refers to an extraordinary coincidence:

In 1981, the Pope died, Prince Charles got married and Liverpool were crowned Champions of Europe.

This year (2005), the Pope died, Prince Charles got married and Liverpool were crowned Champions of Europe.

However, tifoc did not spot this himself, and nor did the emailer who told him about it. (Unless the BBC reporting the same coincidence in April was itself a coincidence.)

Ashes anyone? This bizarre game last Saturday suggests that England are at least in with a chance of doing what they also did in . . . 1981.

(22)

Still buzzing with pleasure after a terrific day with pals at the Goodwood Festival of Speed on Saturday, it struck me as I walked around the ground and past the huge car park as to how fantastic is the level of motoring engineering, aesthetics and of course safety these days. But we are hemmed in as never before by rules and regulations, speed cameras and road humps, the combined effect of which is to make driving in most of Britain a frustrating experience. The joys of flooring the accelerator on the open road, with the roar of wind in the hair, are over.

Such a shame. As my dad said, it is a bit like being surrounded by the world's most beautiful women and then to be told by the State that you are not allowed to ask any of them for a date.

(2)

Well, it was a nice idea. But today I have to say oh dear, and Michael Jennings can say heh. Australia smashed England at one-day cricket today, and the man who made the biggest impact was the still great Glenn McGrath, who took two of the three wickets that fell at the very start of the England innings. England tried hard after that but never recovered.

In other sporting news, the rule in England is that if you are Scottish and you lose you are Scottish, but if you win you are British. I did not know that Tim Henman had Scottish ancestors, but it would seem that he does. On the other hand, someone called Andrew Murray is, for the duration of his Wimbledon run, British.

In other cricket news, the Zimbabwean cricket team is not welcome. That is history, of the horrible sort, and a rather ineffectual attempt to make it less horrible. Plus, the cricketers of the USA are at each others' throats. That is more like farce, although having been caught up in one of these irreversible faction fight things myself, I sympathise more deeply than most would.

(32)

I had all kinds of plans of Things To Do over the weekend, but instead I spent my time following the news, with growing disbelief, of Australia losing two cricket matches, yesterday against England which was a bit of a surprise, and on Saturday against Bangladesh which was a cricket earthquake. The Aussies will probably pull themselves together by the time the test matches come around, because they are, after all, the Aussies, the best cricket team in the world. But they have now lost four games in a row, which is quite a hiccup by their standards. They lost the twenty over thrash against England last Monday, heavily, and then they lost to Somerset in a fifty-over warm-up game. And now they have lost these two games. As you can imagine, the British media are having a fine old wallow.

The general opinion is that Assie captain Ricky Ponting, who won both the tosses of the weekend, made a mistake in batting first against Bangladesh. Yesterday, he did it again against England, in a game where England would have put Australia in first. On days like these, the bowlers get whatever help they will from the conditions right at the start, while it is still a bit muggy. Later, bright sunshine makes it much better for the batters. There was a touch here of "we are going to get this right if it kills us", instead of "let us do what will get us the win", a win they are starting to need rather badly. Worse, this decision suggested that most insidious form of sporting arrogance, which goes: "you fellows have to do everything right to win, but we are so great that we do not have to do everything right to win. The regular rules do not apply to us. We can bat first when we should bat second. We can hook bouncers just over long leg. We can go out the night before and get pissed. We do not have to get our feat to the pitch of the ball. We do not have to warm up when we bowl. We just have to show up. And still win." Wrong. Great sportsman must have that vital dose of humility, which says that they only got great by doing everything right, and that to stay great they must continue to do everything right. But then again, maybe Ponting just wanted to practice batting first, and then defending dodgy totals.

Supporters of Australia will of course say that without Kevin Pietersen, England's new South-Africa-born wonder batsman, England would have lost, and that is true. Pietersen scored 91 not out in 65 balls to wrap it up with 3 wickets (too close for comfort) and 15 balls (an eternity in one day cricket) to spare, and was the Man of the Match despite Steve Harmison earlier taking 5 or 33. But that brings me to my second feeling about this summer's proceedings, which is for the first time in a long time, England may just have the edge in star quality over the Aussies. If the likes of Harmison, Andrew Flintoff, and now this extraordinary Pietersen character ("genius" was the word Vaughan used to describe his innings today), give of their very best during the forthcoming Ashes games, but if Australia's star bowlers Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath turn out to be a bit past their admittedly stellar best, then England have a real chance. Mike Atherton, in yesterday's Sunday Times, says that the Aussies are not what they were. He of all people knows all about what the Aussies were when they were what they were.

But, there is still Shane Warne. Glenn McGrath is very, very good, the best quick bowler of his time. Warne has been � still is? � something else again. Warne makes any bowling attack he is in twice as good. He bowls lots and lots of really good balls, including a few that are devastatingly good, and yet combines that with bowling hardly any bad balls, and certainly not the one bad ball every two overs or so that your average leg spinner will serve up. Against a Warneless bowling attack, the batsmen can reckon on times when they can cruise along and make some relatively easy runs without too much pressure, and prepare themselves for when the pressure resumes, with the next new ball say. But against a side with Warne in it, the pressure on batsmen is continuous. The quick bowlers can exhaust themselves in turn at the other end, while Warne just bowls and bowls. The only other bowling attack like this in cricket history was when the West Indians had about five ultra-fast bowlers taking it in turns. Recently Warne was voted, I think by some Australians, the greatest bowler of all time. (It may even have been the greatest cricketer.) This shocked me at the time, but thinking about it some more, I realised that this was right. If you were picking your all-time team, taking turns against another bloke picking his, school playground style, which bowler would you pick first, both to have him in your side and to deny him to the other side? Warne. Whenever, during the last few years, Warne did not play against England for some reason, England tended to do quite well. When Warne played, they crumpled, again and again.

Warne recently gave up playing one-day international cricket, and from now on will only play in five day test matches. He is now turning his arm over for Hampshire, and he took no part in this recent string of Aussie defeats. When he joins the Aussie party, he will undoubtedly try to raise his game and if he does he will duly transform the Aussie bowling. If that happens, Australia will go right back to being solid favourites, with all the other players suddenly playing better than before.

England's unknown quantity is Steve Harmison. Harmison has it in him to win the series on his own, the way Frank Tyson once did in Australia half a century ago. Today, for example, Harmison took three wickets in one over, and they were not any old three wickets. They were: the extremely dangerous Gilchrist, then Ponting (first ball) and Martyn (second ball). The next over he bagged Hayden (a phenomenal catch by Collingwood), and towards the end he bowled Mike Hussey with a slower ball, thus putting a damper on the final few overs of the Australian innings. Only the exceptional batting of Pietersen at the end denied Harmison the Man of the Match award. Perhaps more significantly, the radio commentators were saying that when Harmison was bowling, with slips and gullies, it was more like a test match than a limited overs game. This was his first game against Australia this summer. He did nothing during the recent tour of South Africa. But he apparently suffers from homesickness, and now he is at home. He has, incidentally, been taking lots of county wickets.

On day one of the test series, it could be Australia 350 for 2 and all this will be forgotten. Or not, in the sense that I � or perhaps Michael Jennings � will be linking back to this posting and saying either oh dear or heh.

In other sporting news, Sir Clive Woodward's Lions finally look like they might beat the All Blacks, but I still tip the locals to win. Why? Because this is not the World Cup.

Tim Henman is ever less likely to win Wimbledon the older he gets. That starts today. We will probably all be rooting for her.

And how about this for a F1 asco?

Football, meanwhile, is a game of two halves, and at the end Germany wins.

(178)

The competition to host the 2012 Olympic Games is now approaching its climax and two front runners are clearly emerging:

London and Paris have earned praise for their "very high-quality" bids to stage the 2012 Olympic Games in a crucial inspection report published on Monday.

There is clearly everything to play for in a contest which is far from over and, despite all the predictions to the contrary, London is still in with an excellent chance of winning the right to stage the Games. It is for this reason that I feel compelled to impose upon my fellow contributors and our readers and ask them to join with me in grand effort to get behind the Olympic bid. The Paris Olympic bid, that is.

You can start right away by sending messages of support for the Paris bid direct to the IOC by means of this feedback form. You can also send letters to the IOC at Chateau de Vidy 1007 Lausanne Switzerland. Or you can send your support by fax to: 41.21 621 62 16.

You can also contact your local political representatives and tell them how much you would love to see Paris get the 2012 Games and send similar messages to you own national Olympic Committee. Also, don't underestimate the drip-drip propoganda effect of letters to your local and national newspapers, calls to appropriate radio phone-in shows and messages on internet fora and, of course, blog comment sections.

Lastly, I want you all to join me in mass harnessing of psychic suggestive power by concentrating your mind on a mental image of the leafy, sun-dappled boulevards of Paris lined end-to-end with a throng of excited spectators waving and cheering on a procession of spandex-clad Olympians and then chant along with me:

"The Games must go to Paris. The Games must go to Paris. The Games must go to Paris. The Games must go to Paris."

Repeat this mantra over and over again until your positive energy has been imprinted on the ether.

Any other ideas and suggestions for bolstering the Paris bid are warmly welcomed. Remember, that every bit of effort helps and that you can make a difference. You can help spare my home town from having to endure the burden of this costly 20th century anachronism.

In anticipation of your kind assistance, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

(9)

Sport is going through an awkward transition phase just now, caused by the onward march of technology. During this phase, the problem is that the commentators often have technology to scrutinise and generally second-guess umpiring or refereeing decisions that are not available to the umpires or referees themselves.

This is quite natural. The commentators can afford to muck about with wild technological experiments. They can stick with them if they seem to add something to their descriptive and analytical efforts, and quietly discontinue them if they only confuse. And even if it takes them twenty minutes to come up with their techno-analysis, it is still worth them showing it to their viewers. But including technology into actual game officiating is a necessarily more cautious and cumbersome process. So there is bound, at any given moment, to be this mismatch between the techno-toys the commentators have, and what the umpires and referees have.

Trouble is, again and again, this technology makes fools out of the game officials. It makes chumps of the umps.

The other day, Liverpool won the European Cup. But would they have won it if the referees of the Liverpool Chelsea semi-final had been technologically assisted. Maybe that Liverpool goal would still have stood if the officials had been able to look at all that subsequent computerisation. But at least disgruntled Chelsea players and supporters would have known that the decision was based on a different interpretation of that information rather than on the opinion of people who were standing in entirely the wrong place to have a valid opinion on the subject.

Rugby, both league and union, already uses slow motion cameras to help them decide about contentious tries. Did his foot go over the side line before he touched down? Did he touch down properly? That kind of thing. (In rugby, unlike in American football, they do not call it a touch down, but you do actually have to touch it down.)

Cricket is the sport I know most about, when it comes to adjudication technology. And cricket is, and always has been, full of tricky decisions that the umpires have to make. Technology is slowly being introduced to help the umpires make fewer errors.

Cricket umpires already use slow motion cameras to decide about run out decisions. This is when a batsman fails (or does he?) to complete a run by reaching the line that matters before the fielders hit the stumps with the ball. And this has greatly improved these decisions. With their being less doubt, batsmen now get less benefit from it, but so what? These decisions are now clearly better.

A big problem remains, however, with LBW decisions. That's "leg before wicket" ? when the ball strikes the batsman's leg and would have hit the wicket. Or would it, question mark question mark, argument argument. There was a series not so long ago between England and South Africa which was settled in England's favour with a series of highly dubious LBWs in the deciding match, and that kind of nasty-taste-in-the-mouth we-was-robbed stuff happens quite often. But at least that happened, as I recall, before the age of Hawk-eye.

Hawk-eye is the machine that tells us, as well as anyone or anything can, whether a batsman was out LBW or not. And although the ultimate truth of the matter is still hard to be sure about - because, after all, the machine is still only guessing where the ball would have gone, rather than measuring anything it actually did do - Hawk-eye looks pretty convincing to me. Put it this way. If I were a batsman being given out, or a bowler begging in vain for the verdict, I would rather that Hawk-eye was supplying the verdict rather than some one-eyed umpire.

The cricket commentators also have their "snickometer" to determine whether the ball has touched the bat while passing it or not, and in some cases to work out whether the ball touched the bat before hitting the pad, and therefore whether or not a batsman can be given out LBW. (If he hits it first, however gently, it is not out.) The Snickometer produces an output that looks like a voice analyser, and expert interpreters to tell what kind of noise that spike is, and exactly when it happened. So the Snickometer can really help, with things like snicked catches to the wicketkeeper.

But, although the commentators, and hence also all the TV viewers like me, have Hawk-eye and the Snickometer, the umpires, as yet, do not. Time and again, they give their instant verdicts, based only on what they just saw, at full speed, and then moments later (fewer and fewer moments as time has gone by) Hawk-eye and/or the Snickometer have given their verdicts. Often they differ. Invariably, the technologically aided decisions are more convincing, and often embarrassingly so.

In the most recent televised cricket match, during the various excerpts and live periods that I watched, there were three dodgy LBW decisions.

I only realised at seven o'clock on Thursday evening that an international cricket match between England and Bangladesh had begun that day, such was the excitement that this contest had not generated among England cricket followers such as myself. And what a horrible mismatch it was. England won by an innings and a lot, with almost the entire Bank Holiday long weekend to spare.

Accordingly, it really didn't matter very much that on day one, one of the Bangladeshi batsmen was given out LBW, to a ball which Hawk-eye immediately decided would have missed the stumps by several inches, sideways and upwards, or that the following morning, England captain Michael Vaughan was given not out LBW when the commentators, and I for what that may be worth, and then a few seconds later Hawk-eye himself, all reckoned he was as bang in front as bang in front can be. Vaughan was then on 24, and went on to make 120, and the Bangladesh batsman wrongly given out in the Bangladesh first innings was their top scorer in the second innings, so these decisions did make a difference, and especially to the progress of the careers of the individual cricketers concerned. But not enough of a difference for anyone to care very much, so huge was the disparity between the two sides.

However, it is a good bet that at some stage during the serious cricket business of this summer - the small matter of a five match series between England and the mighty Australians, no less - there will be similar umpiring errors, which will be similarly revealed instantaneously to be errors, but which may have a more serious bearing on the outcome of the contest. The likelihood is that Australia will win this series handsomely. But if England play at their very best and if Australia fluff some of their lines, it may be closer than that - close enough for umpiring errors to matter quite a lot.

In the days when the only equipment that cricket had to help it decide about run outs and catches and LBWs was the eyes and the ears of the umpires, with no one else having any play-backs or slow motion cameras or computer analysis, and when any commentator who disagreed with the umpire was just backing his eyes and ears (from a hundred yards further away) against the umpire's, this was no problem. Umpires were, then as now, human, but you just had to accept their verdicts, because how else could things be decided? Mistakes got made, but were accepted as inevitable.

Now, however, it has become technologically possible, and hence humanly necessary, to do better.

It is sometimes said that all this technology undermines the authority of umpires. That is true. But only insofar as the cricket authorities do not allow the umpires to use it.

I am not really complaining about all this. As I say, this mismatch between what is good enough for commentators and what is good enough for umpires is inevitable, and there is bound to be a lag. All I am saying is that cricket is now wading through the treacle of this lag, and that it should be the concern of the cricket authorities to make as much use of technology as they conveniently can, as soon as they can, and to do away with as many obvious injustices as they can.

I am not saying that this will be easy to organise. Should the umpires have hand held kit and make their decisions on the pitch, or should all the decisions be referred to an off-pitch umpire, as run outs are now? Should as much weight be given to what the technology says would have happened (whether the ball would have hit the wicket, if it had not struck the batsman's pads), as to what it says did happen (snicks, balls pitching were they have to for an LBW to be given, and so on)? Should the verdict of Hawk-eye, in other words, be regarded as final? How long should everyone be made to wait for these verdicts? All very complicated. But these questions cannot be dodged, and must be dealt with.

Personally I would favour Hawk-eye's verdict being accepted as final, and I bet a lot of the players would prefer that also, even if Hawk-eye presumably does make the occasional mistake.

In the meantime, while the lag lasts, the argument will rumble on. Some say that the answer is not to give the technology to the umpires, but to snatch it away from the commentators, but that rabbit is already out of the bag, and will be very hard to stuff back in again without accusations of Luddism. (Personally, I find Hawk-eye's opinions fascinating, and would greatly miss them.) But more to the point, the fact that the technology is now a fact means that even if we all stop consulting it when something controversial happens, we still could have. So the arguments will not go away until the technology is accepted and made maximum use of.

In short, bring it on, and the sooner they can get it working, the better.

(29)

I am definitely not a real football fan. If the team I want to win is winning, well jolly ho. If it is losing, then it is only a game and nothing to get fussed about it.

So when I came home from a walk along the river in the evening sunshine, to find that Liverpool were already 3-0 down in the European Cup Final against AC Milan, it was no great source of sadness to me. Only a game. I switched to CSI Miami.

But every so often I flipped back to see how Liverpool were doing, and quite by chance, I caught the first Liverpool goal, scored by captain Steven Gerrard. Hullo, said the commentator. Expectantly. And prophetically.

When I next flipped back from the gruesomenesses of CSI, Liverpool were already celebrating goal number two, scored by substitute Smicer (pronounced Smeetzer), and on my next visit I saw Liverpool get awarded a penalty.

At this point, I did not want to watch it, not because it did not matter, but because it did. It had gone from Only A Game to: God On A Bike!!! in the space of about five minutes. If I allowed myself to get all excited, Liverpool would then lose, and I would suffer idiotic agonies. So, back to CSI, where the news was that more people were being murdered gruesomely, by really nasty people. Lucky thing the forensic scientists all look like actors. Back to find that Liverpool have converted the penalty. (I spare myself the agony of actually witnessing what they show me later: the Milan goalie saving it and then the Liverpool guy knocking it in at the second try. This is rare.)

From then on it was a visit back every five minutes or so. 3-3. 3-3. 3-3. 3-3. Extra time looms. 3-3. 3-3. Extra time. 3-3. 3-3. 3-3. Penalty shoot out looms. 3-3. 3-3. Penalty shoot out.

Can not bear that. If I watched that I would get even more wound up, and additionally wound up by the sense of shame at getting so additionally wound up. It is only a game!!! (God on a bike!!!!)

Ten more minutes of something, else. Ooh, I wonder how the shoot out is going. Milan have missed their first two! Amazing. Liverpool are actually likely winners. So I watch their next one, and of course the Milan goalie saves it. Liverpool are still one ahead, and still probably winners, but again, over to Celebrity Home Makeover Love Island on Ice Meets Eastenders Uncovered Confidential. (Actually I think that by then it was Blackadder.) And when I go back again, Liverpool are celebrating. Bloke in specs: "Jamie, tell me honestly, did you think at half time that you had any chance?" Jamie: "No." Bloke in specs: "Rafael, that was fantastic, fantastic." Rafael: "Yes, bloke in specs, that was fantastic fantastic", etc.

As Alex Ferguson said after his Manchester United won the 1999 final of the same tournament against Bayern Munich in equally improbable style, with two extra time goals from Sheringham and Solskjaer: "Football. Bloody hell."

At half past one a.m. tomorrow morning they will be showing it again. And that I will video, and then watch it properly later, and then again in the months and years to come. That is how to enjoy sport, if you are a not-proper sports fan like me. Watch and rewatch the games your guys win in style, and forget the rest. Do not waste your one life obsessing over games that got away, or which were won by your team but unmemorably, without any amazing magic moments to savour. Take all that spiritual energy, and apply it to doing real life better, I say. My method wastes far less time on all this nonsense.

But when games go right, enjoy.

(5)

Last week, my friend Jonathan Pearce made some observations on the impending takeover of the Manchester United football club by Malcolm Glazer. This led to a lengthy comments thread that I was going to add to, but the comment in question got a little long, so I thought I would turn it into a post. In particular, I wanted to address the key question, which is simply is there any way Mr Glazer can get enough revenue from the club to pay of the large debt that has been accrued, and if so, how.

As I see it there are two sources of value in the club that the present management is not presently allowed to exploit, and to make a success of his bid Glazer needs to gain control of at least one of them. One is that television rights are sold collectively, and as a consequence the share of television money that is going to Manchester United as not comensurate with their popularity and fan base. The other is that Asian and particularly Chinese television markets are not presently competitive and as a consequence Asian television companies are paying far less for the right to show football than the matches are actually worth. I will address these two issues in turn.

Manchester United gets a far smaller percentage of total TV rights money than it would be entitled to merely by the level of its popularity. Of the various competitions that Manchester United play in, the governing bodies of the two that matter (The Premier League and the UEFA Champions League) sell the television rights of the competitions collectively. The Premier League sells the rights to all its matches in bulk and then shares the money amongst its clubs. So does UEFA. If Manchester United were able to sell the television rights to its own home matches directly to television companies, the club would receive a lot more money than it does now. There have been some mentions in the press that Glazer might try to have this happen, but I chances of this happening strikes me as relatively low.

There have been lots of suggestions over the years that the biggest clubs in Europe might break away from their national leagues and form a super league where they control their own TV rights (and there have been more in recent weeks as the bid for Man U has gone on), but this is always a non-starter. National leagues have too much history and are too important to fans. It might be possible to argue that collective selling of TV rights is anti-competitive, but I don't think the courts would agree. (Membership of the Premier League is voluntary). And I think a court would probably be susceptible to the argument that the three or four top clubs in England are dominant enough already (whether or not this would have much to do with what the actual law says) . If clubs in the Premier League could sell their own rights, then I believe that about 75% of the total television money would go to the top four clubs, and I tend to think there would be legal and political objections to that, regardless of their merit. (Seriously, think about it. You are a television company. Once you have the rights to the home matches of Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, and Liverpool, what else do you need?)

One might be able to make this argument more strongly in the case of the Champions League, but it wouldn't help quite as much, mainly because Manchester United aren't dominant in that competition, having only won it twice and only once in recent years, and not having looked like winning it in any other recent year. Of the 32 teams that play in that competition every year, probably ten have claims to be as big or nearly as big as Manchester United, and another ten are good enough to win it if things go their way. (And Manchester United's recent record of making the later stages of the tournament isn't that great). Inevitably, the television money of this competition would have to be divided up in more ways than for domestic football, even in a situation where clubs were permitted to sell their own television rights. (And in any event, bigger and more successful clubs get more money than smaller and less successful ones do now, although the means for dividing the money is perhaps a little eccentric, depending as it does on performance in national leagues).

Which is not to say that Manchester United's share would not increase considerably if they could sell their own television rights. It would, but not as much as it would if they could sell the rights to their own home matches in the Premier League. But in any event, once again I think the political and legal objections are likely to be too great for there to really be much chance of that happening. UEFA gains its power in the labyrinthine world of football politics largely through the television revenues of the Champions League,and saying it wouldn't give this up without a fight is a vast understatement. Of course, one possibility would be for the top European clubs to break away from the Champions League and instead form their own international competition, but if they did that UEFA would try very hard to prevent them from playing in national leagues as well. While I think if UEFA tried to do this and the clubs challenged it in court the clubs would win, it would be a dreadful fight, and at least ten of the top European clubs would have to act in concert in the first place for this to happen. And I think many of them would shy away from trying it because of the size of the fight that would be involved.

So, while I do see hidden value in England and Europe for Manchester United, I can't see any great way for Malcolm Glazer to extract it. My Samizdata and ubersportingpundit colleague Scott Wickstein commented on the Glazer takeover of Manchester United a week or so ago, and he observed that he thought that the takeover would have worked a decade ago, but that now is too late. His argument there was essentially that European television changed in the 1980s and 1990s with the rise of private television companies (particularly pay television companies) in competition with the traditional cozy state owned and state regulated television stations, which meant suddenly that football leagues and clubs could extract something like the fair value of their television rights, whereas previously they had been in markets where little money was paid for television rights due to a lack of competition due to state ownership and state regulation. (At the same time, football clubs and teams got a lot of media and marketing related expertise from the television companies in general, and this led to them marketing themselves better in other ways, such as getting more money from merchandising replica shirts and the like).

Scott's point is that there was lots of hidden value in Europe in 1985, and that there was money to be made by people who noticed this, but that this is now being extracted and this is priced in. And after considering the sort of stuff above, I tend to think that he is pretty much right.

But Europe isn't the whole world. The question is whether there is value outside Europe that can also be extracted. And that is the second point that I want to discuss. The popularity of football in East Asia (especially Japan and China) is often commented on, and it is certainly true that diehard fans in Manchester often do not realise this. As someone who is (a) a Manchester United supporter, although not a very avid one and (b) an Australian, I found myself discussing this with a few locals in a pub in Manchester last year. In particular they had no idea that a major reason why Manchester United games often kick off
around midday is that this is peak television viewing time in east Asia. (In the case of Saturdays, this also has to do with the FAs rules about what time live television broadcasts of matches are allowed in Britain).

So the Asian following is real, but the question that needs to be asked is whether clubs are actually making any or much money from fans in these markets. And the truthful answer to this, perhaps surprising given the level of exposure of the clubs in this markets, is actually "Not much". In terms of merchandising, the Asian market is far smaller than that of Europe, at least partly due to tremendous amount of counterfeit goods being in circulation. (This will change as certain markets get richer, but this will be over a longer timescale than Mr Glazer�s). In terms of media rights, things may happen faster. lack of competition in the Chinese TV market means that although lots of people watch Premier League football there, the rights are bought by state controlled television networks that do not face competition in bidding for the rights, and so which get them for close to nothing. The rights are probably worth quite a lot in terms of advertising that they generate - the Chinese middle class is at this point in the hundreds of millions, depending on how you measure it - but little of this is flowing through to the clubs. The question is whether it is possible to make some of it do so within a relatively small number of years. That means competitive auctions for rights in China.

This doesn't strike me as impossible. In India, multiple bidders now bid huge amounts of money for the rights to cricket matches. India is still a lot poorer than China. (Of course, India is also a lot freer than China, which means that the Chinese government is rather more concerned with controlling the media than is the Indian government). But in financial terms, if it can happen in India, then it can surely happen in China. And if it does, the money is potentially a lot more. But "a lot more" is still relative. The Chinese middle class is still a lot poorer on average than the population of Europe. The total amount of television money that could come from China in the immediate future, even in a free market, is a lot less than can come from Europe. Probably if the television rights were sold collectively in China and Asia, Manchester United's share would still not be enough to pay for Mr Glazer's debts, even if the rights were sold in a free auction.

But there is still another side to this. If we had a free market in television rights in China and Asia, and Manchester United and other British clubs were allowed to sell their television rights individually rather than collectively, then the total amount of money that Manchester United could gain might just compare favourably with their television income in Britain. There are quite a few big ifs in there, but if all this were to happen then I could see Manchester United's income increasing dramatically and the club being worth what Mr Glazer has paid and more. This does strike me as more feasible than the various other possibilities. The Premiership is more likely to be willing to give up collective selling of TV rights for Asian markets, because firstly it doesn't make much money now and it doesn't really know how much they are worth. Secondly, there is scope for competition between European Leagues here. If Real Madrid are free to sell their TV rights individually in China, then Manchester United can plead disadvantages against its European rivals as an argument as to why it should have similar freedom. There are relatively few short term losers in making such a change, which is why it is more possible.

But the question is whether this can all happen in a short period, that is within five years. If it can, Mr Glazer might make money - conceivably even a lot of money. He needs help from someone to free up the Chinese television market. The obvious person is actually Rupert Murdoch, who has extensive Hong Kong based Asian satellite television interests, and who has been sucking up to the butchers of Beijing for years now. Murdoch himself attempted to buy Manchester United a few years back but was foiled by British competition authorities. It may not be that Glazer and Murdoch like or even know each other, but now that Glazer owns the most valuable football club in the world, they certainly do have common interests.

(42)

Britons, even those uninterested in sport, would have to have been ignoring the news for the past few weeks not have seen reports about the audacious purchase of English football team Manchester United by American tycoon Malcolm Glazer. His bid, which looks likely to succeed and will take the club off the stock exchange, has enraged fans, concerned that a man with no knowledge of football or the club's history will wreck the club.

I hope the fans' worst fears do not come to pass. The deal is, however, troubling. Glazer has taken on a vast amount of debt to finance the deal, presumably calculating that he can earn enough profits to service his debt to make the deal - known in the jargon as a leveraged buyout - viable. With concerns rising that the economy could slow down and dent the firm's profitability, such a deal could easily end badly for the club. A number of teams, most notably Leeds United, have fallen on hard times, nearly going under due to mountains of debt.

As a gung-ho defender of free enterprise, I can hardly claim that Glazer was not entitled to bid for this team under the rules of the stock market. He has taken his gamble and who knows, it may pay off, although the financial details don't appear very reassuring. I have noticed more than just a whiff of unpleasant anti-Americanism in some of the reporting on this deal in some quarters of the media.

I follow another team - Ipswich Town FC - but have always had a bit of a soft spot for the team that has given us the likes of Duncan Edwards, George Best and Bryan Robson. I hope that this rather oddball entrepreneur from Florida understands what he is doing and does not wreck one of the most famous, if the most famous, sporting institutions in the world.

(24)

What's on your mind tonight? Global warming? Economic collapse? African poverty? Islamic terrorism? Demographic decline? Mass immigration? The rise of China? The fall of Europe? Avian flu? AIDS?

Well, none of that matters to me right now. I am content to float aimlessly in the warm bath of deep, spiritual joy that I have been immersed in since Saturday afternoon when I finally got to see my beloved Chelsea clinch the Premier League Title.

I have never been here before. The last time Chelsea lifted the crown was in 1955, several years before I was born. In my 37 years of devotion to this club I have known pain, disappointment, frustration, humiliation, exasperation and occasional (and infuriatingly short-lived) elation. The term 'emotional rollercoaster' does not even come close.

Yet, on Saturday afternoon, all those years of hurt just seemed to melt away like April snow. My 'ugly duckling' team has grown into a beautiful swan and (for the moment at least) nothing else matters.

Colour me happy. Very happy.

(3)

The campaign to impose the Olympic Games upon Paris and the French taxpayer, rather than upon London and the British (and London � i.e. me) taxpayer, is lunging strongly towards the finishing tape:

. . . Mauritanian head of CONFEJES Youssouf Fall explained support for Paris's candidacy by stressing "France's important experience in organizing sports competitions, as well as Paris's excellent quality infrastructure." Paris's official commission said in a press release, "This decision is a major international push for Paris's candidacy, which is now guaranteed of strong support in the final vote on July 6 in Singapore." The choice of the site of the Games is not voted on by the countries as such, but rather by the members of the IOC, who can vote as they wish. Nevertheless, . . .

That is the most eloquent "nevertheless" I have read recently.

. . . among the 39 countries that support Paris, there are many whose representatives have a vote, including Morocco, Canada, Egypt, Cameroon, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Guinea, and Tunisia, and the Paris 2012 committee stresses that "the Francophone community of Belgium and the Canadian provinces of Quebec and new Brunswich have also given their support." Among other countries at the CONFEJES meeting were Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Comoros, Congo, Ivory Coast, Djibouti, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Greece, Haiti, Lebanon, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Mauritania, N�ger, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rumania, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Chad, Togo, and Vietnam. In addition, French sports minister Jean-Francois Lamour stated yesterday that this vote shows "one additional proof of the support and determination Paris's candidacy can count on. . . .

Allez France! Allez neo-colonialism!

And an interesting reminder, I think, of how different the world can look when viewed from somewhere . . . different.

My guess would be that all this talk of democracy that has been bubbling up in the world lately must be quite a nuisance to a number of the regimes listed there. Which might explain why France, despite being democratic itself, is not that keen on the idea spreading.

(13)

This BBC story tells us that the recent visit by Olympic Game officials to inspect London about its chances of winning the bid to stage games in 2012 cost 680,000 pounds.

Come on ladies and gentlemen, surely you can do better than that. What is the point of being on the Olympic committee if you cannot itemise your bills in the millions? They are not even trying.

It goes without saying that I fervently hope that Britain does not host the event.

(8)

While many aspects of intellectual property rights are clearly defined legally by such devices as patents and trademarks, the situation is not quite so clear with other things that may be defined as intellectual property. Take titles of merit, such as 'World Champion'.

In team sports, this is not really an issue. For team disciplines can only take place in a regulated environment. For example, in football, the question of which is the strongest club in Europe is one which there is a tournament called the "Champions League" and that is designed to allow such questions to be decided. And it is generally agreed by all and sundry that UEFA are the "fit and proper" people to run this tournament (except perhaps by FIFA, but that is by the by).

For individual sporting disciplines, it is not so easy to regulate these things. Golf, for example, has rarely if ever had any reference to a 'World Champion'; only recently has it even agreed on a ranking system to determine who is the best player in the world. Indeed, although I do not know much about golf, it seems to me that golf is a sport that seems to discourage this question altogether.

Chess, another individual player sport, is a different kettle of fish. It is also an illuminating example of how sporting titles can gather prestige enough to have a real financial worth to them, in the same way that intellectual property does. Indeed, it can be seen from the example of chess that to be a 'world champion' is to have an asset of considerable value.

The notion of being a 'world champion' of a sport seems to have come into vogue in the mid to late 19th century, and, indeed, chess is a sport which was one of the first to embrace the concept. In chess, it evolved around the person of one Wilhelm Steinitz, whose claim to be the best player in the world was accepted, and the concept of a 'World Championship' match as a mechanisim to formalise this claim was introduced.

At this stage, there was no international body - the champion was free to accept or decline challenges and was free to make the rules as he went along. Eventually Steinitz was defeated by Emanuel Lasker, who became champion in 1894. Lasker was the greatest player of his day, but as he grew old a new generation of challengers emerged. Lasker was not keen to meet them. After the First World War, Lasker's heart was not really in chess and he resigned the title until financial circumstances induced him to play against his strongest challenger, Jose Raul Capablanca. By this stage, Lasker was past his prime, and Capablanca, one of the strongest players in history, won the title with some ease.

There were efforts after this to regulate the World Championship, but they came to naught- the establishment of a global Chess federation (FIDE) in 1924, similarly, made no difference. Champions continued to enjoy the title as their personal property.

However, when Capablanca's successor, Alexander Alekhine, died undefeated in 1946, FIDE seized its chance, organising a tournament of the leading players of the day to determine who would be the World Championship. This tournament was won by Mikhail Botvinnik, the leading player of the USSR.

Chess, by this time, had become a very big sport in the USSR. By this time, the leading Soviet players were regarded as professionals in the service of the Soviet state, and the leading players of that country were given state salaries. This had two important functions. First, it enabled the leading Soviet players to concentrate on the game on a full-time basis, and secondly, it enabled the state to control directly the incomes of people it considered important to it.

In a subtle, indirect way, the USSR also came to dominate the international Chess federation, FIDE. This was perhaps bound to happen, as the USSR took chess quite a great deal more seriously then any other nation, but it had more sinister overtones because of the high amount of interest that the Soviet Government took in the game.

(As another aside, this is by no means uncommon. In cricket, Pakistan's government has always had a role in the national cricket board, also this happens in Africa. Zimbabwe's government controls the game there directly; in South Africa, the cricket authorities are extremely sensitive, and servile, to the government's wishes. However it is rare that a government will end up controlling an international sporting body. This is because usually there will be other nations of similar size taking an interest in that sport to counteract this. However, in chess, the US government only took an interest when Bobby Fischer seemed likely to give the USSR establishment a bloody nose).

But the authority of FIDE to be the governing body of the sport, and to determine the rules of engagement of the World Championship, became unquestioned. Every three years, the champion would play a match of 24 games against a challenger who had come through a rigorous qualifying system. And if the Champion lost, he had the right to a rematch the next year (although this rule was abolished in 1962.) This cycle became so ingrained into the conciousness of the international chess fraternity that when the eccentric (to say the very least) American Bobby Fischer tried to insist on changing the format of the World Championship match, as champion, in 1975, FIDE stripped him of his title, and awarded it to his challenger, Anatoly Karpov, with general approval of the international chess community, not just in the Eastern bloc, either.

Karpov, by reclaiming the World Championship from the hated American, was the instant 'golden boy' of the USSR; he was decorated by Breznev, and enjoyed a high position in Soviet society. So when another Soviet grandmaster qualified to challenge him, Victor Korchnoi, the Soviet government used subtle measures to help Karpov in the 1978 match. The enraged Korchnoi defected to the West, and then qualified once again to challenge in the 1981 World Championship match. Here, the USSR's influence in FIDE was again shown, and Karpov won in controversial circumstances.

In due course, Karpov lost his title to Garry Kasparov. But when the USSR expired, many of its assets became loose items, like assets to be disposed of with the receiver of a bankrupt estate. And, free from the hand of the Soviet state, Russian grandmasters realised that they no longer had to accept the dictate of FIDE as to where, when, and how they played chess. So in 1993, dissatisfied with the terms of their slated 1993 match, Kasparov and his challenger, Nigel Short, announced a breakaway organisation, and played their match under that banner.

FIDE retaliated by stripping Kasparov of his title, and holding a new match, but the 'official' champion did not have real credibility. In the 1990s, FIDE fell into the hands of a Russian provincial politician, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who has continued to operate FIDE to this day. FIDE continues to be recognised as the governing body for the sport, except for the World Championship. FIDE continues to hold "World Championship" tournaments, but is having increasing difficulty in doing so, because the dimished prestige of the 'official' title makes it hard to generate prize money and the like.

In practice, the 'World Championship' has reverted to being the personal property of the holder. Gary Kasparov treated it as such, refusing or accepting challenges on his own (financial) whim, until he was defeated in 2000 by Vladimir Kramnik. Kramnik, in turn, accepted a challenge in 2004 by Peter Leko, and only with difficulty held on; the match was agreed on and conducted privately, with sponsorship by a Swiss tobacco company.

Efforts to 're-unify' the 'World Championship' have been intense, but have come to naught. Kramnik is generally recognised as the World Champion, even though he is by no other measure the best player in the world. However, the title has such prestige and aura in the international chess community that his claim is generally recongised, as long as he is willing to defend it. Such efforts to 're-unify' the title under the auspicies of FIDE are bound to fail, at the very least, until FIDE is willing to concede that the title has intangible value, rather like goodwill in an accounting sense, and is willing to compensate the holder accordingly.

What does this long case study say about intellectual property? Well, there is some intellectual property that is really hard to value properly. What is the value of having the control over who challenges you for your title and when, and where, and for how much? We do not know yet, as no one has paid for it, but it is surely a considerable sum.

(20)

The line here, which I pretty much toe, is that the Olympic Games are an orgy of drug-sodden, politicised insanity, which Britain, London in particular, will spend the next century or more paying for, in the unfortunate event that Britain, London in particular, get the damn things, in 2012. That the politicians all seem to love the Olympics is enough to make me hostile, even though I do have a serious weakness for modernistical structures of the sort that they build nowadays to accommodate sporting events.

Luckily, Paris is now said to be the front runner. But, the news from Paris is deteriorating. On March 10th, that gang of bribe guzzlers known as the IOC (International Olympic Committee) will be visiting Paris, and the local unions, purely by coincidence I feel sure, happen to be agitating at that time against � the future basically:

French unions have rejected calls to shelve strikes planned for the day the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is due in Paris to assess its bid.

Seven unions are to take part in marches and stoppages on 10 March, to protest against government moves to relax France's 35-hour working week.

Meanwhile, Mayor of London Ken Livingstone is up to his neck in a row about some insulting and borderline anti-semitic remarks he made to a Jewish journalist, in the course of his ongoing feud with a newspaper group.

The pressure on London Mayor Ken Livingstone intensified today as Tony Blair joined calls for him apologise for his Nazi jibe to a Jewish journalist.

In the capital, there were fears that the continuing row over Mr Livingstone�s outburst � in which he likened the journalist to a concentration camp guard � could damage the city�s chances of hosting the 2012 Olympics.

Well, it certainly could, and the French press is presumably spinning this story like a nuclear powered top. But, a possibility that does not seem to have been much discussed is that Ken Livingstone's attitude during this ruckus might be what it is not despite the attempt to get the Olympics for London, but because of it. The initial insults sound less than calculated, but politicians like Ken Livingstone are nothing if not good actors. What if Ken picked this particular fight deliberately? Okay, that may be somewhat farfetched. But the aftermath? After Ken had had time to think things through?

Israel has called on Ken to apologise. "International" people, like the people in the International Olympic Committee, are just going to fall over themselves to obey Israel. Not.

Tony Blair wants Ken to apologise. And he is another focus of adoration throughout International land. Again, not.

I do not know the political attitudes of the IOC people, but I bet Ken Livingstone does. And what if he calculates that hanging tough, in the face of all this pressure, adding further insults to the original insults, will actually get him more points with these people than backing down?

(16)

Relieved as I am temporarily am of my Cultural and Educational obligations, I have resumed contributing to Ubersportingpundit, which is bossed by Scott Wickstein. Yesterday I did a somewhat belated piece about the first weekend of the Six Nations rugby tournament, on the Saturday of which Wales beat England 11-9. Wales had not beaten England in Wales in this fixture since nineteen ninety something, and the Welsh were very eager for their side to win, and more to the point, they rightly sensed that this year, they had their best chance for years.

Just how eager they were for a victory I had not realised, until I followed up this link, from a commenter at UbSpPu:

A Welsh rugby fan cut off his own testicles after his team beat England, police confirmed today.

Why did he do that?

It was reported that the man told his friends: "If Wales win I'll cut my own balls off."

Perhaps his idea was that when England duly won, again, he would be able to console himself by saying: "Well, if Wales had won I would have had to cut off my balls, so thank goodness they did not win." If so, the plan went badly wrong.

After the 11-9 victory in the Six Nations clash, the man is reported to have gone outside and severed his testicles before bringing them back into the club to show fellow drinkers.

So much for the Welsh desire to win rugby matches. The story ends with the voice of typical killjoy Welsh puritanism:

A local was reported as saying that the man was on medication and should not have been drinking.

As Dave Barry would say, under a headline about creeping fascism: "What, suddenly you're not allowed to chop you own balls off?" Amazingly, Samizdata now has a link to this severed testicles report, and, as yet, Dave Barry seems not to.

If England beat France next Sunday, I intend to celebrate by cutting my toe nails.

(18)

The England cricket team is doing really rather well just now. They are not the best. Australia are the best. But England are well on the way to establishing themselves as the best of the rest. Yesterday they completed a fine victory against South Africa, in the first of the series of five test matches they are playing down there, having earlier in the year, in England, beaten New Zealand in 3 games out of 3 and the West Indies in 4 games out of 4. Before that they toured the West Indies and beat them 3 games out of 4, with the last game drawn. In other words, England have won 8 out of their last 8 test matches (more than any England side has ever won consecutively before), and it would have 12 out of 12 had it not been for that final game draw in the West Indies. Recent England recruit Andrew Strauss, who batted superbly, both in the game against South Africa that finished yesterday morning and throughout last summer, has now played in just 8 test matches and has been on the winning side every time. This is amazing.

All of which means that, what with England doing so well, now was a very good time for the England cricket authorities to be renegotiating the TV rights to cricket matches, and here is what they have done:

Live coverage of England's home Test matches will no longer be available on terrestrial TV from 2006 onwards.

The England and Wales Cricket Board has awarded an exclusive four-year contract to BSkyB, which will run until 2009.

In other words, I and millions of other BBC License Fee payers will not be able to watch test cricket live on the telly without paying extra.

I am selfishly unhappy about this. I like watching test cricket live on the telly, in among doing other things. Cricket is a slow game, and now that they have instant replays of anything very exciting, it mixes well with working on other things.

However, it is clear to me that the cricket people in question (the England and Wales Cricket Board � or ECB) are perfectly entitled to make this deal. If I want to go on watching their games, I will have to pay more. That is the deal they are offering, and it is up to me to decide what to do about that.

Others, however, take a more interventionist line.

Criticism of the ECB's decision was swift. The backlash amongst cricket supporters has been fierce and the governing body stand accused of ignoring their responsibility to promote the sport at a time when the England team is enjoying great success.

Labour MP John Grogan, a Yorkshire CCC member, told the Guardian he wants the list of "crown jewel" sports, which include the FA Cup final and Olympics, to be reviewed. Cricket was removed from the protected list in 1998.

"I think it's disastrous for English cricket," said Grogan.

"There is a real danger (cricket) will disappear from half the public's consciousness and youngsters will take up other sports.

"The government has to review what sports are included in the listed events."

Listed events. If you think that sounds like 'listed buildings', you would be right. What it means is that The Government, on behalf of The People, seizes control of various Big Sporting Events, and says that the people who have spent the last century or two organising them, and building up into the Crown Jewel Events that they have become, do not own or control them any more. Oh, they have to go on organising them. But they are no longer allowed to charge what they want to charge for their events. Which means that the events are not theirs any more. Greedy cricket supporters who, like me, want to watch cricket on the telly, but who do not want to pay what the supplier of the events is asking, are now agitating for the Government to steal test cricket from its rightful owners.

As usual, when the Government is being urged to Doing Something, the question of whether the people on the receiving end of this Something are being wise, or generous, or generally doing their jobs well, is all mixed up with whether the Government would be right to barge in and rearrange matters. But, these are two absolutely distinct matters. Maybe your taste in music is poor. Maybe you are worth more money than your employers are now willing to pay you. Maybe in refusing to marry this virtuous but rather plain girl rather than that silly but prettier one you are being both cruel and stupid. But that is a long way from saying that the government should force you to listen to better music, force your employers to pay you more than they want to, and decide who you should marry.

And maybe the ECB is serving cricket badly, by denying many of the potential next generation of England cricketers the chance to watch test cricket at an impressionable age. Maybe this is a mistake. Maybe the money they will make from the deal and which they will distribute to the England county cricket clubs, is money they should have been willing to do without. Maybe.

But � and no maybes about it � it is none of the Government's business to be deciding on behalf of the ECB what they should charge for their product, and to whom.

(29)

What she said.

What she (the Telegraph's Janet Daley) started by saying was what they did in New York to bash the crime numbers down to a state bordering on civilisation from a state not bordering on barbarism. And then she turns her attention to the very contrasting state of affairs that still pertains in London, as we here hardly need reminding.

You will have noticed that this is precisely the opposite of what is happening here. Try ringing the police to tell them about an act of vandalism that is going on before your eyes and you will be treated with scarcely concealed ridicule: we've got more important things to worry about than some kids smashing up a building site. Never mind that the kids who have got away with that are likely to conclude that they can get away with pretty much anything.

Now New Yorkers have their city back and we are losing ours. �

I have a suggestion.

The politicos are cranking up this London Olympic bid. Well, all those of us who care more about people getting murdered than we do about people running marathons should offer the Olympiacs a deal. You can have your damned games if, by the time they come here, you have got on top of London's crime numbers. If, on the other hand, you obsess about the Olympics and regard harping on about murder as a mere distraction, then we should all flood the internet with "London: World Capital of Crime � Olympians Do Not Come Here � You Will All Be Murdered" propaganda. "London Welcomes The Olympians" � "Now Hand Over Your Wallet Or Die", etc.

Could some computer graphics genius perhaps do something with those Olympic ring things to turn them into a piece of anti-crime anti-the-political-causes-of-crime propaganda? Slosh some blood on them, perhaps, or make a couple of the rings into the front end of a double-barrelled shotgun.

The good thing about this arrangement is that I believe that it would work spontaneously. No one would have to be in charge of anything. But, if any of the people who do think that they are in charge of the Olympic bid tell us that we are being unpatriotic if we go on about crime in London instead of ignoring it and suffering in silence, they will be spontaneously attacked, and in a way that will really hurt them, with globally circulated (especially in Paris of course) bad news about what an appallingly unsuitable city London would be to hold these stupid games. Shut up, they will say. And the reply will be: no. Either you help us, or we screw you. That will be our message to them. And I think, after they have had a taste of it, that it might prove rather persuasive.

Which means that it is possible is that the Olympiacs might actually be recruited as allies in the campaign sketched out so vigorously by Janet Daley. Which means that something along the lines she says might � quite soon actually � start being done.

If London did do a New York with its criminal arrangements, as a result of the Olympics coming here, I for one could easily put up with a few weeks of Olympiac madness.

(7)

As an unashamed football (not soccer, dammit) fan, I must confess not to always having the highest regard for Sir Alex Ferguson, who will lead out his beloved Manchester United squad for his 1,000th match in charge as manager. He can be an irascible old fellow, and his carping about the decisions of referees is tiresome.

One cannot, however, doubt his passion for the game or his record of success in winning a hatful of trophies, including the European Champions League cup in 1999, as well as his careful and often fatherly nurturing of a raft of wonderful young players like Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, and of course David Beckham.

By the rapid hire-and-fire standards of modern football, Fergie's longevity is a wonder to behold. He reigns above ManU with every bit as much pomp as that other great Scotsman to have managed United, Sir Matt Busby (the man who probably did more than any other mortal to create the great club that it is today).

And Ferguson's tenure has coincided with football's rise to unparalleled commercial success, and whether one is bored senseless by sport or an addict like yours truly, one cannot doubt that Ferguson and Manchester United have played a huge part in making football the successful enterprise it is now.

(7)

Further to this posting and previous postings involving Zimbabwe, the England cricket tour of Zimbabwe, etc., this story is the kind of reason why I am not that bothered about this apparently very stupid cricket tour that is now going ahead. No tour, and there would be that much less reportage of Zimbabwe and its disgusting ruler. What has happened is that about half the media have been banned from entering Zimbabwe, to write about the cricket! I suppose the fear is that they might wonder what all that shouting and screaming and people bashing is that goes on outside cricket grounds (and everywhere else � except in Safari parks apparently, see the comment on that previous posting) in Zimbabwe these days.

All the same, the ICC, cricket's global governing body, is making itself look ever more ridiculous:

For most countries, intervention from the government in this manner would be grounds enough for withdrawing from the tour but the ICC gave Zimbabwe special dispensation because of the situation in the country under the regime of president Robert Mugabe.

Well, exactly. A normal government cannot be allowed to behave like this. The Mugabe regime, on the other hand, must obviously be spared the interfering attentions of inquisitive journalists. How else can this disgusting regime grapple unhindered with all of the many, many problems caused by its own disgustingness?

(8)

Instapundit thinks there is a connection between the dodgy cover-ups in US public life such as Rathergate and the Sandy Berger affair, as detailed here, and the basketbrawl and its public implications as detailed here. For good measure, he invites us to call him crazy.

I do not think he is crazy, but he might be taking a short term view. As Jim Geraghty put it:

There's one set of rules for regular folks, and another set of rules for celebrities, former high-ranking government officials, and other "important" people. If we break the rules, we pay the price. If a Dan Rather lies on the air, or Sandy Berger steals classified documents, there's no consequence.

Well, yes. I would posit, though, that rich and powerful figures in society have always benefited from these sorts of shenanegans. There is nothing new there. What IS new is that thanks to the compressed news cycle and bloggers, whistleblowers and better education, is that people are much less willing to put up with it. Compared to the dodgy dealings of earlier times, Rathergate is small beer indeed. We are not talking Teapot Dome here.

That is not to say that we should not worry about this level of dishonesty. Dodgy dealings by those with public responsibilities should never be tolerated. But it is a positive sign that people are increasingly unwilling to tolerate illegal behavior from what is laughingly known in some quarters as the Great and the Good. (Maybe one day people will worry about the actual laws that get passed. I remain an optimist.)

Instapundit thinks there's a connection between dodgy dealings and boys behaving badly, either playing or attending sport. I remain to be convinced. The actual fight in question seems to me to be a bit excessive, but hardly unprecedented. I have seen worse fights in Australian country football, and as for players and spectators interacting, well, after 25 years of watching cricket, I think I've seen it all before.

The shock that US bloggers seem to be in over the affair does suggest that it is new to American sports lovers though. But as a sportslover with a more global perspective, I would say that the behavior of sports fans (and indeed players) is probably somewhat improved, if you take a long term and global view.

But then, when it comes to the long term (longer then the next electoral cycle), I am a raging optimist. I think Professor Reynolds is wrong on this one.

(8)

This afternoon, the BBC showed the highlights of the international rugby match played yesterday between England and South Africa, at Twickenham. I already knew that it would have a happy ending. (I find important rugby internationals very hard to watch properly, and always try to tape them, so that, if England win, I can then settle down and enjoy them properly. I am not, in other words, a Real Fan.)

Anyway, yes, England won 32-16, scoring two tries in the first half, with South Africa only managing one try, at the end when it was too late.

This was not a result that many people expected. Why? Because no one really knew what to expect.

South Africa won the recent triangular tournament of the Southern Hemisphere giants (i.e. against Australia and New Zealand), but what does that mean nowadays? Hard to say. After all, last weekend, Ireland beat them in Dublin. Narrowly, but they beat them.

As for England, who knew? Since that World Cup triumph (actually since just before it - England peaked before the World Cup rather than at it and only just clung on to their form enough during the World Cup to win it) England have been in decline, and then in - disintegration. Big Name after Big Name announced their various retirements. Leonard, Johnson, Dallaglio, Back. Manager Clive Woodward had always said in public that the World Cup, once won, was only the start and that he and his happy band would then proceed to win the next one. But in truth, winning this thing once (and for the very first time remember) was always the important thing, and once Everest was climbed, climbing it again held insufficient magic for the older players, especially since their only contribution would be supplying a bit of continuity before retiring in a year or two's time. Other players got injured, or revealed that they already were injured, and in no state to play in any games other than such games as World Cup Finals. Others just needed to put their feet up. So the World Cup team fell to bits with extraordinary suddenness. England came third in the Six Nations at the beginning of this year, their lowest position for many years, and only escaped a total thrashing from France in the final game (which had earlier been billed as some kind of huge decider type confrontation) because the French got bored and let England back into the game. And then when England journeyed yet again to Australasia to try to repeat their pre-World Cup triumphs of a year earlier (that was when they peaked), they were just murdered.

Eventually Woodward himself realised that putting together another team to win the World Cup again would not be the same either, so he said bye bye also, muttering about being some sort of soccer manager, and amid autobiographical claims that he only played rugby instead of soccer because his snobbish dad made him. Now he tells us.

So the England team for the current crop of Northern Hemisphere versus Southern Hemisphere internationals now being played in Britain really were an unknown quantity, above all because there is now a new boss, a man called Robinson. Andy Robinson. New guys were no longer playing for as long as it took World Cup Giants to recover from their various injuries and tirednesses. Now, they were playing in the certain knowledge that the Giants are all history, and that if they are now in the starting line-up for the biggest matches (like against South Africa at Twickenham), that makes them the best, instead of just the best of the rest. Non-household names like Corry, Worsley, Moody, Borthwick, Grewcock, Henry Paul (he is Henry Paul because he is really from New Zealand and has a brother who rugby league, for New Zealand, I think) are now first choices, with no Everest behind them to render their current efforts meaningless. Joining them are guys who, if you have only been watching internationals, you may never have heard of. Titterell. White. Somebody called Cueto. What sort of an England rugby name is Cueto? (Well, no odder than Dallaglio, I suppose.)

A few Big Names from - oh, that World Cup thing - do remain. There is Josh Lewsey, the flying winger. There is big beefy centre threequarter Mike Tindall. There is big, beefy but fallible (especially with his line-out throwing) hooker, Steve Thompson. Above all, there is the twinkle-toed genius who scored England's only try in the You Know What and who then took the summer off, a man also called Robinson. Jason Robinson. He is a black Born Again Christian, so, for some English purposes, evangelical Christianity does still have its uses. As one of the TV commentators said recently, one of him facing just one opponent is like having an overlap already. He was badly missed during the Australasia tour in the summer.

Most intriguing of all, there is a new fly half, called Hodgson, who would have been in the You Know What squad had he not been injured and had to stay at home. And why, pray, is there a new fly half? Does Jesus Christ's younger brother Jonny not now play fly half for England, now and for ever? Well, no he does not. Not since the You Know What. His very last kick for England (I think) remains the drop goal that won the You Know What in the dying moments of extra time. Since then, he has been hurt. His shoulder is damaged.

It is not impossible that Wilkinson has played his last game for England. Not likely, just not impossible. Why? I'll list the reasons.

One: Wilkinson seems to be one of these people whose mind is stronger than his body, with the former constantly demanding of the latter things that it cannot quite do. (As the bald guy said in Top Gun: "Son, your whatchamacallit is writing cheques that your whosadaisy can't deliver on!" or whatever it was.) Physically, Jonny W is no weakling, of course not. But mentally he is very strong, as in very mentally determined to do physically amazing things, so this could be a real problem for him, especially as he gets older. He is not just hurt now. He keeps getting hurt.

In particular, Wilkinson loves to tackle people, one of his most memorable moments (apart of course from the drop kick at the end of the YKW) being an extraordinarily violent tackle (more like a head-on collision really) that he inflicted on the unfortunate French captain a year or two back. He survived this collision, in fact he won it completely, leaving the French captain strewn all over the track for the next two hundred yards with himself still careering along the rails. But that tackle was greeted not so much with a collective roar from the crowd, as with a collective eupphhh!!! - as if 70,000 people had all been simultaneously punched in the ribs by 70,000 giants, all at the same time. Such contretemps take their toll.

Two: Wilkinson's prime skill is his goal kicking. When it comes to running and passing, he is good, but no genius. It only needs a rival fly half to step forward who outshines Wilkinson in these skills to threaten King Jonny's reign. Why? Because tries get you five points, seven if you convert them, and so are still the best way to win rugby matches. There is also the fact that even the best goal kickers, Wilkinson even, are capable of losing their touch and suddenly becoming ordinary. Ask the golfers.

Third (see above): Charlie Hodgson. He, apparently, is better than Wilkinson at passing and running. And he is not a bad goal kicker either, and has it in him to get a lot better at it (see below).

A week ago, against Canada. Hodgson ran and passed brilliantly, but he kicked goals � well he basically did not kick goals apart from the very easy ones, despite numerous opportunities to do so created by, e.g., himself. And whereas kicking goals is kicking goals, with the opposition team no more involved than the crowd, running and passing depends a lot on the opposition, and Canada are only Canada. So, for Hodgson, the game against South Africa was huge. And he did not disappoint. He jinked his way through for the first England try, and generally played splendidly. Most amazingly of all, he had a dream of a day kicking goals, missing nothing and thus scoring 27 of England's 32 points.

Although, it has to be said that the basis of the England win was a massive forward effort by all those big beefy new boys, Corry, Moody, Borthwick etc. England, it turns out, really do have that strength in depth that people like me were, until yesterday, doubting. It must also have helped that yesterday was by far the coldest and most miserable day of this autumn so far. South Africa, who do not like such things anyway, had no real preparation for such miseries, it having been mild and dry until yesterday. Meanwhile, for England's players coldness and dampness are like sunshine to a West Indian cricketer. The point of these digressions is that yesterday, England did not just win. They were winning throughout, and nothing makes a fly half look better than being surrounded by a winning team, forwards going forwards, opposition backs on the back foot, etc.

Nevertheless: Wilkinson, look out. From having been England's sporting number one, you could find yourself demoted to England number two fly half, if Hodgson carries on like this.

There is also a new scrum half called Harry Ellis whom a lot of people are now talking about. Dawson (England YKW scrum half) seems to be past it now, and his number two Bracken has bowed out. Number three for the last few years has been a guy called Gomarsall, but Gomarsall had a somewhat poor game against South Africa, and Ellis could soon be the starter.

Despite all the changes in the team, and the departure of Woodward of course, the most important recent England rugby appointment might eventually prove to be a man called Joe Lydon. Joe who? You would not say that if you were a rugby league fan, because Joe Lydon used to be a rugby league god. And, he has now become the England (rugby union) offensive coach. In English, that makes him the man who tells the England backs how to score tries. Previously, he was the boss of England's outstandingly successful seven-a-side rugby team, from among whose ranks so many fifteen-a-side regulars keep emerging. Do I detect the influence of Lydon in picking Henry Paul (ex rugby league) instead of YKW hero Will Greenwood, who now languishes on the England subs bench, alongside YKW hero Ben Cohen?

Before the highlights of the England South Africa game, the BBC also showed the highlights of England versus New Zealand at rugby league, and you got a sight of just how good those league fellows are at running and passing, and hence what Lydon brings to rugby union. The underlying point is that the best union players are now all as ferociously fit and skilful and well trained as league players have long been. Attacking Union runners used to rely on the other fellows being either tired or just plain crap at tackling, but that no longer works and they have to learn a whole new bag of tricks. These last couple of games suggest to me that England are learning such tricks.

I know, I know. England always say they are going to play Expansive Rugby, but then, when faced with the choice between losing expansively and winning boringly, they always settle for grinding up to the other end and kicking penalties. And so it may be once again. But this time - I think, I hope, I pray - it really could be different. Against Canada, for all that Canada are amateurs to England's pros, I thought I detected a genuinely different approach among England's backs. In particular, they seemed willing to throw very long passes, as a matter of routine, during the first twenty minutes, and not just towards the end when they were either playing desperate catch-up or celebrating an easy win. There really did seem to be something different going on. And then yesterday, despite the first rate opposition and vilely wet weather, England scored a couple of very good tries, the second being by this Cueto chap, after a long kick found him all alone on the wing. I could really get used to Cueto if he keeps doing that.

Meanwhile, also yesterday, New Zealand defeated Wales yesterday by the narrowest of margins. The great Joe Rokocoko, the one truly stunning player on either side, scoring two New Zealand tries, including one second half masterpiece of guile and pace that was one of the best I have seen on TV in a long time. So despite losing, Wales are back in business, as Ireland have been for some while. Even Scotland have not been doing too badly either (by their recent catastrophic standards).

And France? Very unpredictable. Another different story. I still fancy France for the next YKW, as do many. Like England four years ago, they are now desperate to win it, and, like England, to do so for the first time.

But, after yesterday, and for the first time since they did win it just over a year ago now, I am starting to fancy England too. I really must get out and watch England v Australia next weekend, while it actually happens, in a pub. If England can win that, they will really be up and running.

(100)

Everyone is entitled to their sensibilities, however wacky, just so long as they do not try to make them the law of the land. As a result when I describe Los Angeles Times writer T. J. Simers as a 'weird prude', it is not with the sense of loathing, hatred and vitriol I would have used were I under the impression he was suggesting that his disquiet over a picture of a beautiful young woman in a pair of shorts (and presumed wish to see people share his puritan values regarding women) be reflected in the law of the land by imposing censorship.

But a 'weird prude' is indeed what I think he is. Whilst I see that bizarrely the age of consent in the benighted state of California is 18, in the vast majority of the world and even in much of the USA, the age at which one is permitted to engage in sex is 16. Moreover even if for some reason you conclude that the age at which young adults should actually have sex should be 18, surely only the most purblind would actually expect a 16 year old to be asexual even if they were abstinent.

So when an attractive physically active 17 year old has a picture taken wearing no less clothing than that in which millions of people have seen her win tennis tournaments...

... T. J. Simers asks, no doubt thinking the true answer is beyond the pale:

Now what do you think when I tell you the girl in the ad is 17 years old?

Well, yeah. The girl is question is Maria Sharapova and since she won Wimbledon, quite literally tens of millions of people know exactly how old she is. And what do I think? I think "Nice legs! What a babe". I am, distressingly, old enough to be her father, but that does not change the fact she is a very attractive young woman. So what?

He continues:

Sharapova may or may not be the most mature 17-year-old the world has known, but she's still 17. A kid. And if the message to young girls everywhere in the L.A. area is that sex sells - rather than Wimbledon championship tennis, shame on anyone who rewards AEG this week and takes their daughter to Staples Center.

Where were her parents? "There you go," said Lindsay Davenport. "I wouldn't do it, and I can tell you my daughter wouldn't either."

Well Lindsey Davenport was a great tennis player but I for one am also relieved she never struck such poses, though gallantry prevents me from elaborating what I think are the obvious reasons for that. But why oh why does Mr. Simers or Mrs. Davenport think a 17 years old should an asexual being? The advertisement was not one in which Maria Sharapova was offering to have sex with anyone, just displaying her athletic assets (her body) in a way in which many would find rather attractive. Being attractive does indeed sell so why pretend otherwise? Is the fact she is not pictured in the act of playing tennis somehow make her sexuality more obvious than these...

 

Clearly this is not a young woman who is in denial regarding the fact she is a sexual being and hardly seems like some bewildered victim of heartless ad man dressing her up as Lolita. I rather doubt the camera man had to wrestle a teddy bear out of her arms to get her to strike that pose. For T.J. Simers to find the WTA image offensive is perverse and suggests to me that he must have some quaint notions of what 17 year olds are really like and how people should perceive them.

Millions and millions of people are married or in long term sexual relationships by the time they are 17 and many of those are also parents, which suggests that the peculiar notion of infantilising young adults and calling them 'kids' for as long as possible is rather far off the mark.

I think what really made this whole thing seem so daft to me was that I have just got back from an interesting exhibition about the Crimean War which features an account of a 14 year old who had accompanied the British forces on that campaign and it all really does make some of the modern notion of a strict division between adulthood and childhood seem truly preposterous when talking about a worldly 17 year old Russian woman who, if you have ever heard her interviewed, is obviously no fool.

There is something profoundly odd about the mindset of a certain ilk of conservative.

(11)

The famed Australian cricketer (and much else) Keith Miller has just died aged 84. While idling through some obit-ing about this remarkable man, I came across this amazing throwaway paragraph, seized upon by Tim Blair and included in the original posting, but originally in a comment, here:

After what he went through during the war, cricket always remained just a game to him. He flew Mosquito night fighters. A lifelong love of Beethoven saw him leave his group during a raid over Germany and fly a further 50 miles to Bonn, where he flew low, at some risk, over the city � just to see the place where his hero was born...

I had no idea that Keith Miller cared anything for such things as Beethoven, let alone that he cared that much. (And I am guessing that he did not endanger anyone else's life besides his own, right? Perry?)

It is truly amazing how much new stuff you learn about people when they die.

(21)

I have not really managed to develop much of an interest in the Olympic Games currently underway in Greece. I am watching the television right now. A bunch of Greek 'fans' are objecting to some US athletes for reasons I cannot quite seem to understand, judging by the less than helpful BBC commentator team.

The Games are not supposed to be about nationalism, and yet the constant focus seems to be on how many of 'our' (British) athletes have won how many gold, silver and bronze medals. When the Games are completed, there will be the usual bleating/gloating over how well 'our' men and women did. If 'we' do badly, be ready and primed for a great wailing about the unsportiness, unfitness, lack of moral fibre blah blah of young British folk.

It is easy to forget that the Olympics were originally envisioned as celebrating the value of individual achievement and struggle over nationalistic competition. I think it is fair to say that this hope has been well and truly thwarted.

(20)

I have always regardless the Olympics with indifference at best (I am not a great sports fan) but clearly the people organising the games in Athens are completely demented.

Strict regulations published by Athens 2004 last week dictate that spectators may be refused admission to events if they are carrying food or drinks made by companies that did not see fit to sponsor the games.

Sweltering sports fans who seek refuge from the soaring temperatures with a soft drink other than one made by Coca-Cola will be told to leave the banned refreshment at the gates or be shut out. High on the list of blacklisted beverages is Pepsi, but even the wrong bottle of water could land spectators in trouble.

These people would be funny if they were not so self-important. And from a PR point of view: message to the folks sponsoring the Olympic... rule number one is do not piss off your prospective customers. Morons.

And whilst on the subject of sporting madness, what I cannot understand is why the furore over well known lothario Sven-Goran Eriksson's love life? So he has some hanky panky with a kiss-and-tell money grubber who happens to be female employee of the Football Association... so what? The guy is the coach of the England football team: he is in the sports business which means reasonable expectations of probity are surely somewhere between rock stars in hotel rooms and sailors on shore leave.

If there is any scandal here it is that Sven's standards seem to be slipping: at the risk of being ungallant, 'beauty' Faria Alam is not quite of the same 'calibre' as Italian lawyer Nancy Dell'Olio or Ulrika Jonnson.

links via AdRants and the Big Blog Company

(9)

Can it be true that Lance Armstrong is to be stripped of his title by the French authorites? Say it ain't so, Lance

(3)

I do not have Sky Sports TV, because then all pretence of doing anything at all with my life would disintegrate. But I am a sports fan, and I am currently watching a game of cricket, on Ceefax.

You would be surprised how enjoyable this can be. Ceefax is especially good for following limited overs cricket, where each side only has a fixed number of balls to bat against, and where it's all finished and done with in one day. These kinds of games can fluctuate wildly, and just watching the scorecard tick over can be very enjoyable, and fits in well with performing other tasks.

And there is no kind of cricket of which the above is more true than Twenty20 cricket, where each side has only twenty overs (equals 120 deliveries) to make its runs, and where the whole thing is over in one evening. And as if to emphasise the extreme extremity of this extreme form of cricket, the teams are not called boring old Yorkshire or dull Derbyshire. They are called things like the Yorkshire Hystericals and the Derbyshire Desperados.

These games fluctuate particularly wildly, and as if to make that point, one of the star batsmen of my team, the Surrey Psycho-Killers, just got out, for 32, against Kent Velociraptors. Another dismissal now, and Kent would definitely have the whip hand. More Surrey slogging and they should win. Okay, I would rather be there, especially since the Oval, where this game is being played, is only a walk away form my home. But Ceefax will do nicely, and this way I get to write this.

Last week, I swear I witnessed another game of Twenty20 cricket which was reduced, by our characteristically vile and windy weather last week, to each side only having five overs to bat each. Yes. They each had just thirty balls to score their runs. Northants Something Scary Beginning With Ns versus the Gloucester (inevitably) Gladiators, I think it was. Five5 cricket, you might say. But I can find no trace of this game on the internet. Did I dream the whole thing? No I did not. Here it is!

The point of all this is to emphasise how lively cricket seems to be in England just now, despite the fluctuating form of our national side, and in the world generally.

This guy is extremely down on these guys, just now. But however well or badly cricket's mere administrators do, the underlying strength of the game is now a world sporting fact, if only because of the rise and rise of India, in the world generally, and as a great cricketing nation in particular.

Twenty20 cricket is already part of the Asian Games. Next, the Olympics.

David Carr will not he happy.

(4)

I spend a lot of my time writing a sports minded blog, Ubersportingpundit, which tries to do to sports what Samizdata.net does for economics and politics. Indeed, many of the contributors to this blog also contribute to Ubersportingpundit.

Ubersportingpundit covers the various Australian football codes, cricket, rugby, and UK football. However, I would like to 'beef up' the UK football coverage for the coming season. With this in mind, I'd like to invite Samizdata.net readers who have strong views about football and the willingness to express them on at least a weekly basis the opportunity to write for Ubersportingpundit.

I'm not looking for someone to write match reports on Aston Villa vs Charlton Atheletic; I'm more interested in someone writing about David O'Leary's strategy to take Villa forward on a tight budget and how Alan Curbishley intends to fill the hole left by the sale of Shane Parker to Chelsea.

I am also looking for another cricket correspondent, preferably someone of South Asian background, who will give a different view to the Anglo-Australian cricket coverage that Ubersportingpundit currently supplies. Residence does not matter, but a willingness to cover India, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, and Bangladeshi cricket issues does.

If you are interested, please drop an email to 'scott' at 'ubersportingpundit.com'. Renumeration is at Samizdata.net rates. (i.e., the goodwill and esteem of the editors!)

(31)

On Saturday afternoon, a gorgeous looking Russian seventeen-year-old called Maria Sharapova won the Wimbledon Ladies Singles title, and the media have been in raptures ever since. Personally I was enraptured ever since she won her quarter final against a Japanese lady. But when Sharapova beat Serena Williams in the final, the world really noticed.

When Sharapova plays, she looks like a Bond girl. When she has won, she immediately becomes a giggly American schoolgirl. She is, from the female gorgeousness point of view, the biggest thing in tennis since the now somewhat ageing Anna Kournikova. Plus, she can really play. (Kournikova never won Wimbledon, or anything else big that I recall. Not that I ever cared.)

So, I was not surprised when our very busy-with-other-things but still very caring and concerned editorial supremo asked me last night to dash off a posting about the lovely Maria, so that we could have a picture of her up here.

However, underneath all the drooling from the likes of me and Perry, there is a more serious story here, which is why it took me a bit longer to write this than I promised last night. Yes, Sharapova is gorgeousness personified, and long may it last. But there is more going on than this.

I can imagine some Americans regretting that their champion, Serena Williams, got beaten by a Russian. Yet, for all that she is Russian, Maria Sharapova is also as American as Apple Pie. She and her entire family came to America. On the back of betting the farm on young Maria's talent as a tennis player, her family chose America, and what could be more American than that?

Born in Siberia, the one-time pauper took home over $2.5 million in Wimbledon prize money - but that will be only the beginning of an earnings career that looks likely to make her the wealthiest Russian tennis player in history.

...her father, Yuri Sharapov, who travelled to Florida 10 years ago after leaving Chernobyl with life savings of $1200 in his pocket, will shield his striking daughter from many of the offers, but there is no shortage of suitors.

Sharapova was spotted as a 6-year-old during an exhibition match in Moscow by Martina Navratilova, who took her under her wing, a relationship that earned her a spot in Nick Bollettieri's prestigious Tennis Academy in Florida at the age of nine.

I had already decided that I was going to tie this story to the similar tale of Martina Navratilova, because Navratilova has a lot in common with Sharapova. Navratilova also went west to find freedom, on the back of her extraordinary tennis talent. A picture of Navratilova is not what Perry de Havilland had in mind when he asked for this posting, yet I feel that it is entirely appropriate. Navratilova found the exact same thing in America that Sharapova has found: freedom. The freedom to develop her amazing talents, and the freedom to be herself.

Now, I agree that when confronted by Martina Navratilova, the Samizdata droolometer behaves very differently to when it is confronted by the likes of Sharapova, especially when you factor in Navratilova's sexual preferences, but underneath all the joking, the story is very similar.

"I was so stubborn, so independent, that I was more American than Czech, even as a little kid," she reflects in her autobiography, written in 1985 with New York Times sportswriter George Vecsey. "I didn't feel I belonged anywhere until I came to America for the first time when I was 16. I'm not a mystic about many things - I tend to be pretty pragmatic about life - but I honestly believe I was born to be American."

I bet Sharapova would say just the exact same thing. Believe it or not, Martina Navratilova actually played again, this year, at Wimbledon, at the age of 47 (but this time really for the last time), eventually losing in the women's doubles semi-finals.

After Sharapova had won her title, the BBC's commentators all started clucking anxiously to the effect that, although in itself very sweet and all that, this story might be setting others a bad example. What if dozens of other families bring dozens of other wonder-kids to America, but then the wonder-kids do not win Wimbledon, and what if they are all then disappointed? Don't risk everything and come to America. What if you fail? What if you don't live out the American dream? It was all so desperately British. (British national motto: Better safe than American.)

But I cannot for the life of me see that any sort of bad example is being set by Sharapova and her redoubtable clan. The worst that could have happened to them was that they would have become rather poor and disappointed Americans, and the same applies to any others who follow their example and arrive in America with their super-tots but do not do so well as the Sharapova family did. Being a poor and disappointed American is nothing like the worst thing that can happen to you in this world, no matter what the BBC may say.

In the unlikely event that no one has yet done a cartoon of the Statue of Liberty waving a tennis racket, this omission should be corrected at once.

(37)

The present UK government, like many socialist-leaning administrations, does not like cars. Besides complaints - sometimes justified - about pollution and congestion, a lot of the hatred of the car contains a puritan impulse (sometimes this is also seen among a certain tweedy sort of conservative). Congestion charges, petrol taxes, speed cameras, road bumps... you name it, owning a car will soon be on a par with smoking, eating red meat, or confessing to enjoying recreational sex.

Well, I have bad news for the puritans. I spent last Saturday in total petrol-head heaven - the annual Goodwood Festival of Speed in west Sussex, and the event was a total sellout. I saw the Lotus of the late Ayrton Senna driven immaculately on a wet track at 150 mph and hear the unbelievably high noise that a F1 car makes. Vintage Maseratis, Ferraris, Lotuses and BRMs vied with Le Mans endurance cars such as the Ford GT40 or the Gulf Porsche (of the kind that Steve McQueen drove in the movie, Le Mans). Magic. There is an almost sensual pleasure involved in the sight, shape, noise, and yes, the smell, of a very fast car.

The crowds were large although not so big as to impede my enjoyment. From what I could see, Britons remain firmly in love with cars, including very fast and noisy ones. I would not presume to check the political/cultural views of the crowds, but I would guess the bias would be towards liberal (small l), fairly pro-enterprise, pro-fun, and not very keen on environmentalism and high taxes. If I were Conservative Party leader Michael Howard, then the Goodwood Festival of Speed clientele would be the sort of folk I would have in mind as a target constituency. I would call it the 'Jeremy Clarkson Voter Segment'.

The Goodwood event also reminded me of something else, which is the high number of South Africans, Finns and Scots who have excelled as drivers over the years. I wonder why that is?

(17)

So far, I have not been all that enthused by the Euro 2004 European Championship football tournament being held in Portugal at the moment but finally, it appears, the sporting event has sparked into life. This evening, Croatia came close to beating the former champions France, in a thrilling game. Earlier in the day, England, who lost their first game in the last minutes to France, managed after some hiccups to overwhelm Switzerland.

All to the good. I must say that watching some of the matches has reminded me of why, despite my annoyance at the antics of highly paid sportsmen, I still love watching football, and why I despise those who think it is amusing to sneer at we plebs and our love of what Brazil's Pele called the "Beautiful Game".

Take this piece of drivel from an anti-sports snob, for instance:

The players are even more loathesome than the fans. All professional sportsmen are more or less imbeciles, of course, but only footballers manage to be so utterly charmless with it. They are essentially overgrown spoilt children, diving and rolling around pretending to be injured, and practically wetting themselves whenever someone scores. There is a general, and sometimes quite fantastic, ugliness. If I had my way, I would have them all shot.

I wonder if the author of this piece would like to pass on his profound thoughts to one of the England team? Seriously though, for all that I despise the moronic behaviour of certain England football "fans" causing mayhem, I also despise a certain kind of anti-sport snob who imagines he or she is being terribly daring and original by sneering at the pleasures of the ordinary guy and his enthusiasm for team sports.

Oh well, come on England!

(12)

Trade here seems to be rather thin (although since I first put that it has got a bit thicker), just as it seemed to be this time yesterday. And this time yesterday I started concocting a posting (for my Culture Blog and to link to from here) about the strange things to be seen on or from Chelsea Embankment, just to the south of Samizdata HQ (which I was visiting the other day for reasons that need not concern you). This morning I finished it. Thinking about this posting some more, I now consider the ducks to be rather mundane. But the red sailed sailing boats and the bus are quite fun, I think.

Here is one of the red sailed sailing boats.

The point is that you do not see little sailing boats on the river in London very often. I seldom do, anyway. Follow the link above to get to a bigger version of this picture, and for the bus and the ducks, and for further commentary.

(7)

My recent posting on Slovakia contained a scoop and I missed it. The leader of the Slovak governing party's campaign for the European elections tomorrow is former ice hockey player Peter Stastny.

I knew the name (one of the few names in ice hockey I ever knew of), but failed to connect it to the poster boy of the Slovak Democratic Coalition.

From the comments to my last posting, my description of SKDU as conservative-libertarian is controversial. Considering that the new Libertarian Party candidate in the USA was selected because he campaigns on sticking to the Founding Fathers' intentions (nationalized Post Office and all), I stand by my description for now.

What is amusing is the contrast between the Slovak and the Austrian election: the posters in Austria oppose reform, the Slovaks put a celebrity on the poster and bring in massive tax reforms in the right direction. American show-biz versus Austrian corporatism. I know which I prefer.

[Thanks to Tim Evans at CNE for providing the tip-off about Peter Stasny.]

(2)

Sad news: Economist / baseball analyst / blogger Doug Pappas has passed away at age 43, the victim of heat stroke while vacationing in Texas.

Pappas chaired the Business of Baseball committee for the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR), and his work on the history of baseball's finances was consistently intelligent and provocative. I mention this in Samizdata because Pappas was also one of the foremost opponents of taxpayer funded facilities for professional sports and was thus a friend of liberty as well. Pappas relentlessly criticized commissioner Bud Selig's claims that Major League Baseball needed corporate welfare to survive.

I am a SABR member, but never got to meet Doug Pappas; for more in-depth tributes from people who knew him, see the excellent baseball / war blog Baseball Crank and David Pinto's Baseball Musings, another excellent baseball-only blog.

(3)

With the minds of the world's intervening classes fully occupied elsewhere, Zimbabwe is now a problem too small for those who might otherwise have done something about it to be bothered with, yet still too big and difficult for anyone else to be able to handle. So, Robert Mugabe's monstrous and murderous political machine will continue to churn its way through what remains of the country and its institutions.

If the anguish of the cricket world serves to draw some of whatever international attention is left over from Iraq to the anguish of Zimbabwe, then so much the better. Personally, I do not give a damn about cricket, or England cricket, or Timbuktooan cricket, as such. Cricket will stagger on, no matter how this Zimbabwe row plays out. But if cricket helps to keep Zimbabwe and its misgovernment in the headlines, then the more and more continuous is cricket's anguish, the better.

Cricket-wise � and this is the new development in this particular bit of the story � the state of the Zimbabwean cricket team has become so disastrous that even the International Cricket Council has started to worry about it. Until now, the ICC has only been concerned with (a) money, and with (b) making England's cricket administrators squirm, pretty much for the sheer fun of it (but also because of (a) money), by demanding that England send a touring team to Zimbabwe later this year, no matter what. But now, the Zimbabwe team is such an embarrassment, and the continuing schedule of so-called Test matches between the Zimbabwe also-playeds against Sri Lanka, and soon, even more embarrassingly, Australia (the best cricket team on earth just now), that even the ICC has realised that cricket as a whole is being, as sporting administrators like to say from time to time but usually only when someone cheats, Brought Into Disrepute. ICC administrators are thus inexorably being brought into personal contact with the people who now rule Zimbabwean cricket.

I do not know for sure what is going to happen any more than any one else knows for sure, but here, for what it is worth, is my guess about how events will now unfold.

Since the people who now rule Zimbabwean cricket are thugs operating under the personal orders of Robert Mugabe, contact between the Mugabe Cricket Thugs and the ICC can only be a good thing, and all the better because it is potentially so newsworthy. I expect the ICC people to discover (as they already sort of know) that these Mugabe Cricket Thugs are indeed Thugs, and what is more that they are Mugabe Cricket Thugs whose word is worth nothing from one day to the next and with whom it is impossible to do coherent business of any kind. Robert Mugabe does not care about the ICC, any more than he cares about the rights and wrongs of murdering people, and the Mugabe Cricket Thugs know this. All that Mugabe now knows or cares about cricket is that some uppity white people ("rebels") have been making a nuisance of themselves, and they must be taught a lesson, at no matter what cost to Zimbabwe.

Now some more damned foreigners are interfering in Zimbabwe, taking it upon themselves to tell Zimbabwe how to do things, and my guess is that they too will get a right messing around from the Mugabe Cricket Thugs, who are now far more terrified of Robert Mugabe's wrath than of a little thing like Zimbabwe being threatened with expulsion from Test Match Cricket. So, such expulsion will be duly threatened. And then, when whatever deal has been made between the Mugabe Cricket Thugs and the ICC has been solemnly sworn to by the Mugabe Cricket Thugs and then welshed on within a few hours, Zimbabwe will be duly expelled from Test Match Cricket. The more humiliating, public, dramatic, acrimonious and downright unpleasant this process becomes, the better, because the more humiliating (etc.) that it is, the more it will broadcast the vileness of the Mugabe regime to the world, and more to the point to parts of the world which have until now regarded England's imperial past as more important than Zimbabwe's mass murderous present. If the many cricket-lovers of India (which is a lot of people) could be persuaded, perhaps as a result of a slanging match between one of the Mugabe Cricket Thugs and one of India's ICC reps, to decide that Mugabe Should Go, well, then he will indeed go, a little tiny moment sooner than otherwise, and a few thousand lives may be spared.

It would appear that this process of mutual recrimination � of deals and then withdrawn deals, of consultations and then recriminations � is well under way.

As I say, if all this foolishness serves to draw some more attention to the sorry state of Zimbabwe, then it will have done some good.

(2)

I've been flagging up England versus Zimbabwe cricket here because I anticipated that the row about whether England ought to be playing cricket against Zimbabwe, given the state of Zimbabwe, was not going to go away. What I had not anticipated was that Zimbabwean cricket would itself be wrecked by the same processes which are destroying Zimbabwe in general. I should have, but I failed to.

The Zimbabwean cricket team (like Zimbabwe itself) is now a racially and politically polarised shambles:

Zimbabwean cricket will reach meltdown this morning when 15 rebel players and their lawyer draft a letter rejecting the board's offer of mediation and renewing their boycott. This time they will walk out for good.

"This will hopefully be our final letter," one of the rebels said. "We'll probably be set free in about 14 days when they fire us." The Zimbabwe Cricket Union will be forced to pick Test sides from the willing but hopelessly inexperienced young players who crashed and burned to a 5-0 one-day series defeat against Sri Lanka.

So what have these "rebels" been rebelling about. Well, their problem is that the Zimbabwe cricket team is now being selected, not by people who know their cricket, but by people who know their Robert Mugabe.

As Michael Jennings (who did see this coming a year ago) said on Ubersportingpundit about three weeks ago:

As far as I can see, any argument for continuing to play Zimbabwe is based on the idea that cricket and politics have been largely separated, and that the strongest team is being fielded. This is now manifestly not so, as players are being selected (or not) on racial and political grounds. �

And things have not got any better since then, as Scott Wickstein explained on Ubersportingpundit today.

Tony Blair has said that England "shouldn't" tour Zimbabwe in the autumn. But he isn't willing to decide the matter, and I can see his point.

The problem is that the ICC (International Cricket Council) has dug itself into a position of insisting that England must tour Zimbabwe, on the grounds that (now that South Africa has been sorted) politics and cricket must be kept separate, and the dominant ICC voices (i.e. India, and also Pakistan and Sri Lanka) are from countries whose citizens are extremely reluctant to admit to white people that they might have made a mistake. Although actually, they could change their policy now, on the grounds that Zimbabwean cricket has also changed. The Zimbabwean team used to be selected on cricketing merit. Now it is not.

(7)

I've just been relaxing in front of the telly watching a show called Fifth Gear, on Channel 5. This show was preceded by another automobile-based show about "Building the Ultimate �" in this case, building the ultimate racing car. (Although, luckily for me, given my actual tastes, I switched back to BBC4 TV in time to witness this amazing boy doing his thing.)

Trouble is, what with speed cameras and satellite snooping systems and politicians who just plane hate cars, except for themselves to be driven about in, there are fewer and fewer places where you can drive these monsters in the manner intended by nature.

So, Fifth Gear went looking for the answer, and they came up with Race Resort Ascari. (Either that or they were told about the answer, and they stitched the question onto the front.) The Race Resort Ascari website is long on atmospheric photography and on self-importantly waffly abstractions ("The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express" � Sir Francis Bacon) and short, as befits the website for a super-luxury product, on trivia like what it is and what it costs to buy it, so I will have to describe this place myself, based on what Fifth Gear showed. Basically what Race Resort Ascari means is that now, you can not only own an ultimate racing car; you can actually drive one at its ultimate speed, around a privately owned race track. You can now go on holiday and drive your car at two hundred miles per hour, just like in the car advers on the telly. And if that palls, you can have a go with one of the other cars they have there permanently. A grand prix car? No problem. A finely tuned rally car? Step inside and foot down.

Financially, obviously, this is one of those "if you have to ask you can not afford it" deals. (I think I heard the figure of £100,000 mentioned.) Personally I would never spend my money this way no matter how much I had. But even so, I salute the principle.

The next step is for someone to build a money-no-object private road which does not just go around in a circuit in the one little lump of land, but on which you can actually go from somewhere to somewhere else, and the further apart these somewheres are the better.

At two hundred miles an hour. In your car. Yours not mine, for once again, I would not be queueing up for this service any more than I now want to spend any time at Race Resort Ascari. Nevertheless, that I would love to see. That I would love to share a planet with.

(5)

The state of New South Wales, Australia (which contains the city of Sydney) is in some ways irritating. If anything, the state government is even worse than the government of the United Kingdom in attempting to over-regulate every aspect of its citizens lives. Carrying weapons of any kind is completely illegal. (I like to carry a Swiss Army Knife, and technically doing even that is contrary to the law). If you want to go into a supermarket and buy a bottle of wine, or a newspaper, or anything but the mildest of medicines, there are laws preventing you from doing so. (Liquor stores, newsagents, and pharmacies are all granted local monopolies). And heaven forbid if you want to go to a quite cozy bar for a drink. But there are some compensations, as fellow Samizdatista Scott Wickstein and I discovered yesterday evening.

Scott and I ventured to what is now named "Telstra Stadium", which was the main stadium for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, which is now sponsored by a telephone company. (More than 50% of the shares of said telephone company belong to the Australian federal government, but I digress....). It was a beautiful evening, and after a beer or two in a nearby bar, we headed for the stadium.

The game was an Australian rules football game between the Sydney Swans and the Melbourne Demons. The atmosphere inside the ground was extraordinarily pleasant. Unlike in certain sports I could mention, the home and away supporters were not segregated from each other, and the atmosphere was enormously pleasant, however fanatical were the Melbourne supporters. (And boy, are the Melburnians fanatical). With 18 players on each side, seven umpires, and certain strange figures called "runners", who carry messages from the coaches to the players while the game is going on there are as many as 45 people on the field at once.

The game is lightning fast, and completely incomprehensible to foreigners. While many Australians think that Aussie rules football is a matter of life and death, in global terms the game is incredibly insignificant. Both teams could probably be bought for what Roman Abramovich spent to bring Damien Duff to the Chelsea Football Club in London.

As it happened my team, the Swans, ended up losing. But there are some compensations. Sydney people are enormously proud of their lifestyle, which involves going to the beach a lot, eating fine food, relaxing, and simply enjoying what life has to offer. And that applies at football matches as much as anywhere else.

And however many millions Mr Abramovich has spent, I seriously doubt that there is a bar where Chelsea supporters can enjoy oysters together after the game, as there is in Sydney. And even if there is (ha), they are certainly not this reasonably priced. And even if they are that, I am sure they are not freshly shucked.

(16)

H-A-P-P-Y.

I am H-A-P-P-Y.

I know I am.

I am sure I am.

I am H-A-P-P-Y.

(2)

One reason for not wanting England to go ahead with its projected cricket tour of Zimbabwe this winter is that the despotic ruler of that unhappy land, Robert Mugabe, will undoubtedly regard such a tour as proof of his own international magnificence, and of the indifference of all people in Britain to his many murders and other atrocities.

Things in Zimbabwe are so bad that even the UN has noticed, and wants to throw other people's money at the problem.

The United Nations is appealing for more than $94 million to provide urgent humanitarian aid to Zimbabwe. The United Nations says economic mismanagement has brought Zimbabwe to the brink of a serious humanitarian crisis.

Yes. Things are about to get really bad out there. Hurry. Give money, before people start to die.

The United Nations says Zimbabwe's economy is a shambles and getting worse. It says inflation has shot up from 100 percent in 2000 to 600 percent this year. And, last year, it says, the Gross Domestic Product dropped by 13 percent.

When I say throw other people's money at the problem, I actually mean throw other people's money at Robert Mugube, for it is undoubtedly he who will hoover it all up.

Money isn't going to solve this problem. In fact that kind of money is the damn problem, or at any rate a big slice of it. Serious international pressure, on Mugabe's version of Zimbabwe, and on all the scumbag politicians in other countries who are protecting Mugabe's version of Zimbabwe, might make some small difference by speeding the collapse of that disgusting regime by a few months and hence saving a couple of hundred thousand lives, or whatever it would be. Anything which might draw attention to this horror story, such as a nice little row about the England cricket tour, is all to the good.

But now here is another reason to hope that the England cricketers cancel their trip. If they do, it may mean that London will not get the 2012 Olympics.

If England boycott their tour of Zimbabwe this winter, it could have a knock-on effect on London's prospects of hosting the Olympic Games in 1912...

... and they seem to have lost a century there, but never mind...

...according to a report in Friday's edition of The Guardian. What is more, the potential costs to the England & Wales Cricket Board are spiralling by the day, and if they are suspended by the ICC for their moral stance, they could lose up to �50 million in gate receipts, sponsorship, and TV revenue.

"The ECB is once again in an invidious position because of the utterly tragic situation in Zimbabwe," said John Read, the board's director of communications. "A one-year ban would cost the ECB tens of millions of pounds, and would have a devastating effect on all aspects of the game, including our ability to help nurture and develop the two million schoolchildren that play cricket up and down the country. It is difficult to envisage a more serious scenario facing cricket in England and Wales."

The ECB's stance has also caused widespread distrust among African IOC members, whose votes will be crucial when it comes to deciding which city is awarded the 2012 Olympics. It has been noted that there was no such opposition to Zimbabwe's participation in the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, partly because of a fear of an African boycott.

Rejoice David Carr.

Maybe the ECB should start a "Boycott the Tour" fund, to cover the cost to them of pulling out of this abominable expedition. I agree that it is tough on them to be used as a political stick to beat Mugabe with. So, all those of us who think their tour should be used as a stick anyway, because every stick helps, should be asked to pay for their opinion. One thing is for sure. Money spent that way will do a whole lot more good than UN "humanitarian aid". Plus, it would publicise the whole disgusting mess very satisfactorily.

Armed humanitarian aid, that went in there and actually helped all the afflicted Zimbabweans and cut out the middle man (Mugabe), preferably by apprehending him (dead or alive), would be a different matter.

(12)

There is something very Georgian and 18th Century about this but I suppose it qualifies as entrepreneurialism of sorts:

The final punch lands, exploding the fighter's nose into the braying crowd, and the broken, unseeing, bare-knuckle boxer submits. The winner lifts his bleeding hands in celebration, knowing the victory won by his fists will line his pockets.

Welcome to the boxing underworld of bare-knuckle fighting, where the exhausted victor can hobble away with as much as £50,000 in cash.

Tax-free cash as well I should think.

These brutal confrontations have long been outlawed. But even now in country lanes, fields, barns and warehouses, grown men are pitting themselves against each other to settle old scores - and earn big money - at the risk of appalling injuries.

A reaction to the 'risk aversion' culture, perhaps?

Organisers say the police rarely break up a fight - it's easier to let the contest finish naturally than risk a riot.

Also they might get the crap beaten out of them.

Ricky English, an unlicensed promoter, has signed up hundreds of fighters in the three years since he started in the fight promotion game. It is big business - he is organising fights up and down the country, charging spectators up to £50 a head.

"This is for the novices," he said. "Fighters won't go amateur any more. They're sick of all the rules, the standing counts and the tap, tap, tapping. They want to have a fight and earn money. And they're earning money."

So is he trying to tell us that overregulation has spawned a thriving 'underground' industry?

"It's great fun. I had one fighter with a glass eye who'd take it out before a fight. Crowds just love it," said Rocky Rowe, who promoted unlicensed fights for many years. "It's a bit like karaoke."

Surely it cannot be that painful?

(14)

Blogger and libertarian authoress Virginia Postrel, in her recent book, The Future and Its Enemies, made a telling point that having fun and free enterprise are increasingly being fused in the same activities.

She cited the example of sports like professional beach volleyball. Now, there are few activities which might excite the moral scorn of the miserablists of the left and right more than a group of young men and women (the latter in rather fetching garb, ahem) punching a ball to and fro over a net. Well, if the idea of volleyball as part of an enterprise culture offends the scolds in our midst, then how about skiing?

I have recently had my annual fix of shooting down ski slopes in the French resort of Val D'Isere, a magnificent resort . I enjoyed a fantastic week. There are few adrenalin-boosting activities to match it, in my view. And putting aside the obvious points about this activity, one thing struck me - skiing is a classic part of a capitalist, fun-loving, life-affirming culture.

Skiing is 'pointless' to those who think we should devote our energies to 'higher' activities, or who think that all those resources spent on ski lifts, skis, hotels and airliners should be diverted to other, worthier goals. Skiing is a vast industry these days. Unlike spectator sports such as football or cricket, skiing is 99 percent participant sport. Millions of people of all ages - mostly being relatively fit - go skiing in places all over the world every year.

Many of the people who work in ski resorts - guides, holiday reps, lift attendants, bar staff and so forth - all seem to form part of a new culture remarkably similar to the sort of laid-back surfing culture made legendary in southern California. While affecting a sort of casual demeanor, most of the people seem in deadly earnest about ensuring they serve the skiers well. A lot of the holiday staff, many of whom have taken big salary cuts to go to the mountains, seem to speak a sort of 'leisure industry slang', a sort of hybrid of Australian 'matespeak', Californian 'coolspeak', and in France of course, overlain with that Galoise-smoking sang froid of the expert skiier with his nonchalant posture.

Skiing is a major triumph of capitalist organisation and enterprise. And even in the French Alps, in the homeland of the 35-hour week and dreaded bureaucracy, it seems one of the most successful businesses in France. In fact, I got the impression that many staff in the French ski businesses have to work for far longer than is permitted under the nation's job-destroying regulations.

And as a final observation, skiing is risky. Good grief, allowing folk to go down a slope without a State licence - are we mad?

(10)

Later today, kicking off at 4pm, England play Ireland in the Six Nations rugby union tournament.

This is, on paper, the toughest game England has faced since they won the World Cup in Australia last November. But it is also the true homecoming of the England team, because today, after beating the tournament's two weakest sides, Italy in Italy and Scotland in Scotland, they now play the first of their two games this year at Twickenham. When England get on top at Twickenham the home crowd roars them on and, in effect, doubles the winning margin.

Several other things make me optimistic about tomorrow's game.

England's forwards, now without their revered but retired World Cup captain Martin Johnson, are going through changes, which makes me hope that England will really want to get points by scoring tries as well as just by grinding forward with the forwards. The England backs have looked promising for years now, and they still do, and I live in hope that one day they will blow someone completely away with a dazzling performance. Could this happen today? Jason Robinson seems to get better and better with every game - and it adds immensely to his aura and must also add to his confidence that he got England's only try (a very good one) in the World Cup Final. Josh Lewsey is also improving. And Ian Balshaw is getting back to his best of two years ago. Greenwood and Cohen also know quite a bit about how to play rugby. Plus, there is no Jonny Wilkinson to rely on to kick twenty points, which gives England an extra incentive to play fast and furious.

In general, playing for England is now the hottest ticket in world rugby, and England coach Clive (now Sir Clive) Woodward's ruthless willingness to sack people as and when he thinks he needs to makes competition to stay in the side ferocious. World Cup Heroes know that they are not sacrosanct and nearly men know they have a good chance of being picked Real Soon Now. So when you do play for England these days, you just know that you have to play really well to keep on playing.

But do not write off Ireland. They came within a kick of beating losing finalists Australia in the World Cup. Brian O'Driscoll played a blinder a fortnight ago when Ireland blew Wales away in what looked beforehand like being one of the closest games of the entire tournament. And England will not underestimate them. Any more than England underestimated Ireland last year, when they thrashed them last year in Dublin.

What I am saying is: (a) England's best is good enough now to blow Ireland off the pitch, and (b) there is every reason to hope that England will indeed play at their best.

Not that you can ever be sure with sport. As I say, Ireland/Wales was supposed to be close this year. And it is a rare Six Nations when there are no big surprises.

I won't be saying much more here about this game. I will just add an addendum here tomorrow with the score. The told-you-so-ing or egg-off-face wiping will all be happening at Ubersportingpundit.

UPDATE (5.55pm): Clang. England 13 Ireland 19. Time to scrape all that muck off my face and make an omelette with it.

(3)

This is the story that is all over the broadcast news tonight, and will be all over the English newspapers tomorrow:

Three Leicester City footballers have been charged with "sexual aggression" after three women claimed they were attacked at a Spanish hotel.

Paul Dickov, Frank Sinclair and Keith Gillespie, who deny the charges, will now spend another night in custody.

The judge in Cartagena said the charges were serious enough to go to trial.

We are now enduring that horrible moment when someone very famous is charged with something very serious, but when no one other than the arresting officers and the accused has the faintest idea of whether the accused are guilty or not, and when the logical thing for everyone else is to say nothing.

I can now hear the ITV news, trying desperately to turn whatever tiny scraps of information and background chit-chat they have in front of them into something portentous enough to serve the needs of this, their top story this evening. But what on earth can they say? The real writing of the story can only seriously begin when whatever court ends up being involved reaches its verdict.

Meanwhile, you have to remember just how important lots of people in England feel football to be. (A great, great many of them make our own David Carr look like a total football agnostic.) In the city of Leicester, this is the biggest news story for years. Leicester City are facing relegation from the Premier League. This could quite well finish their chances of avoiding that fate. To talk about something as trivial as the relegation of a sports team from a football league to a lower football league when some men have been charged with a crime may seem very odd. But that is what this is about, and why this is such big news here.

It is the combination of vagueness and disastrousness to something which so many people take so seriously which gives this story its special atmosphere.

With a regular disaster, like an earthquake, or a terrorist outrage, the disastrousness of the disaster is not in doubt, and there are plenty of things to say because there is actual news to report, in ghastly abundance. But not with this. Fans and other players foolish enough to open their mouths on the subject are now queueing up to say that they "do not believe" that these men would do such a thing. Others who are equally ignorant are muttering under their breath that there is no smoke without fire, and what can you expect of footballers, who are a law unto themselves and think they can get away with murder? Neither opinion is worth anything. This is why the civilised world has law courts, to replace ignorant speculations like those with disciplined investigation.

The only solid facts here are that this is very bad for Leicester City football club, and that these charges are serious.

(12)

This, a report from the London Evening Standard, is going to make David Carr very happy:

London's rivals for the 2012 Olympics have already started exploiting a row between British and Irish officials over Northern Ireland which could seriously damage the bid, Standard Sport can reveal today.

The row has become so inflamed that Ireland's International Olympic Committee member Patrick Hickey, one of the leading figures in European sport, has said the British Olympic Association, who organise this summer's team for Athens, could look like "clowns".

The Olympic Council of Ireland, who say they have traditionally had jurisdiction over the area, is angry that the BOA have suddenly decided to add the words "Northern Ireland" to their team contracts for the Athens Olympics.

But what is so clownish about that? This story explains the situation rather better:

Hickey said, "they would have to withdraw those letters in the team agreement where they have added Northern Ireland. Otherwise they will look completely foolish when we turn up in Athens with seven to 10 members of our team from Northern Ireland and nobody from Northern Ireland on the British team. They would look like clowns".

Yes, that would be clownish all right. But there is more involved than that. The Irish suspect that the British use of the words "Northern Ireland" in those team contracts could be a sign of action to come, at some time in the future. Back to the Standard:

The BOA strongly deny they have attempted to change anything and played down the dispute. The Irish see the move as a threat to the future of all-Ireland sports teams. �

Odd, those "all-Ireland" sports teams. The only game I know about in this connection is Rugby Union. (Irish people do not concern themselves with cricket very much.) And yes, next Saturday, the opening match of the Six Nations Rugby Union championship will be France v. Ireland, at the Stade de France in Paris. Ireland as in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, with two different Irish national anthems if I am not mistaken. No doubt this arrangement was arrived at during an era when sport and politics inhabited different universes, and the politicians regarded what the sportsmen did as entirely the business of the sportsmen. Also, in former times, whatever arrangements the British made with their neighbours were no-one else's business. Now, sport is big business and big politics, and Britain is just one beast in the global sporting pack. Now, the mere wording of a team contract can take on a huge international significance:

Hickey revealed today that several bidding cities, keen to take advantage of London's problems, had already contacted him since this newspaper broke the story about the dispute last week.

My guess is it was one of David's lawyer friends (all lawyers know all other lawyers � this is a well known fact) who wrote those contracts, in a deliberately provocative manner, and then rang up all the competing cities to tell them about this row. After all, if enough people say there is a row, there is!

So David's No Olympics for London campaign is getting nicely into gear, and I congratulate him on progress so far.

(7)

One of Australia's greatest golfers, Greg Norman, is among a number of male golfers who want to limit, if not resist completely, the number of women golfers playing men in top-class tournaments.

Straight off, before the equal opportunities industry kicks into gear, we should remember that however dumb and sexist many golfers are said to be (or in some cases, actually are), golf clubs are, by and large, private associations. If women are annoyed at missing out on playing golf against the best, then by all means let golf clubs be opened which cater for both sexes, but we should also resist all attempts to ban the right of clubs, however fuddy-duddy, to set their own rules.

Also, a point for Norman and his ilk to recall is this - the handicapping system. So long as the golf handicap of a man is treating equally - on a par (heh) with that of a woman, then why are the guys getting upset? After all, if you have to be a scratch golfer to make the cut at the Masters, say, then if women really aren't good enough to play, then the handicapping system in play will expose this rather quickly.

In truth, I suspect that Norman and his fellows probably fear that women are getting better at the game and will give them a serious run for their money.

But like I said, this issue is strictly for the clubs, the members, and the paying customer. Message to government - stay out of it.

Right, time I went to the driving range.

(14)

I happened to catch the BBC Radio 5 sports punditry show Fighting Talk on Saturday. One topic under discussion was whether soccer's FA Premier League should "do something" about dominance of the current top three teams in the league, it being alleged that their success made the rest of the league boring. One of the pundits was against this notion, making the point that, as little as 15 years ago, there were different dominant teams. Those who celebrated Liverpool's invulnerability in the mid 1980s could hardly have imagined that that club's place would be taken by Manchester United in the 1990s. Indeed, barely six months ago, nobody could have predicted the emergence of oligarch-funded Chelsea as title contenders. She argued that the league had evolved "organically" - any problems would tend to correct themselves - and lamented the prospect of a "genetically engineered" league with structures designed to hobble the successful teams and boost the mediocre.

I thought it was interesting to hear those specific terms used to support a laissez faire position and it struck me that there is a paradox about environmentalism. That is that, while it holds that organic processes are desirable in food production and any kind of "artificial engineering" is bad, it holds that the reverse applies to society and the economy. Capitalism has developed without a plan. Nobody had to sit down and design civil society. Yet these natural phenomena are scorned by the likes of the Green party whose underlying premise is that society should be re-engineered so that it can become "more natural".

(20)

On the same day that Prime Minister Tony Blair launches London's official bid for the Olympic Games in 2012, I hereby announce the start of my 'No Olympics' campaign.

"The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games will enhance sport in London and the UK forever," said bid chairman Barbara Cassani.

And, by curious coincidence, 'forever' is about how long we are going to have to spend paying for it. No. Non. Nein. Njet. Let the French have it. Or the Russians. Or the Brazilians. Or somebody. Anybody. Just not here. Go away. Sod off. Scram. Sling your hook. Get lost.

I think I shall call a press conference.

UPDATE: The French have also launched their official bid. Apparently, they are the favourites. Good. I support the French bid. Vive la France!

(10)

Stephen Pollard quotes from and links to this article, but doesn't comment other than calling it "fascinating".