You Cannot Be Serious!

The 101 Most Infuriating Things in Sport

MATTHEW NORMAN

To Rebecca and Louis, implacable enemies of sport in all its myriad guises

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

101 - Roger Federer

100 - Neville Neville

99 - Adolf Hitler

98 - Simon Barnes

97 - The Argentine Polo Player

96 - Blake Aldridge

95 - Peter Fleming

94 - Tony Green

93 - Frank Warren

92 - Graeme Souness

91 - Kriss Akabusi

90 - Ronnie O’Sullivan

89 - Pelé

88 - Brian Barwick

87 - Sledging

86 - Graham Poll

85 - Pat Cash

84 - Richard Keys

83 - Harold ‘Dickie’ Bird

82 - Mervyn King

81 - Virtual Racing

80 - Alastair Campbell

79 - The Vuvuzela

78 - The Charlton Brothers

77 - The Charity Fun Runner

76 - Rhona Martin

75 - Arjen Robben

74 - David O’Leary

73 - Lleyton Hewitt

72 - Ken Bailey

71 - Alan Sugar

70 - John McEnroe

69 - David Bryant

68 - Badge-Kissing

67 - In da Hole!

66 - Sir Geoffrey Charles Hurst

65 - George Graham

64 - Eric Bristow

63 - Jonathan Pearce

62 - Sir Clive Woodward

61 - The Japanese Racing Driver

60 - Jonathan Edwards

59 - Sven-Göran Eriksson

58 - Sir Allen Stanford

57 - The Jockey Club

56 - Daniel Levy

55 - Joe Bugner

54 - Flavio Briatore

53 - John Motson

52 - Willie Carson

51 - Mike Gatting

50 - Footballers in Gloves and Tights

49 - Paula Radcliffe

48 - Tony Blair

47 - BBC Sports Personality of the Year

46 - Colin Montgomerie

45 - Glenn Hoddle

44 - Andre Agassi

43 - Dwain Chambers

42 - Sir Ian Botham

41 - Ron Atkinson

40 - The Centre Court Crowd

39 - Will Carling

38 - Tiger Woods

37 - Sue Barker

36 - Andy Gray

35 - Mark Nicholas

34 - The Barmy Army

33 - Ashley Cole

32 - Olympic Race Walking

31 - Mick McCarthy

30 - Thierry Henry

29 - Naseem Hamed

28 - David Pleat

27 - Sepp Blatter

26 - The Bare-Chested Gargantuan Newcastle Fan

25 - Steve McClaren

24 - John Inverdale

23 - Kenneth Bates

22 - Alan Shearer

21 - Billy Bowden

20 - Derek Thompson

19 - Michael Schumacher

18 - John Terry

17 - Pete Sampras

16 - Harald ‘Toni’ Schumacher

15 - Kevin Pietersen

14 - Mark Lawrenson

13 - Audley Harrison

12 - Tim Henman

11 - José Mourinho

10 - The Henman Parents

9 - Geoffrey Boycott

8 - Sir Alex Ferguson

7 - Bernie Ecclestone

6 - The Offside Rules of Rugby Union

5 - Arsène Wenger

4 - Alan Green

3 - Sebastian Coe

2 - The England Football Team

1 - Peter Alliss

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

I love sport. I love it with a passion so obsessive that it strikes me as indistinguishable from mental illness, as my wife would be gracious enough to confirm. In May 1991, three days into the commencement of our courtship, she awoke at 6.30 a.m. to hear me announce that I was leaving the flat to tie a shoelace on the northbound Northern Line platform at Embankment underground station. Spurs were playing Nottingham Forest in that afternoon’s FA Cup final, I explained as her absolute indifference gave way to mild alarm, and because such a shoelace-tying had prefaced our victory over Manchester City in the replayed Cup final of 1981, it had to be done again. She didn’t say anything.

Nor was she capable of speech four months later when, a week into our honeymoon, I checked us out of a quaint Shaker inn in rural Massachusetts and into a filthy, cockroach-infested motel room, on the grounds that the former had no cable TV and the latter did, allowing us (me) to watch the peerlessly melodramatic dénouement to that year’s Ryder Cup.

Almost two decades later, the deranged love for sport remains unabated by the ravages of middle age. I can, and do, spend untold unbroken hours not only watching sport – any sport, other perhaps than dressage, rowing and ten-pin bowling – on television, but also taking comfort from studying cricket averages, the sequence of winners in golfing majors, and the results from the early rounds of 1970s tennis Grand Slam events. When I confess that one of my more thrilling experiences in recent years was chancing upon a website that included the scores from the qualifying competitions for World Snooker Championships, which I duly attempted to memorise, you may understand why I have come to know the condition as spautism. I regard myself as a little less far along the spectrum than those who have not missed an away fixture played by their football team in forty years, or have visited all ninety-two league grounds; but not by much, and more thanks to indolence than anything else.

Hand in hand with any all-consuming, sanity-threatening love, there inevitably travels a portion of its opposite. I resent sport as a whole for its imperious hold over me, as the stalker perhaps does the stalkee, or a heroin addict the weakness of which the drug use is manifestation rather than cause. And I resent those involved in playing, describing and administering it, both as agents of that time-sucking dominion, and in many cases for themselves.

The frustrations, distastes, rages and loathings acquired over forty years have made the writing of this book a painful task. How does one whittle down so many thousands of irritants, dullards, hypocrites, narcissists and plain horrors to a mere 101? On what possible grounds can no space be found for Cristiano Ronaldo or Vinnie Jones, Iron Mike Tyson or Sam Allardyce? What brand of imbecile would put his name to a list devoid of such titans of administrative cluelessness as cricket’s Giles Clark, or Sir Dave Richards, who somehow vaults the towering conflictof-interest hurdle to remain a power at both the Football Association and the Premier League? Whence the sheer gall to include Colin Montgomerie, yet not Nick Faldo? How in the name of all the saints did Chas and Dave avoid an appearance for ‘Snooker Loopy’?

You will each have your own fierce criticisms, as much for the inclusion of those you admire (Peter Alliss’s popularity with many sound judges must, however bemusing, be acknowledged) as for the omissions of those you detest. The ranking of the 101 will also inevitably displease.

In my defence, it is among sport’s sovereign duties to provoke every emotion, and rage at the incompetence, arrogance and indeed pretension of armchair know-all writers like myself (see also Simon Barnes, no. 98) is undeniably one of those. If you believe you could do it better, you are almost certainly right. All I can say is that every word of what follows comes from the heart – not from one of that organ’s more gentle or engaging ventrical chambers, perhaps, but from the heart nonetheless.

Matthew Norman

September 2010

101

Roger Federer

Setting aside the bleeding obvious (genius beyond compare, blah blah), it must be admitted, with reluctance and sadness, that the Fed has become something of a wanker.

It isn’t easy to say, and people continue to shy away from saying it, for such is the reverence for the indecent beauty of his tennis and so capacious is the storehouse of glorious memories the Swiss has deposited in those, like me, who have followed his career obsessively for almost a decade. I can’t think of a sportsman who has given me half as much televisual joy as Federer. I’ve barely missed a match he’s played since he announced himself as a generational talent at Wimbledon in 2001 with a thrilling five-set win over the seemingly unbeatable apeman Pete Sampras (see no. 17). Even now, with his decline apparently established and picking up pace, there is no one you’d rather watch.

So it is with far more regret than relish that the masturbatorial quality he increasingly exhibits must, in the interests of the rigorous honesty that defines this book, be noted.

First of all, there are the gleaming white blazers – vaguely nautical, with hints of both seventies disco and something worn on the bridge of the USS Enterprise, invariably with some boastful statistic (fifteen major titles, for instance) stitched into them – he has taken to wearing. With the notable exception of the Green Jacket presented to winners of the US Masters, there are no naffer garments known to world sport.

More disturbing, meanwhile, is the self-pity. The infantile crying fit that followed his defeat to Rafael Nadal in the Australian Open final of 2009, when he had to abandon his loser’s speech, although not the first of its kind, was an embarrassment to behold. For a while after that, it seemed that the birth of his twin girls and his maiden French Open win in the summer of that year had matured him. Admittedly his victory speech at Wimbledon, after edging out a heroic Andy Roddick 16–14 in the fifth, was not impressive. A man with fifteen major titles informing another with just the one, and that years ago, that he knew the agony of narrow defeat, lacked sensitivity. The relief was that Roddick was too traumatised by his loss to take in the clumpingly misplaced condescension.

Worse by far would come after the following year’s shock quarter-final defeat to Tomáš Berdych, when Federer blamed everything – a back injury, a sore leg, bad bounces, Denis Compton and the alignment of Uranus in Mars’s seventh house – other than himself, and offered the faintest and most grudging of praise for the Czech. ‘I definitely gave away this match,’ he said. But he hadn’t. He’d simply been on the wrong end of the sort of hiding he has dished out a thousand times, and lacked not only the humility to accept it, but the will to simulate that humility. No one sane expects epochal titans like Roger Federer to be genuinely humble. You don’t dominate a sport for years without a rapacious ego. All we ask is that they have the wit to give the appearance of modesty on the rare occasions it’s demanded, and this now seems beyond Federer’s grasp.

The emperors of Rome had slaves positioned behind them at all times with the sole purpose of reminding them of their humanity by whispering the mantra, ‘You too shall die, Lord.’ Federer could do with one of those as his career comes to what one hopes will, for all the irritation he can generate, be a very slow and gentle close. That, and a style counsellor on the lines of Reginald Jeeves, who always found a way to prevent Bertie Wooster from wearing one of those white smoking jackets he’d bought in Monte Carlo that were capable of cauterising the retina at twenty paces.

100

Neville Neville

Excuse the self-indulgent lurch into personal philosophising, but I have two iron rules of human existence, and two alone.

The first is that anyone who imagines that something as infinitely complex and perplexing as human existence is susceptible to an iron rule is, axiomatically, an imbecile.

The second is this. Never trust anyone who has the same name twice. Humbert Humbert was Lolita’s paedo-stepfather, and Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy. Like so many iron rules, this has its one exception (Lord Chief Justice Igor Judge, or Judge Judge, seems a good judicial egg). Neville Neville, on the other hand, serves only to confirm it.

Can you honestly blame a man, you might ask, for his parents’ startling lack of imagination? Of course not. What you can and must blame him for is not availing himself of the cheap and simple remedy that is deed poll. What the advantages of hanging on to both names could be, apart perhaps from halving the time required in adolescence to practise the signature, I can’t imagine.

But it’s not the wilful refusal to jettison at least one of those Nevilles that earns this double namer – a football agent with just the two clients (can you guess? Go on, have a crack) – his berth in this book. That refusal did, after all, inspire what may be the second-best football chant of the last twenty years. The first is the Chelsea ditty about Gianfranco Zola, sung to the tune of the Kinks’ ‘Lola’, that went thus:

If you think we’re taking the piss

Just ask that cunt Julian Dicks

About Zola

Who-oo-oo-o Zola …

The brilliance, I’ve always felt, lies in how the Sondheims of Stamford Bridge eschewed substituting that ‘piss’ with the ‘mick’ that would have made it very nearly rhyme. This deliberate avoidance of the obvious strips away any lingering threat of Hallmark-greeting-card tweeness, and imbues the song with an emotional force, even poignancy, it would otherwise have lacked.

The Old Trafford chant regarding our subject, sung in the earliest days of his issue’s Manchester United careers to the tune of Bowie’s ‘Rebel Rebel’, was barely less uplifting, if bereft of the assonant genius celebrated above. This is it:

Neville Neville, they’re in defence

Neville Neville, their future’s immense

Neville Neville, they ain’t half bad

Neville Neville, the name of their dad.

With one of the brothers, this was also uncannily prescient. The future of Gary ‘Our Kid’ Neville, with club and country, was indeed immense. More than that, Gary, one of the more articulate native players in the Premier League (he speaks English almost as well as the less fluent Dutchmen), would prove to be football’s most influential trade unionist in the years between Jimmy Hill masterminding the scrapping of the maximum wage in the 1960s and John Terry’s heroically flawed attempt to spear-head a mutiny against Fabio Capello during the World Cup of 2010.

You may recall how Gary, the Lech Wałsa of his generation, nobly led the England dressing room in threatening to withdraw their labour in protest over the ban imposed on his clubmate and fellow England defender Rio Ferdinand for the amnesiac skipping of a drugs test; and how he spearheaded the snubbing of the media after one international in umbrage at their criticism. Anyone on several million quid per annum who can bring the flavour of the Gdansk shipyard to the England dressing room is more than all right with me.

Philip, alas, is quite another matter. More gormless and less gifted by far than his elder brother, his career has contained just the one moment of immensity: the immense act of foolishness that concluded England’s involvement, under the riotously clueless stewardship of Kevin Keegan, in Euro 2000. England, astonishingly incompetent even by their own standards in the final group game against Romania, had inexplicably recovered from conceding an early goal to lead 2–1 at half time.

The plucky little Ceauescu-executors duly equalised in the second half, but with a couple of minutes remaining England had the draw they needed to make laughably ill-deserved progress to the knockout stage. And then, for no apparent reason, with Viorel Moldovan heading harmlessly towards the byline, Our Philip chose to scythe him to the turf. Short of picking the ball up and dribbling it around the box in homage to the Harlem Globetrotters’ Meadowlark Lemon, he could not have gifted Romania a more blatant penalty.

An admirably distraught Phil would eventually receive full punishment (a transfer to Everton), but from Neville Neville there has been not a word of regret for his own central role – part genetic, no doubt, but surely part nurture as well – in the creation of this national humiliation.

Shameless Shameless.

99

Adolf Hitler

On 28 May 1940, Winston Churchill held the most important Cabinet meeting in British history. With the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax championing the majority view that the military situation was so hopeless that the only option was to sue for peace, the new Prime Minister had a desperate fight on his hands to keep buggering on against the Hun. The need to win round his ministers elicited from him what is regarded as even his greatest speech – the fight must continue even if it meant every one of them bleeding to death in the dust, he said, because a nation that is conquered can rise again, but one that surrenders is finished for ever. The memory always amuses when a peevish politician does what Hillary Clinton did in the spring of 2008, and insists that fancy oratory ain’t worth diddly.

For all that, I can’t help wondering if Winston could have spared himself the rhetorical bother had he known then what we know now about Hitler and cricket. In the event, all he would have needed to do was inform the Cabinet, take a vote and go back to his bath.

In fact this outrage didn’t emerge for another seven decades, when a contemporary account by a Hitler-loving Tory MP, one Oliver Locker-Lampson, was unearthed. This related how in 1923 Hitler came across some British expats enjoying a genteel game of cricket and asked if he could watch them play. Happy to oblige, these thoroughly decent coves went that extra mile for post-Versailles Treaty hatchet-burial by writing out the rules of the game for his perusal. Hitler, having duly perused, returned a few days later with his own team and took them on. The scorecard of this Anglo–German clash has never been published, but from what followed we may presume that the result pre-empted the one to follow in 1945.

In an unwonted flash of intolerance, Hitler took umbrage at the rules, declaring the game ‘insufficiently violent for German fascists’ (Bodyline, which might have changed his thinking there, had yet to come). To this end, and with a novel way of training troops in mind, he suggested tweaking the rules by introducing a larger, harder ball, and abandoning pads. The absence of any masterplan to jettison the protective box may well be further evidence of that rumoured gonadic deficit. With only one to protect, imaginary Nazi cricket scholars posit, why bother?

If the Führer had entirely misunderstood the point of the game, failing to appreciate the languor, subtlety, nuance and infinite complexities that make Test cricket the most captivating of sports, perhaps he can be forgiven. He was never a chap easily imagined daydreaming at deep fine leg, or taking four hours to score 23 on a flat wicket.

Even so, and however unsuccessfully, he had blazed the trail of cheap-thrills pseudo-cricket that would find its apotheosis in Twenty20, and for that, among other things, he cannot lightly be forgiven.

98

Simon Barnes

‘I suppose the problem,’ observed the chief sportswriter of The Times once, when contemplating the crazy misconception that he merits the teasing of the inferior and the envious, ‘is that some people can’t come to terms with the idea that intelligent people like sport, and might want to read someone who tries to write about sport in an intelligent way.’ How true this is, how very, very true. I mean, it’s hardly as if there are incredibly bright and thoughtful writers like Hugh McIlvanney in the Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday’s Patrick Collins out there covering this turf, is it? It’s not as if Mike Atherton, Matthew Syed, Marina Hyde, Paul Hayward, Oliver Holt and others sate the appetite for smart and insightful sportswriting. ‘My attempts to do so have met,’ Mr Barnes went on, ‘with a bewildering hostility in some quarters.’

Bewildering indeed. To be a lone oasis of intellectualism in an arid wasteland of moronic cliché must be a grievous weight on the shoulders of this most engagingly unpompous of hacks. Yet, like Atlas, he bears his burden stoically and without complaint. ‘Occasionally I’ve come up with some high-faluting notion,’ said this Pseuds Corner fixture, ‘and somebody will say, “What if Private Eye got hold of it?” I say, “Well, fuck them. Let them get hold of it. I’m setting the bloody agenda here, not these guys.” ’

It’s that ‘occasionally’ I love. At his best, when writing about his Down’s Syndrome son and even every now and then about sport, Mr Barnes – an eerie doppelganger, with his lupine face and ponytail, for the Satanic character Bob in Twin Peaks – is very good indeed. At one iota less than his best, when presenting himself as what someone identified as a ‘posturing narcissist’ – well, suffice it to say that another hack once expressed bewilderment of his own on finding him using the words ‘unpretentious’ and ‘unselfconscious’ (of Amir Khan) with apparent admiration.

From the canon of Simon Barnes, you could pluck many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of examples to illustrate the massive range and power of his mind, or indeed his commitment to wearing his learning lightly. Sometimes, for example, he will restrict the Nietzsche references to no more than one a paragraph (I’m a Heidegger man myself, with the odd Hegelian twist). But space is short, so let us leave it to this all-time personal favourite to give the flavour. Roger Federer, Mr Barnes once declared, is ‘as myriad-minded as Shakespeare ever was’.

Sometimes, as the agenda-setter himself might be the very last to agree, there simply are no words.

97

The Argentine Polo Player

The abundant ridiculousness of the sport itself need not detain us here. That it appeals to male members of the House of Windsor within a death or two of the throne is ample comment on its mingling of needless physical danger and grotesque unaffordability. Its appeal to the female sex is predicated on something else, of course, as close students of Jilly Cooper’s oeuvre will need little reminding. Why frustrated women d’une certaine age prefer the ogling of equestrians, and inter-chukka traipsing around fields stamping down displaced pieces of turf to work off some of that ardour, to availing themselves of the splendid pornography so freely available on cable television, I cannot say. All we know is that the Argentine polo player, that prancing ponce of the aristo sporting world, makes the polo field cougar paradise.

Invariably sickeningly handsome and repulsively dashing, this archetype of gentrified machismo has correctly identified the tight-buttocked, muscle-bulging activity of riding around swinging a mallet as the speediest route to a life of idle riches. For decades, long before the trail was blazed by Sarah Ferguson’s mother, wealthy English and American women have been alighting on the pseudo-gaucho talent pool as a source of mid-life gratification.

Exactly how many of the players are descended from gentlemen who hurriedly fled central Europe in the mid-1940s is unknown, though any genetic inheritance from Prussian cavalry-men would obviously be handy for horsemanship. One of the age’s finest players, meanwhile, glories in the first name of Adolfo.

Yet it is not for us to visit the sins of the great-grandfathers on the great-grandsons. What it is for us to do is point out that these show ponies are essentially glamourised gigolos with nothing on their minds but the servicing of Anglo-American sugar mummies and the cushy lives their capacious purses will thenceforth provide. What polo represents to the Argentine, in other words, is a hole with a mint.

96

Blake Aldridge

So much nauseating drivel is intoned by sports people about the primacy of the collective effort – the striker insisting he couldn’t care about scoring so long as the team wins, for example, when he’d massacre an orphanage for a hat-trick in a 3–9 defeat – that any expression of individuality in a group context generally acts as an anti-emetic. When, however, a member of that group, even a group as small as two, pinpoints the midst of competition as the time to slag off his partner, the antidote loses its efficacy. When that same group member chooses to do so at the side of an Olympic pool, by speaking to his mother in the crowd on his mobile phone, you know you’re dealing with a fool of the very first water.

The diving prodigy Tom Daley, who represented Britain in the 2008 Olympics at an age when others are gingerly ditching the armbands, was admittedly an irritant himself, with all the robotic references to his sponsor. He paid tribute to ‘Team Visa’ with all the frequency and sincerity Barry McGuigan lavished on ‘my manager Mr Barney Eastwood’ before the two went to attritional courtroom war.

But then, precocious fourteen-year-olds are irritating, as parents and Britain’s Got Talent viewers need no reminding. They also tend, inexplicably, to lack Olympic experience, which perhaps explained the sub-par performance in the Beijing synchronised diving event of a pubescent boy who would confirm his talent a year later by winning an individual world title in Rome.

Aldridge, although more than a decade older, allowed him no such latitude, publicly criticising Daley during the competition despite the experts identifying Aldridge himself as the weaker performer. As for the phone call, filial piety is a wonderful thing, but there are times and places to demonstrate it. Seldom since Oedipus has a public figure found a less appropriate method of showing the world how much he loves his mummy.

Aldridge’s punishment was not the putting out of his own eyes, but a lurch into a new sport also covered by live cameras. Sadly, he seems to have as much talent for shoplifting as for diving, winning his first conviction in May 2009, a few months before Daley won his gold in Rome. He was fined £80 by police for nicking stuff from B&Q.

Encouragingly, he appears to be showing more sticking power in this career. He was arrested again in February 2010 on suspicion of stealing wine from Tesco and assaulting the security guard who caught him at it. His trial awaits at the time of writing, and we wish him well. If and when it takes place – if it hasn’t already – a word of advice. Whatever the temptation, try not to call your mother in the spectator seats at the back from the dock. Judges hate that. And however badly you think your barrister is performing, Blake, on no account criticise him publicly until the verdict is in. In court, as on the diving board, it is essential to work as a team.

95

Peter Fleming

John McEnroe’s old doubles partner may be the most unnervingly weird character ever to analyse any sport on television. His air of intellectual superiority may be well-founded, as it would be for anyone with an IQ over ninety sharing airtime with Barry Cowan, but it does tend to grate.

Although he behaves himself during Wimbledon, when he works for the BBC, Fleming seldom hears a question on Sky that isn’t beneath his dignity. His preferred mode of expressing disdain, particularly towards presenter Marcus Buckland, a modest and charming soul, is the exaggerated pause. How, Mr Buckland once asked him, would he explain the amazing abundance of talent in the men’s game today? Eunuchs grew rabbinical beards in the time Fleming took to ponder this, before offering a desolate ‘I dunno,’ and lapsing into quietude once more.

On a good day, the silence in response to a seemingly unchallenging enquiry – Does Novak Djokovic’s second serve look a bit off? Are Rafa Nadal’s knees playing up? What is the time? – puts you in mind of Pinter performed by the Theatre of the Mute. On a bad one, you could write a wistful rite-of-passage memoir in the style of Alan Bennett in the time he requires to address a wayward Andy Murray two-hander down the line.

Occasionally, when Fleming feels that the foolishness of the question requires more peremptory treatment, he might wince, snort or raise his eyebrows to the crown of his head. Now and again, he will stare in disbelief, the gaze apparently in homage to Jack Nicholson in The Shining or Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men.

When Mr Fleming, facially a hybrid between the Addams Family’s butler Lurch and Jay Gatsby, does deign to share an opinion, it’s invariably worth hearing. He is an extremely bright guy, and he certainly has a presence (that of a Harvard philosophy professor stunned into an existential crisis at mysteriously finding himself redeployed as a third-grade teaching assistant). Tennis, like darts and nothing else, is a sport Sky covers well, and the languid gloss Fleming lends to its broadcasts does much to explain that bucking of the form book. I wouldn’t be without him for the world.

Nor, however, would I wish to get into a big-money staring contest with him, much less be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the Situation Room at the White House demanding an instant decision from a President Fleming about how to respond to worryingly raised activity levels in an Iranian nuclear silo.

94

Tony Green

The most perplexing event in the sporting calendar is the BDO World Darts Championship, broadcast each New Year by the BBC. The tortured history of the great darting split, as featured in a hilarious edition of BBC2’s documentary strand Trouble at the Top, needn’t detain us long. Suffice it to say that in the 1990s a trickle of BDO stars flowed away to form the rival PDC, now run with typical commercial élan by Barry Hearn, and that the trickle later became a torrent.

Where the PDC is dart’s equivalent of football’s Premier League – a point it subtly underscores by naming a competition ‘the Premier League of Darts’ – the BDO is, at best, its Conference. So robbed of talent has it become that the trades descriptions people risk a class action for negligence by failing to have it restyled The World Championship for People Who Try Hard, Bless ’Em But Just Aren’t Terribly Good at Darts. An averagely well coordinated male who threw the first arrow of his life on Christmas Day could expect to reach the quarter-finals, at least, a fortnight later.

The timing of the BDO event, which starts immediately after Phil ‘The Power’ has retained the real world title on Sky Sports, is the equivalent of rescheduling Wimbledon as a warm-up for a satellite event in Cleethorpes, and adds an additional layer of poignancy that isn’t strictly required. That the work of lead commentator Tony Green perfectly reflects the quality of the darts completes a startlingly surreal picture.

Best known to students of game show theory as Jim Bowen’s Bullseye stooge (‘And Bully’s special priiiiize … a reverse lobotomy!’), this John Prescott lookalike, and alas soundalike, must be the most clueless commentator in the history of televised sport. Like the former deputy PM he so closely resembles in girth and jowls, Mr Green boldly pioneers aphasia as a mainstream lifestyle choice.

His trademarks may be boiled down to two. Whenever the director shows a cutaway shot of a palpably bored crowd sullenly watching the apology for top-flight darts on a giant screen (and isn’t that the special appeal of a live event? It’s so qualitatively different from watching at home) he will respond with an elon-gated ‘Yeeeeeessssss, there they are!’ Technically, it’s hard to pick a fight with that. There is invariably where they were. On other levels … well, it’s not Richie Benaud, is it?

The other signature dish is to respond to a cosmically witless pre-prepared pun from co-commentator David Croft with the wheezy breath of an obese hyena dying from emphysema. This death rattle is then followed by ‘Dear, dear … oh dear,’ to suggest a psycho-geriatric-ward fugitive reacting with a mixture of delight and shame to a bladder accident induced by unquenchable mirth at Arthur Askey affecting, on the London Palladium stage in 1957, to be a busy, busy bee.

How Mr Green has been retained by the BBC for so long, in defiance of the verbal facility of the inter-stroke victim, is less mysterious than it seems. The BDO is effectively the property of a cabal – a couple of veteran players, chairman Olly Croft, master of ceremonies Martin Fitzmaurice (the sea monster who screams ‘Are you ready? Let’s. Play. Darts’), cackling sub-Kray blingmaster Bobby George, and Mr Green himself.

Between them, this bunch have transformed the BDO into a hybrid of kitschily ironic entertainment, aversion therapy for those terrified of becoming hooked on televised darts, and crèche for those who might one day grow up to join the PDC.

Mr Green himself refuses to acknowledge the existence of the rival organisation, which unusually for him makes some sense. The immortal Sid Waddell, his one-time BBC colleague, is of course the PDC’s main commentator, and even Mr Green can see the danger of drawing attention to the contrast. Even when the BDO version was won by a disabled man unable to extend his arm fully when throwing, the Australian haemophiliac Tony David in 2001, Mr Green’s confidence in its supremacy remained unshaken.

‘Yeeeessssss,’ is how he greeted the winning double that day, ‘it’s Tony Davis!’ After two weeks of the tournament and two hours of final action, how cruel to come within a single space on the middle line of the Qwerty keyboard of calling the new champion’s name right. For once, Mr Green had stumbled on a certain eloquence. Albeit unwittingly, and with unwonted succinctness, he had told his audience all it needed to know, if only about himself, in a syllable.

93

Frank Warren

How a man of such exquisite sensitivity has survived and made money in the rough and Runyonesque world of boxing is one of the miracles of the age. Mr Warren’s vulnerability to criticism does him nothing but credit. Where others become hardened by long careers in the big-fight game, he has been softened remarkably.

Other than offering sincere admiration, what can you say about the adorably florid-faced boxing promoter and gunshot survivor? Not a dickie bird. While Frank lives up to his own belief that when people have an opinion, ‘they are entitled to express it’ – for example, he repeatedly expressed his opinion of me (‘moron’, for example) in his News of the World column – experience teaches that this passion for freedom of speech is a one-way street. Even the most affectionate of teasing will provoke from Frank the threat of an action for libel. In fact, he’ll more than likely sue over this.

‘If it pleases your lordship, my client Mr Frank Warren, a man of the most blameless character, a pillar of his local community, a tireless worker for many deserving charities, is profoundly distressed by the implication that he may tend toward the mildly litigious, and seeks substantial damages for the injury to his feelings and reputation …’ Somewhere in such an action we might sniff out the stirrings of a defence, should it come to that. And it’s even money that it will.

92

Graeme Souness

Even in the legalised GBH halcyon era of the 1970s and early eighties, English football knew no more vicious a would-be maimer than Graeme Souness. With the thick moustache and bubble perm regarded as mandatory at Liverpool at the time, he may have joined team-mate Mark Lawrenson (see no. 14) as a prototype for the Village People’s construction worker. But had you found yourself sharing a YMCA dormitory or navy bunk with Souness, you’d soon enough have swapped the warmth for a street doorway or Davy Jones’s locker, for fear of being on the wrong end of a studs-up leg-breaker in the middle of the night.

No one ever took such unsmiling satisfaction from endangering careers. His most infamous assault, late in his career for Glasgow Rangers against Steaua Bucharest, crystallised the purity of his malevolence. About the raising and spiteful stamping of his right boot onto the thigh of one Dmitri Rotario there was nothing unusual. What was so refreshingly novel was that Souness, whose reaction to this arrestable offence was to clutch his own leg in mock agony, was in possession of the ball at the time.

The best to be said of Souness’s commitment to violence is that it never lacked integrity. Just as with Roy Keane, who is excused an entry thanks to the accurate character reading he offered Mick McCarthy (see no. 31), he was too magnificent a player to need the brutality. There was no design or purpose to it whatever. This was the Edmund Hillary of football hatchet men: he sought to rupture cruciate ligaments because they were there.

Souness went on to earn his berth on Sky Sports, where despite the hot competition he shines out as a beacon of charisma-free witlessness, in the traditional manner. Only having repeatedly proved his uselessness as a manager, with Liverpool, Blackburn Rovers and Newcastle among others, was he deemed fit to point out their inadequacies to coaches in current employment.

Despite the rich catalogue of failures, his self-confidence remains as strident as it is misplaced. A few years ago I came across him in a bar during one of Tottenham’s then perpetual managerial crises, and asked if he fancied himself the guy to turn Spurs around. ‘Son,’ he said, leaning magisterially back on his stool, ‘the club I couldnae turn round has yet to be built.’

Inexplicably, this remains a judgement shared by no one else. Indeed, in a nice instance of life imitating art imitating life, Souness has come to emulate Yosser Hughes, with whom he famously appeared in a Boys From the Black Stuff cameo (excellent he was, too). Time and time again he has invited chairmen to ‘Gizza job,’ and been answered with a sarcastic chuckle. Although not, one suspects, to his face.

91

Kriss Akabusi

It pays testament to his enduring genius to irritate that even today, years after last setting eyes and (worse) ears on the man, it remains impossible to do the late-night channel-flick of the insomniac philistine without a frisson of terror that Kriss Akabusi might crop up in an ancient repeat of A Question of Sport.

As a useful 400-metre runner over hurdles and on the flat, specialising in stirring last legs of the relay, Akabusi seemed a harmless enough soul. Yet even then the exaggerated can-do enthusiasm of his post-race interviews – for all that they often came moments after he had proved that he couldn’t do, and indeed hadn’t done – hinted at the horrors to come.

Television executives evidently noticed them, and concluded that what the viewing public needed in the deep recession of the early 1990s was the human equivalent of one of those executive toys which, at the faintest touch, produce an extended burst of deranged giggling. If laughter is indeed the best medicine, Akabusi will live to be 140. The problem for the rest of us is that while he was getting all the health benefits, we were stuck in the placebo group. Worse than that, the insane chortling that was doing him such a power of good had the disturbing side effect of raising the blood pressure in the rest of us.

If there is an unflatteringly jealous tone in the above, the reason for that is simply put. Of all the human traits, the one I envy most is the Akabusian gift of being easily amused. In a dark and gruesome world, what ineffable bliss it must be to laugh uncontrollably at nothing until the ribcage creaks and the bladder screams for mercy.

In what passed for his televisual heyday, when he was a presenter on Record Breakers and a guest on just about everything else, nothing – not one thing – Akabusi could hear would fail to strike him as outlandishly amusing. If the Shipping Forecast on Radio 4 revealed a high ridge of pressure moving towards South Utsira, he’d squeal with mirth. If the Hang Seng index in Hong Kong had been marked sharply up in brisk early trading, he would yelp and shake with merriment. If his GP had told him that he’d developed gangrene in both legs, and required an immediate double amputation, he’d have collapsed with mirth and crawled around on the floor until the limbs detached themselves of their own accord. In his commitment to laughing uncontrollably at the studiedly unfunny, he was a one-man Michael McIntyre audience long before that alleged comedian emerged to raise fresh doubts about the taste and even the sanity of his compatriots.

Whether the unceasing screeching was genuine, possibly due to an undiagnosed neurological condition, or the stand-out feature of a construction designed to get him media work, it is impossible to be sure. I don’t remember his eyes laughing in tune with his mouth, but it was all a blessedly long time ago.

Today, Mr Akabusi does what retired sportsmen with a TV future buried in the past tend to do. He is a motivational speaker, using silly voices, demented changes of decibel level (whispering one moment, yelling the next, neither volume remotely explained by the text), anecdotes and archive footage of relay triumphs to give new meaning and direction to the lives of those unable to find a televangelist at the right price.

No doubt he makes a decent living from reliving the highlights of a decent career, and explaining to those unable to better the late King of Tonga’s personal best for the 60-metre dash how to adapt his athletic experiences to become better, happier and richer people. I hope so. There is no obvious malice in the man, and I wish him well.

For all that, I can’t help thinking that that the only people for whom a talk from Kriss Akabusi would constitute an effective motivational force are members of the voluntary euthanasia society Exit.

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