LITMIR.BIZ

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never short of things to bet on in a betting shop.

      Yet the rapacity of the high street chains knows no bounds. So it was that a few years ago, the screens began to feature these simulations – their results pre-determined by random-number generators in the three- or four-minute gaps between the real versions.

      What is particularly tragic about virtual races is that they are enlivened by in-house commentaries identically as involved, dramatic and hysterical as those that attend the Derby and Grand National. Somewhere in a London office, in other words, an employee of William Hill is sitting at a screen watching the virtual race unfold and becoming unhinged by simulated action involving animated animals at an imaginary racetrack.

      ‘Going behind Elysian Fields, going behind. Hare’s running at Elysian Fields,’ it begins. ‘And they’re away. Trap 2 Fellatio Flyer gets out best, ahead of Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis in 4. There’s trouble behind, with 1 baulking 5, and off the first bend it’s 2 leading 4 and 6. Down the back straight, and 6, John McCririck’s Codpiece, takes it up just ahead of 4, 2 and 3. Round the second-last bend, and 5, Aortic Aneurysm, joins 6. Off the final bend, and there’s nothing to choose. It’s 5 and 6, 6 and 5 [screaming now], 5 and 6, and here’s 3 finishing like a train up the outside to join them. Coming to the line and it’s 6, 5 and 3 in a line, they’ve gone past together. Very close, Elysian Fields.’ A short, tension-heightening hiatus. ‘Result, Elysian Fields. Trap 5, Aortic Aneurysm, has beaten 6, John McCririck’s Codpiece.’

      For the committed gambler such as myself, telling fantasy from reality is hard enough. Virtual racing is an animated hoof or paw step too far. Every sensible dealer knows that when you have an addict in your power, you don’t actively encourage the overdose that will either kill him or persuade him to seek professional help.

      That, in a sensationally loose manner of speaking, is what virtual racing forced me to do. After that quarter of a century of dismal love, it proved the tipping point, and I turned to internet poker instead. There was a time, truth be told, when that threatened to turn nasty too. But I’m pleased to report that I have learned to control the appetite, and have it down to no more than fourteen hours a day.

      80

      Alastair Campbell

      The possibility must be acknowledged, before we go on, that whatever this psychotic dry drunk is remembered for when tomorrow’s historians do their work, it won’t be his contribution to British sport. They may prefer to focus on his role in preparing the ‘intelligence’ dossiers that helped take us to war in Iraq; his mutually destructive persecution of the BBC for reporting that role in a way that seemed entirely accurate to all but himself, the judicial buffoon Lord Hutton and a few Blairite ultras; and his part in the exposure of Dr David Kelly as the source for that report which led directly to the weapons inspector’s death in the woods. Next to all that, the degradation of the civil service’s integrity and independence and so much else besides, Mr Campbell’s sporting persona is a purely humorous one.

      The one-time writer of soft pornography and devoted fan of Burnley FC became the Comical Ali of British sport in 2005, when for reasons that pay credit to the eccentricity not just of himself but also of Sir Clive Woodward (see no. 62), he became ‘media manager’ on the calamitous British Lions tour to New Zealand.

      As so often in this book, the questions raised – by both the offer of the job and its acceptance – seem better suited to a month-long annual convention of psychoanalysts in Zürich than to a sports hack. Who, without relevant professional qualifications, would feel confident in positing a theory as to why Woodward thought it wise to place media relations in the grubby hands of a character with half the credibility of Pinocchio’s longer-nosed brother Whopperio? Why Campbell agreed to this lunacy is slightly easier to guess. Sitting in the kitchen of his Tufnell Park home staring longingly at the dormant red phone directly connected to Downing Street cannot have been much fun. Even so, boredom alone hardly explains in full why this delicate flower was blithely prepared to expose himself to the ridicule that must, it seemed at the time, ensue.

      So it did. Not since his namesake role model in Baghdad looked out of his ministry window at the American tanks rolling into town, and rushed to a press conference to inform the world that the Republican Guard was doing a bang-up job in driving the infidels into chaotic retreat, had anything rivalled what followed.

      The Lions were thrashed in all three Tests, and as the on-field débâcle unfolded the media’s attention was diverted to a spat between Woodward and Gavin Henson, whom the coach had curiously omitted from the squad for the first match against the All Blacks. It was at this point that Campbell’s gift for managing the media was unshackled. In order to persuade a British public bemused and livid at Mr Henson’s exclusion that reports of a bust-up were nonsense, he staged a photograph of Woodward and the father-to-be of Charlotte Church’s children walking together after a training session. It was taken by an agency photographer from a hidden position, with a long lens and possibly without Mr Henson’s knowledge, and Mr Campbell then distributed it to national newspapers in Britain. Mr Henson’s subsequent amnesia, as expressed in a book, led him to forget the agreement between them about this picture to which Mr Campbell has always laid claim.

      Not content with that morale-repairing masterstroke, Mr Campbell then underlined the humility for which he is loved by taking it upon himself to give a pre-match team talk. Why several members of the side, most vocally Ben Kay, were astonished by this, what with Mr Campbell placing rugby union as high as fourth in his list of sporting preferences (after football, athletics and cricket), who can say? As to the notion that he dipped a toe into the foetid pond of bad taste by invoking the exploits of the SAS in Bosnia to stir their blood, well, some people just live to take offence. Personally, I’d have been even happier had he referred to the work of British troops in Basra, in the war he played a small but crucial part in facilitating, but perhaps that’s just me. And to think Martin Johnson had contented himself with Agincourt before some of those same players beat Australia to win the World Cup for England two years earlier.

      Sir Clive, quite a spinner himself, declared himself delighted with Mr Campbell when the tour was over, explaining that the fault lay entirely with the media, and not one iota with its manager. ‘The media has missed an opportunity,’ he said. ‘If they had spoken to Alastair, he would have given them ideas on how they could have written more creative stuff.’ Indeed he would. He’d have persuaded them that the trio of savage Test defeats were thumping wins, the confusion emanating from a series of faulty electronic scoreboards. ‘That’s why I brought him along,’ Woodward went on, ‘to try to move everything with the media on to a whole new level, but unfortunately the media have not taken up the challenge.’ Idiot media. Sir Clive concluded by describing Mr Campbell’s contribution as ‘outstanding’.

      So it was. It stood out then, as it stands out now, as the most breathtakingly cack-handed display of media mismanagement in the annals of even British sport.

      79

      The Vuvuzela

      The one-note plastic horn that played its selfless part in producing the worst World Cup thus far was, so Fifa assured us when the global outrage was at its zenith in the tournament’s early days, too deeply embedded in South African football culture to be banished. Once, you could hardly help reflect, pissing in the pocket of the person in front of you was deeply embedded in England’s football culture, but if the tournament had come here in the early 1980s, would Fifa prissily have refused to discourage that for fear of treading on effete cultural feet? I don’t believe so.

      Before we go on, let me say this. I love South Africa and its people. One of the happier weeks of my life was spent there covering the story of the Lemba, a tribe who believe themselves to be Jewish, insist that the Ark of the Covenant (Ngundry Llogoma in their language) was once in their possession, and have the coolest flag known to humanity (an elephant inside a Star of David). Another was passed in a Johannesburg hospital attached to a weird, bubbling machine re-inflating the lung punctured by a burglar, in the home of old family friends, who had the impertinence to stick a bread knife into my chest. It’s an incident about which I never speak, though I will show the chest X-rays to anyone to whom I’m refusing to speak about it, pointing out the 1/12th-inch gap

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