LITMIR.BIZ

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Sadim of football punditry (like Midas in reverse, everything he touches turns to lead) has made too many sensationlly daft predictions for them all to be catalogued here, so we must confine ourselves to a few favourites.

      Pelé’s pick for the 1994 World Cup was Colombia. Suffice it to say that the Colombian defender Andrés Escobar had been shot dead in a Medellin car park before the final was played. In 1998 he went for Norway. Norway. Four years later, the scorer of more than 1,000 career goals studied the World Cup field, and plumped – I’m not making this up – for England. To repeat, that’s England. E.N.G.L.A.N.D.

      Over his insistence, long ago, that Nicky Barmby would become a player of unarguably world class, and his categorical statement that an African nation would win the World Cup before the year 2000, let us lightly pass. Perhaps the highlight of highlights from the mouth of this soothsayer of soothsayers was his contemptuous dismissal of his own country’s chances in 2002 (the year, you may recall, he predicted an England victory). Brazil, insisted Pelé, would not survive the group stage. How tantalisingly close the team came to fulfilling his expectation, as they became the first country ever to win all seven games in normal time en route to lifting the Jules Rimet Trophy.

      Whoever would have believed back in 1986 that of the two players universally acknowledged, then as now, as the greatest of all time, it would be Diego Maradona – much too adorably deranged nowadays to warrant an entry of his own in this volume – who went on to become the more beloved, and Pelé who would establish himself, even in football, as the imbecile’s imbecile? If only there were a Viagran equivalent for a limp and lifeless brain.

      88

      Brian Barwick

      When Caligula set the template for hilarious over-promotion, who would have thought that the day would dawn when the Football Association of England would make the creation of a horse as Consul of Rome seem a tediously conventional employment decision? In fact, giving his horse Incitatus that much-prized post was the sanest thing (not the highest of bars to clear, in truth) Caligula ever did. Its purpose was purely ironic. He intended to satirise the cravenness of his Senators by obliging them to celebrate the appointment as a masterstroke. As, to a Senator, what with being in terror of their lives, they did.

      What Brian Barwick’s ironic intent in hiring Steve McClaren as England football coach might have been, on the other hand, I’ve no idea, because the only thing satirised there was the luminescent idiocy of Barwick himself and the FA of which he was chief executive. However, since the only other possible explanation is that he regarded Mr McClaren (see no. 25) as a gifted international coach, there is no option but to hail him as the world’s first, and doubtless last, kamikaze satirist.

      Truth be told, this erstwhile TV sports executive looks nothing like an anarcho-comic genius. With the wide, bald dome and bristly little moustache, he more closely resembles Mr Grimsdale, the 1950s middle-management archetype in all those side-splitting Norman Wisdom flicks that still have them queuing round the block in downtown Tirana.

      Mr Grimsdale can be excused for repeatedly hiring Norman, having noted the calamitous results of doing so in thirty-three previous films, on the grounds that he was a fictional character conforming to somebody else’s script. Mr Barwick wrote his own, yet no one but he was vaguely surprised that McClaren’s England stint concluded beneath a deluge of farce (brolly and all) of which a coalition of the Keystone Kops, Laurel and Hardy, Jim Carrey and our own Chuckle Brothers could barely have dreamed. McClaren’s inadequacies were so evident to all but Mr Barwick that the first obituary to his England career was published the day after his appointment was announced. This was at least a day late.

      Still more humiliating than the act of panic itself (in such a state was Barwick after his fiascoid failure to hire the Brazilian Luiz Felipe Scolari that he’d have given the job to a hat stand with the requisite coaching badge) was the way in which he chose to present it. Fans of Gordon Brown’s blanket denial in the summer of 2009 that he had intended to fire Alistair Darling as Chancellor should note that Brian Barwick had blazed that trail. He donned his straightest face to inform us that Mr McClaren had been his ‘first-choice candidate’ all along, within days of allowing himself to be filmed at Heathrow en route to talk to Scolari in Lisbon – the very act of amateur-hour incompetence which provoked the media frenzy that in turn frightened Scolari into telling Mr Barwick to stuff the job up his jacksie. And in the sense that Mr McClaren dwelt in a holiday cottage a few inches to the south of Mr Barwick’s upper colon at the time, this is precisely what he did.

      Two years later, soon after McClaren had masterminded the epochal disaster at Wembley that saw England lose to Croatia and fail to qualify for Euro 2008, old Grimsdale followed him out of the FA. His involvement in football now rests with his place on the board of Hampton & Richmond Borough FC. So let us end this appreciation on an uplifting and life-enhancing note by congratulating Brian Barwick on finding his level at last. Long may he enjoy it.

      87

      Sledging

      All that strictly needs to be said of the relationship between this cricketing branch of low-level bullying and genuine wit is this: of all the cricket-playing nations, sledging is beloved solely by the Australians.

      There was a time, long ago, when it may have had some appeal. When W.G. Grace reacted to having his stumps clattered by informing the bowler, ‘’Twas the wind which took the bail orf, good sir,’ and the umpire chipped in, ‘Indeed, doctor, and let us hope the wind helps thee on thy journey back to the pavilion,’ the coalescence of mannerliness and the lingo of the Amish barn-builder lent the exchange some charm. Nothing there to induce the enquiry, ‘Where is thy ribcage repair kit, good doctor, when thou most sorely requireth it?’ perhaps, but rather sweet for all that.

      By the time, some half a century later, that F.S. Trueman was advising an incoming Aussie batsman who shut the gate to the pavilion behind him, ‘Don’t bother, son, you won’t be out there long enough,’ the art of sledging may already have been in decline. Another half a century on, and it is virtually impossible to find any sledge that is not predicated on either the batsman’s girth or the conceit that his wife has a sexual appetite so rapacious that her reflex observation, having serviced the entire Household Cavalry, is to ask after the whereabouts of the Scots Dragoons.

      Perhaps this is too harsh. It could be that Shane Warne was indeed a larrikin Mark Twain, and Adam Gilchrist an ocker Tallulah Bankhead. We’ll never know for sure, because seldom do the stump microphones capture the inter-ball hilarity. However, now and again a sledge is picked up. It may give a flavour of this nourishing comedic form to quote this citation, offered by New Zealand blogger Michael Ellis as his candidate for history’s greatest sledge: ‘And of course you can’t forget Ian Healy’s legendary comment that was picked up by the Channel 9 microphones when Arjuna Ranatunga called for a runner on a particularly hot night during a one-dayer in Sydney. “You don’t get a runner for being an overweight, unfit, fat cunt.” ’ It is not known whether the Sri Lankan felt it beneath him to offer the mandatory reply to a portliness-related sledge (‘Yeah, mate. Well, it’s yer missus’s fault for giving me a biscuit every time I fuck her’).

      The oppressively limited range of subject matter qualifies the sledge as sport’s closest equivalent to the haiku. If the batsman isn’t fat or a cuckold in the imagination of the Oscar Wildes of the slips, he must be gay. ‘So,’ Glenn McGrath once enquired of Ramnaresh Sarwan, ‘what does Brian Lara’s dick taste like?’ ‘I don’t know,’ responded the West Indian, preparing a foray into virgin sledging territory. ‘Ask your wife.’ If anything encapsulates the exquisite subtlety of the two-way sledge, it is McGrath’s counterstrike to that. ‘If you ever mention my wife again,’ he said, expecting a degree of sensitivity (his wife, now deceased, had been diagnosed with cancer) his reference to the fellating of Mr Lara might be seen to have sacrificed, ‘I’ll fucking rip your fucking throat out.’ Whether or not Mr Sarwan is indeed a friend of Dorothy, who would deny that Mr McGrath, in common with all the legends of Australian sledging, is a spiritual friend of Dorothy Parker?

      86

      Graham Poll

      The public laundering of dirty washing

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