LITMIR.BIZ

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ones do what they can to keep them private. None of us wants the neighbours to learn our grubby little secrets. The same goes for companies, in which a specially acute strain of loathing is reserved for the whistle-blower.

      So too it is with countries. You and I know that secondary education in Britain is a disaster, that scandalous numbers leave school barely literate, and that the innumeracy statistics are equally shameful. We know that the developed world’s educative dunce’s cap rests upon the British head, and it anguishes us. Government after government tries, or pretends to try, to sort it out, and through the lack of funds, will and courage, fails. These things we know, and these things we naturally prefer to keep to ourselves.

      Yet in every family there appears to be someone who can’t avoid spilling the beans, and in the case of our national family the blabbermouth is Graham Poll.

      In front of the several hundred millions watching Croatia play Australia in the 2006 World Cup, our leading referee revealed that the British education system produces adults who, let alone struggling with their twelve-times table, cannot count to two.

      Late in a game of mesmerising fractiousness, Mr Poll had sent off a brace of players when he showed Croatia’s Josip Šimunić a second yellow card. The ensuing calculation was not, on the prima facie evidence, a demanding one. This was not an equation to have the average ref whispering, ‘Get me Vorderman on the phone NOW’ at the Fifa fourth official through his little microphone. Put simply, the equation was as follows: 1 yellow + 1 yellow = 2 yellows = 1 red.

      On Sesame Street, Big Bird would have cracked it like a nut with a diseased and brittle shell. Yet it tantalisingly eluded Mr Poll. He allowed Šimunić to remain on the field for several minutes before ploughing virgin territory by making the Croat football history’s first recipient of a third yellow card. Then, and only then, possibly concluding he’d gone as far along Revolution Road as seemed decent in one night, did Mr Poll fish into his back pocket for the red card.

      Along with the mischievous pleasure at the pricking of a bumptiously over-inflated ego went a dash of sympathy. A reputation built over many years had been obliterated by one moment of inexplicable daftness, and that, as Gerald Ratner would confirm, is nothing to be relished.

      Mr Poll retired from international football the next day, in the manner of the cabinet minister who elects to resign to spend more time with his family the night before he appears on the front page of the Sun.

      The damage had already been done, of course. The dirty secret about British education had been broadcast to the planet. The subtle irony that this unwitting act of whistle-blowing ensured Mr Poll would never blow a whistle again on the international stage may have been little consolation to the man who cannot count to two.

      85

      Pat Cash

      How fitting that Cash recently became tennis’s youngest grandfather. The whiny tone to his tennis punditry, the classical ocker sexism and the sub-Blairite attempts to cling to his youth by playing electric guitar suggest a man at least three decades older than his forty-five years.

      Plagued by the confusions that causing mild offence is a substitute for wit and grinning cockiness is indiscernible from winsome charm, Cash’s specialist impertinence is ignorantly dismissing tennis players of infinitely greater talent and spirit than he ever showed. Allied to this is a rare talent for being wrong. To take one memorable example, early in 2007 Cash wrote a piece, headlined ‘Serena is Lost Cause’, in The Times, attempting to nudge the younger Williams sister towards retirement and describing her as ‘deluded’ for imagining she had a future at the top of the game. ‘When Serena Williams arrives in Australia on her first foreign playing trip in a year,’ began the world-weary elder statesman, ‘and announces that it is only a matter of time before she is again dominating the sport, it’s time to tell her to get real.’ Two weeks later, as you will already perhaps have guessed, Serena annihilated Maria Sharapova 6–1 6–2 in the Australian Open final

      Getting real seems a habitual problem for Cash. His own journey into retirement was not the gracious swansong he advocated for Serena. Far from it, the embittered grouch on annual display in the BBC’s wretched Wimbledon coverage had an early run-out. He took deep umbrage at the failure of tournament directors and the ATP to give him wild cards late in his career, when the rigor mortis had set into his game. The therapy that followed did little to improve him.

      There have been sporting pundits who endeared themselves by forever complaining that things ain’t what they were (Freddie Trueman comes to mind) and scratching their heads until the scalp bled in mystification at modern ways. Cash is not among them. While he may choose to regard his vinegary carping about the venality and amorality of current tennis as the refreshing bluntness of a straight-shooter, it is in fact purely the self-pitying rancour of the nasty old geezer in the nursing home wash-clean plastic chair, muttering ‘Dunno they’re born’ at anyone under sixty who appears on the telly. ‘Nobody wanted anything to do with me,’ he sniffled once of the indifference shown to him in the dog days of his playing career. You know just how they felt.

      84

      Richard Keys

      Strictly speaking, this emblem of blazer-clad corporate loyalty – a man who would lay down his life, you suspect, in the cause of Sky Sports – should be of more interest to anthropologists than anyone else. Now that the advent of high-definition television has obliged him to shave his hands to spare the feelings of more squeamish viewers, this is no longer as obvious as it once was. But there was a time when his fronting of broadcasts raised grave doubts about the professionalism of the Ape Recovery Squad at London Zoo.

      His own professionalism has seldom been in doubt. He anchors Premier League transmissions with a seldom-wavering dull competence unleavened by his slavish commitment to talking up what he routinely refers to, despite its transparent recent decline, as ‘the best league in the world’. This rare example of a cliché without a shred of truth (Spain’s La Liga has always had the edge in everything but the capacity to induce preposterous hype) is not, of course, his alone. The BBC propagates it with barely less fervour. The difference is that, where Gary Lineker is capable of admitting that a Premier League game was less than scintillating, Mr Keys is not. Supported by whichever permutation of pinhead pundits the afternoon or evening spews up, his devotion to his employer and the domestic competition that is its cash cow compels him to talk up every match as if it were a classic.

      Being easily entertained is an enviable gift, but there comes a point at which it becomes hard to distinguish from an illness. The reassuring news for fans of Mr Keys is that he is in fact perfectly well, and finds much of the football as soporific as the rest of us, as a rare cock-up established in 2007. ‘Daft little ground, silly game, fuck off,’ was his verdict, unwittingly broadcast, on a Scottish trip to the Faroe Islands, lending a piquancy to the many times he has prissily apologised, as Sky presenters must, for profanities uttered by interviewees or bolshy tennis players.

      If he could dredge up the same candour when aware that the microphone is live, and show some respect for an audience that may be marginally less thick and pliable than he imagines, it would improve him no end. But then, honestly appraising football matches is not his function. Sky Sports is the public relations arm of the Premier League, and Richard Keys its regrettably missing link between a PG Tips primate and Max Clifford.

      83

      Harold ‘Dickie’ Bird

      In the absence of an ‘uncle’ or schoolmaster showing undue interest in his development, the cricket-fixated boy of the 1970s knew no more unwanted an authority figure than the then doyen of Test match umpires.

      It would be an exaggeration to claim that Dickie ruined my childhood and early adolescence, but his heightened fears about the weather condemned me to countless summer days of needless boredom. If he had an inkling in his bones that a raincloud drizzling over central Turkmenistan was contemplating a move in a westerly direction that might take it over Headingley by mid-November, he’d take them off. If the light dipped by one iota below the level required to read the bottom line of the optician’s wall chart from forty paces, off he would take them.

      Sweet-hearted

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