Crass Djokovic reminds us that we’re never ‘all in this together’

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If you’re old enough to remember the conflicts in the Balkans, Kuwait and Iraq, you may well have spotted that modern warfare is like football.

So shocked are we to see it emerge in supposedly more civilised times that we’re initially all over it. Like the football junkie in August who wants his football live on-screen with his Twitter feed open alongside it, we can’t get enough media coverage of this novelty.

By the time it’s rumbled on for a month, though, we’re making do with highlights on Match of the Day.

After two months, score updates on our phones see us through.

And if you’re one of the world’s leading tennis players, it seems, it can all get so humdrum that your levels of blasé go proper old-school and you’re happy to read about Saturday’s games in the Sunday papers.

How else do you explain Novak Djokovic’s grotesque summation yesterday of all the horrors that have unfolded in Ukraine, as “politics”.

Push is coming to shove in the festering sores of eastern Europe, to the point where not even the privileged world of professional sport can escape it. Wimbledon has banned all Russian and Belarusian players from tennis’s third major championship this year, and Djokovic is unhappy.

“When politics interferes with sport, the result is not good,” said the world number one.

I’ll get back to Wimbledon’s decision later. For now, I want to examine the word-choice of a man who is comfortably old enough to know better.

I needn’t tax you with the full roll-call of accusations/facts stacked against Russia right now. Bombing hospitals, targeting homes, executing civilians, torturing PoWs, driving tanks over cars with non-combatants inside them. These are just the lowlights.

And they are most definitely not ‘politics’.

‘Politics’ is deciding how a nation best educates its young. Or where lies the dividing line between stimulating commerce and fawning to big business. Or whether Big Government or personal responsibility is the better answer to society’s ills.

By the time you get to the War Crimes subreddit you enter a world far removed from the machinations of the House of Commons.

Djokovic might call himself “a child of war” but it’s a shame he hasn’t learnt greater sensitivity from the experience.

“Politics”. I’m not sure he could have insulted Ukraine and its people more had he tried.

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So what of that Wimbledon decision? Call me hard-line but the moment Russian tanks rumbled uninvited into a neighbouring country, I believe every Russian player on the WTA and ATP tours should have been told to pack their bags. Until Russia withdraws, see ya.

And my argument is this. We can fight one of two wars against Vladimir Putin. The obvious one is out of the question, because for all the West’s faults, we are better people than those in the Kremlin. It would have taken even ex-President Trump more than ego alone to launch nuclear missiles. I no longer have the same confidence about that crank in Moscow.

Which leaves us with just one war. Isolation, as far as is reasonably possible until the last Russian boots are back where they belong. Until that happens, Russia is a pariah, and it must be squeezed every which way. Because if it isn’t, the bad guys present and future start thinking that going rogue is doable. Uncomfortable for a while, maybe, but grit your teeth and it’s doable.

And nothing would have planted that dangerous thought more firmly than Daniil Medvedev lifting the Wimbledon trophy while his compatriots visit the kind of horrors upon a nation that we thought had been left behind with the Battle of Stalingrad.

This boycott offensive, of course, means pain for a lot of people. Including many Russians who see through Putin’s tin-pot propaganda and are just as appalled by Ukraine’s fate as we are. That is very sad but it is also too bad.

Everyone feels the pain of war, which is why governments worth a damn move heaven and earth to avoid it. The moment the Red Army mobilised, even we relatively lucky souls in British suburbia knew there would be pain. Even if it just amounted to a drumroll when we opened our next gas bill.

And that’s what sticks in the craw about Djokovic’s response to the Wimbledon decision

You, me and the rest of the ordinary folk; we have to grin and bear the fall-out from this conflict. When it’s those in the gilded cocoon of professional sport, however, such sacrifice cannot be countenanced. Remember the one front-line business that kept its show on the road while most others were parked up at the kerb during lockdown? Premier League football.

Oh, sportspeople will posture all right. Make all the appropriate anti-war noises and throw in a Ukraine flag emoji for good measure. But let their cossetted world come too close to ours and you’ll hear them whine soon enough.

Maybe we should be grateful to Djokovic, though. It is, after all, nearly 15 years since the global economic crisis, and the honeyed baloney of David Cameron as he sought to assuage taxpayers being forced to bail out bungling bankers.

A reminder that we are never, ever all in this together, was perhaps overdue.

You know who’s really ‘ill-judged, intemperate and plain wrong’, Lord Hain? You.

So Peter Hain moves towards the end of his adult life in the same way he began it. Agitating against racism.

With one difference.

When the young Hain made a right nuisance of himself whenever South African sports teams came to town, I could at least see his point.

Today, I see just a blinkered old fool making poorly-considered arguments.

His suggestion that Formula One team manager Christian Horner was an irresponsible rabble-rouser with his trenchant criticism of Lewis Hamilton after Sunday’s British Grand Prix shouldn’t have got as far as first base, never mind into the Press. Hain effectively admits as much when he tacks on this afterthought.

‘I am not suggesting that Christian was implying anything racist in what he said. He was talking in pure racing terms and not racist terms and that is obvious.‘

Game over. So when society’s knuckle-draggers hear Horner blame Hamilton for sending Horner’s star driver into the wall, and take it as their cue to reach for the monkey emojis on Twitter, that’s on them, right? We go after the villains, the blameworthy.

We don’t follow Hain’s ridiculous notion that it’s innocent people who must jump through all the hoops whenever pond life sticks its head above the surface.

Not least because, in this context, it leads us to a highly undesirable place. If you’re a person of colour who’s erred, you effectively get a free pass in Peter Hain’s world. We’ll ratchet down criticism, deserved or not, to powder-puff level. Because of your skin.

Aside from the double-standard that this creates; if Lewis Hamilton is the man I think he is, I doubt he’d be thrilled by such a world either.

But that’s the liberal-left all over. Every time they try to make nice with minorities, they patronise the hell out of them.

Hearn just taking his cue from us

Not normally a breeding ground for high passion, snooker had a storm brewing this week, with news that World Championship organisers are banning football shirts among spectators.

While World Snooker chairman Barry Hearn talked about dress suitable for a grand occasion, critics grumbled about ‘gentrification’. Unfortunately for the latter, however, a lot of Mr Hearn’s talking was being done for him over at Aintree, setting for this week’s Grand National meeting, where a number of women offered their sartorial concept of ‘Ladies Day’. Some, you may feel, succeeded rather more than others, and herein lies the problem.

Peter Hitchens once pointed out in his Mail on Sunday column, how the public toilets that our parents and grandparents knew – grandiose affairs with patterned tiles and elegant light fittings – have degenerated into today’s brutalist and purely functional designs, intended to offer as little incentive and raw material as possible for the hooligan to work with.

We showed ourselves incapable of taking care of such places, Hitchens concluded, and so those responsible for them responded accordingly.

A little of that thinking, I would suggest, underpins Barry Hearn’s defence of his own pride and joy, and before they unload on him for it, his critics might like to study some of those Aintree images, and remind themselves that there is more than one definition of the word ‘class’.

Dejected by Christmas, ejected from cricket

A week in which I learnt of a shopping centre that is now offering hypnotism for shoppers overcome by the terrifying ordeal that is Christmas, and that players of cricket – once “a sphere of wholesome discipline”* – have finally reached the point where they are no better than footballers.

This thing we call Society: we’re all satisfied that it’s still moving forwards, yes…?

• – from The Cricket Field, by James Pycroft

 

Universities and now sport the symptoms of a society gone soft

There may be something in the theory that the opponent most demonised by his critics is the one they’re most afraid of.

I’d heard a lot about Rush Limbaugh before I started listening to him, all of it from those whose politics are at variance to his, and whose withering dismissal of the American radio talk show host had me braced for some ranting demagogue who would display only the most fleeting relationship with Planet Earth.

And then I listened to the man himself, courtesy of his weekly highlight show broadcast via TuneIn. The reality was one of the more evenly spoken of all the conservative radio voices, which for the great majority of his airtime seemed to articulate little other than eminent common sense. Presumably, we are both insane together.

See what you think, once you read this transcript of a segment in which he considers how the Pollyanna mindset of so many millennials, to whom happiness is an entitlement that must not be tarnished in the slightest degree for even one second, is now seeping into both supposed seats of learning and professional sport.

The opening five paragraphs are largely preamble. It’s when Limbaugh turns his attention to ex-New York Giants coach Tom Coughlin that he really starts warming to his task.

The money quotes…

“I shouldn’t have to be upset, which seems to be the rallying cry of Millennials. Don’t upset me! I don’t have to be upset. I don’t want to be upset. Don’t microaggress me.”

“It’s what all this college campus rot is all about. They don’t want to hear things that upset them, be it anything they disagree with or anything that might slightly offend. They don’t want to hear it. They shut people up…It’s childish, spoiled rotten childish. But it’s not just the kids…we have adults now who have been raised with that culture, who have now assumed positions of responsibility and authority where you would expect some wisdom and the ability to offer guidance to some of these people and push them to man up, advance their maturity or whatever.

But…there are fewer and fewer people capable of this.”

James Alexander Gordon – Reality 0 Over-Reaction 5

James Alexander Gordon was, by all accounts, a popular man.

He read out the football results on the radio every Saturday afternoon for 40 years, in a gentle, soothing Scottish accent that drew us all in and had us all trying to predict a game’s outcome based on wherever his intonation seemed to be leading us.

It’s safe to say that whoever reads the football results from now on, two generations of British football fans will forever hear them in Gordon’s voice.

And now he’s dead.

There you have it: an obituary that might be rather sparse but which nevertheless covers all the pertinent details. We’re not talking the composer of heart-rending symphonies here, after all, or mourning the first man on Mars.

We’re talking football results. Read from a script that he didn’t even have to memorise. Talk to Gordon’s family and friends and they can probably each recall 10 things that spring more readily to mind about him than his Saturday job.

A point apparently lost on the Daily Telegraph this week, as it declared that the “Scot’s lilting tones and perfect delivery elevated the classified football results from the mundane into an art form”.

Oh please.

“To do something seemingly so simple so expertly, time after time, and to make so many people feel happy and safe while you did it: what a beautiful contribution to our national life.”

You’re sounding dangerously like a luvvie, Alan Tyers. Oh, hang on a minute…

“Several years ago, I wrote and performed a pilot for a radio comedy sketch show about football.”

Aha.

“It went to a swift and deserved demise on the BBC Commissioning killing floor…”

Right. Shame the Telegraph’s sports editor isn’t quite as discerning.

I don’t know what prompts this modern tendency to over-inflate people’s achievements beyond what they actually amount to, but it is maudlin, cloying and fast becoming something of a national malaise.

Struggling to crack athletics dress code

Full of admiration as I am for the achievements of British athletes at last week’s European Championships, one thing troubles me.

Is there something I’m not getting about aerodynamics and the female body?

Some consequence of physics that decrees that while it’s okay for male athletes to perform in full length shirts and shorts extending half-way down the thigh, women can only perform to their best if sporting 12 inches of bare midriff and glorified bikini pants?

I hope there is a technical answer to this question, because if not, it begs another one.

In a society that normally clamps down hard on the objectification of women, how come athletics is getting a free pass?

Will England and USA even qualify for World Cup 2026?

Jump-rope in between classes at a Cuban elementary school. (Photo: Wikipedia)

Nice though it is to know it’s not just us, Elementary Politics‘ lament for the idea of games without competition in American schools is nevertheless depressing reading:

“But these bans speak to a larger problem with the schools nowadays. People are so terrified of children possibly feeling anything less than successful that they remove all obstacles. Might fail? Let’s get rid of tests. Actually failing? Let’s punish the students who actually did their work. Can’t play a sport? That’s okay, precious snowflake, go jump rope for an hour. It’s insulating an already coddled generation of children in a bubble full of fake success, a bubble that will quickly burst once they get to the real world. Schools do children a disservice when they remove competition and the situations to learn how to cope with failure.”

Harry Redknapp has done English football a favour

Harry Redknapp (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You be as defensive as you want, Steven Gerrard. If Harry Redknapp has finally voiced the unsayable, then maybe the England team can genuinely progress, instead of just talking about it.

Whatever ails my country’s national side, these last two World Cups have finally destroyed the ‘burden of expectation’ argument. There wasn’t any, neither this time nor in South Africa, yet an England team finally liberated from the ghosts of 1966 never showed.

Too many foreigners in the English Premiership? That might point to a lack of depth in talent but those who have ultimately failed in Brazil are front-line Premiership players, thriving in a multinational domestic league.

No, all that remains is the fact that such men are incapable of translating club form into international form. No-one who cannot offer compelling solutions to that conundrum should ever manage this team, no matter whom he has managed thus far, nor what he’s won. We are beyond tactics with this malady, we are in the realm of psyche.

Why there should be such a disconnection between club and country is a topic many of us might have danced around delicately, not wanting to think the unthinkable, not wanting to fall into line with the ‘overpaid prima donnas’ theory because it felt too obvious, too knee-jerk.

Well now Harry has said it for us. Some professional footballers just don’t want to play for their country, as staggering as that might seem to you and me. For all Gerrard’s indignation, I don’t believe the former Spurs manager has to name names to make this argument stick: we just have to ask ourselves why he would put his head on the block like this unless he was speaking the truth. Redknapp needs neither the money, the exposure nor the hassle of stirring up a hornets’ nest that others refuse to prod.

I doubt it will happen but I do think that it’s time the FA at least delved into this possibility, with a no-names, no-pack drill survey of all English Premier League players, that asks them to express their honest views, under the protection of anonymity, as to precisely where donning an England shirt fits on their bucket list.

That it has come to this is not pleasant (has England’s post-imperial ennui infiltrated even the competitive hotbed of professional sport now?) but Harry Redknapp has shown that the elephant in the room may not be as imaginary as we’d hoped. Until we stop dancing around it, everything else is just window dressing.

Related articles

• World Cup 2014: Harry Redknapp says current England squad is worst for years
• Gerrard urges Redknapp to name and shame players

Two things that just don’t seem right

THIS and THIS.