I got hooked on sport the first time I played something resembling a proper game of football. Teams picked by two of the older lads, jumpers for goalposts at the local park, 5 v 6 or something like that. I was certainly less than 8 years old and probably more like 6. Up till then I thought football was two people kicking a ball to each other in the back garden. Well, I'd done that with my dad and remember, kids, this was the 1950s and the ONLY game live on tv then was the F A Cup Final and I wouldn't have seen any kind of real match.
Actually pedants among you may point out that isn't quite true, though nearly: there was the odd F A Cup tie and league match broadcast. Then the introduction of floodlights made night matches possible (seriously) and some of the early European matches English clubs played in were televised, I think much to the distaste of the F A at the time. I don't believe in having a second team but I've always had some admiration for Spurs from the days of hearing their fans singing "glory, glory Tottenham Hotspur", a vague memory I can only think came from grainy black and white pictures of Spurs European games in 61-62 and 62-63 seasons.
There were some edited highlights, limited to 5 minutes, on the BBC in the 50s but I don't remember seeing them. Match of the Day, showing highlights from just one game a week of course, wasn't broadcast until 1964.
I instinctively realised my level of natural sporting ability was limited. But when, aged about 10 I announced to my mother that I wanted to be a journalist when I grew up, "NO!" came back by return. She knew immediately that I wanted to write about sport. (Ten years later it would be sport and music, another few later sport, music and politics. Hmm - what do I blog about now?)
She was right of course - I was much better with numbers than words. I remember being told in my early 30s that I was a typical engineer who basically couldn't write anything clearly. (What's changed I hear you mutter...).
But sport still fascinates me, both team and individual sports, provided they are based on keeping score in a way that is factually clear - goals, points, shots taken, runs scored, time on the clock or whatever, with or without technology. As soon as scoring by judgement features, I find it hard to accept that the contest is a sport. OK, maybe boxing, but I'm not keen. I can enjoy watching ice dancing, but it's a very borderline sport - what's the difference from ballroom? For a spectator surely it's entertainment more than sport, even if it's competitive.
So I was taken with what Claude Puel, the Leicester City manager, said in a newspaper inteview: "I like the competition. I like the story, I like the effort of the athletes to prepare the competition, how they live, their success, their defeats, their comebacks. All this, it is fantastic". (Puel is French, give him a break with the English, after all Arsene Wenger has never really mastered it after all those years, has he?).
And what a fascinating time we're having. The best sporting action I've seen lately was probably last month's NFL Superbowl, making it the best televised sporting event I've watched since the 2017 one. Last year I watched the extended highlights (no all nighters for me these days!) suspecting from a part glimpsed news report that I knew that the favourites, the New England Patriots, had won. But as they trailed the Atlanta Falcons 28-3 going into the last quarter I kept thinking "surely New England can't do this". But Tom Brady, one of the greatest quarterbacks in the history of the game, dragged his team back level by the end of normal time and to an unlikely victory in what the Yanks call overtime. The Guardian described it as a "frenzied, brain-frying climax". This year Brady broke the Superbowl passing record but gave up a late turnover as the Philadelphia Eagles pipped the Patriots in another high scoring game, with more yards gained - a good measure of how end to end the action was - than any game in NFL history. The quality of much of the play - the attacking play at least - was breathtaking. In the pro game complex plays involving the quarterback passing rugby style to another player who then throws it forward are rare - too risky. But the NFL has gone all Pep Guardiola. Early in the match the Patriots tried such a play. Even more unusually it was quarterback Brady who was the intended receiver and he was completely clear but the ball slipped through his hands.Towards the end of the first half the Eagles coach called essentially the same play and this time their quarter back Nick Foles, also running completely free as the deception worked, made the catch and the score. Foles was the reserve ("understudy" to the Americans) quarterback until two months ago and nearly retired 2 years back. Fantastic stuff.
Meanwhile Manchester City and Liverpool continue to dazzle us with their attacking play. Mo Salah - "Cat Stevens" to Mrs H - has already broken the Liverpool record for goals scored in a debut season, previously held by Fernando Torres. You can feel defenders panic when he gets the ball. At City the player who has impressed me recently is David Silva. At the start of the season my newspaper, noting the 25th Premier League season, asked all its football journalists to nominate their player of the Premier League era. Naturally there were multiple nominations for Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Alan Shearer and Didier Drogba. John Terry also got picked. The one that made my jaw drop was David Silva. A neat and tricky player, yes. But best in England in the last 25 years? For me he often looked a bit lightweight and seemed to produce his best performances at home against the weaker teams. (I'm not saying I wouldn't have wanted him at my club, mind!) However, in the last few months Silva has, for me, been a man transformed. Very involved in the game, getting a foot in to win the ball, getting in the box and scoring some very good goals. He has 8 Premier League goals this year, at the best goals per game strike rate he has achieved while at Manchester City. He got a total of six in the last two seasons. And 7 of the 8 have come since the start of December. As for getting a foot in, he's been going in hard enough to get 5 yellow cards since late November. Have they been force feeding him Shredded Wheat? ("He must have had three shredded wheat" was the comment when I played and a team mate was too hyped up).
Actually things have happened in Silva's life. He had a son born very prematurely in December who is still fighting for life. His manager has basically said be here when you can - Silva has missed a couple of matches and a warm weather training break while flying home to Spain frequently. He says he has been able to focus on his play when he is on the pitch. Some people find being at work is a blessing when they have things to worry about. I also wonder if the rave reviews all through the autumn for his colleague, Kevin de Bruyne, have motivated Silva to be at his best when he could play, possibly not knowing how many games he would miss. Now 32, he signed a one year contract extension in November, which should keep him at Manchester City until 2020, when he will have been there 10 years. Silva has the air of someone who has had quite a bit of success, knows the clock is running down on his career and feels he still has things to achieve but must perform at his very best because of the competition in the squad. I have new found respect for him: he's gone from "useful fancy dan lightweight" to "good lad" in my estimation.
Of course, we now we have the Champions League clash between Liverpool and City to look forward to. I commented about City's propensity to play "too much football" in their 4-3 defeat at Anfield a few weeks ago (Pep isn't all right, 13 February). It will be interesting to see how both sides approach the two-leg tie, Liverpool having been smashed 5-0 at the Etihad in September.
It's a shame the two English sides have been paired in the last eight but it does tempt me to watch:I don't normally bother with Champions League games. Either team against Real Madrid or Barcelona wouldn't raise my pulse, but these matches are a fascinating prospect.
On top of this we had the drama of Ireland clinching the Grand Slam on St Patrick's Day. With the World Cup coming up in 2019 critics had been debating at the start of the Six Nations whether England were showing enough consistency to challenge for the trophy they last won in 2003. I hold to what I muttered early in the second half of England's game at Murrayfield: "This England team has peaked". At that point England had lost only one of their previous 25 matches. Twenty minutes later that became 2 defeats in 26. Two games on and it's 4 defeats in 28, after three losses in a row. My error was understatement: this England team is in freefall. It has no visible leaders apart from Owen Farrell, in Dylan Hartley they have a captain who is never trusted to be on the pitch for more than three quarters of the game and a dearth of world class players. The few players who are world class or close to it aren't able to perform to their full ability in the team, the way it is currently set up. I know very little about rugby but I can see that England have close to zero chance in the World Cup. Ireland though could give it a go: they were tremendous at Twickenham and throughout the tournament. The contrast between the passion showed by the Scots and Irish and the lack of commitment from the English team in the two matches was stark.
And then there is Eldrick, better known as Tiger, Woods. After so many comebacks have ended in anticlimax this time Tiger looks like, well, Tiger. A bit more than a dozen years ago, when Tiger had won 8 majors, I recall reading a debate in a golf magazine about whether Tiger would beat Jack Nicklaus's record of 18. Yes said the pundit on one side of the page - after all he's won 8 between the ages of 21 and 28, while Nicklaus won his 18th aged 46. No said his colleague on the other side of the page, he puts too much pressure on his back and won't be winning anything when he's over 40. Tiger Woods was only 32 when he won his 14th major, hobbling on a knee that would need surgery. That was followed by what can only be described as a meltdown (Wikipedia uses the strange wording "Woods took a hiatus from professional golf in order to focus on difficult issues in his marriage"). Comeback attempts faltered as he needed back surgery twice in 2014 and 2015. More alarmingly, his touch around the greens seemed to have gone - troubles with his back notwithstanding I hadn't ever expected to see Woods duff chip shots like, well me or any other club golfer of modest ability actually. Now 42 this time Woods looks the real deal again and has competed at the top of the leaderboard in his last 2 events.
Could he win more majors? Indeed, could he win the Masters at Augusta in April? It's the easiest major to win (because the field is diluted with past winners who are past it, reducing the number of places for the young turks who probably aren't intimidated by Tiger, indeed most of them seem fearless and nerveless) and Woods has won it four times before. The bookies got scared enough to make Tiger favourite after his strong opening round at last weeks Arnold Palmer Invitational, though some bookies have now switched to Rory McIlory, who won that event. Now I'm not a fan of Woods, though I respect him as one of the world's greatest ever sportsmen. He has been great for golf because of his ability, his youth when he started to win tournaments and, let's face it, the colour of his skin. Sport and golf in particular badly needed black stars to put the remarkably recent past behind it. (No black player competed at Augusta until 1975 and the first black member was admitted in 1990). Unfortunately, Woods was not the ideal role model, his aloof demeanour, together with his propensity to swear and spit on the golf course always seemed at odds with golf traditions, though most commentators seemed to ignore that side of Woods. I know none of this would bother me in football but football is football and golf is golf. However, that is all by the by. If Woods were to win at Augusta, ten years after his last win in a major, it would be one of the great stories in sport, as well as keeping alive the question "can he beat Nicklaus's record?"
Puel is right. "All this, it is fantastic".
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