If you thought you’d got away with one ruddy World Cup in 2006, then brace yourself: there are two of them in 2007, so obviously a double helping of the baloney which accompanies them. Cricket’s World Cup is staged in the Caribbean through March and April; rugby’s in France in September and October. Anniversaries to celebrate, too, and with a nice aptness. I fancy you can easily make a centenary case for 1907 being the year in which genuine international sport became a reality: for the first time an overseas competitor (Aussie leftie Norman Brookes) won the men’s title at Wimbledon, and another, French golfer Arnaud Massy, was first to win the Open and — nothing new under celebrity suns — he promptly named his newborn son Hoylake after the Lancashire links over which he’d so triumphantly trod. The first custom-built motor race track was opened to allcomers at Brooklands in Surrey; London’s Olympia staged the inaugural All-Nations’ Horse of the Year Show; South Africa, the first non-Aussie visitors, played a Test at Lord’s; and at Epsom an Irish-trained horse, Orby, won the Derby for the first time. Trainer was Col. Fred McCabe, and as the nag romped in, historian Roger Mortimer noted that even as ‘raucous Hibernian revelry greeted “the first Catholic horse” to win a Derby’ the Colonel, who doubled as chief medical officer to the South Irish Horse, was telegraphing the regiment’s barracks: ‘MO authorises immediate issue of champagne to all ranks.’
Champagne anniversaries all round in 2007: peerless prizefighter Muhammad Ali is 65 on Wednesday week, 17 January. Also due his bus-pass this year is cerebral cricketer Mike Brearley; that brace of gnarled, nutbrown, knowall off-spinners, Fred Titmus and Ray Illingworth, each turn 75; and Tom Graveney, of the opulent off-drive, is 80.
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