Overture and beginners, please. This is it, for real, and mercifully the hysterical months of jingo-jangle jibber-jabber are stilled and silenced into concentration today when, at long last, the England football team plays the first of its three qualifiers in the World Cup against Paraguay in Frankfurt. To reach the sudden-death knockout stages in a fortnight’s time, England also need, as they say, ‘a result’ against Trinidad & Tobago in Nuremberg on Thursday, and against Sweden in Cologne on Tuesday week. The strident tedium of the trailers has been excruciating. Now all shall be revealed. Will the defence dither and drift? Has the once dagger-sharp Lampard refound his edge; Gerrard his appetite; Owen his speed off the mark? Is Beckham, anyway, too old, too rich and too distracted? Could, even, the ludicrously steep salary of Sven the Swede (nearing £20 million for five years’ work) turn into money well spent?
More than 60 years ago, my father would come home for a Saturday lunch from the Gloucester cattle market with — as well as a packet of wine gums as a treat for us — a copy of that week’s Punch and Spectator. I distinctly remember wondering if the former was to help Dad keep abreast of the prizefighting world, and the latter a weekly update for general sports’ watchers. In fact, each mag did sometimes include sporting articles — Punch with, say, Bernard Hollowood on village cricket, or A.P. Herbert on the Boat Race; and for sure, by the time I was out of my pram and able to read, the Speccie each week through the late 1940s to the mid-1950s unfailingly carried an enchanting piece on all manner of sports by Labour MP, former Oxford rugby Blue, J.P.W.
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