There is no place like home

BUSINESS DAY, 5 JUNE 2003

I AM PLEASED TO be back in the country. I have been away this last week and more, inspecting the sporting environs of England and Ireland, and I cannot begin to tell you what a relief it is to be back in a place where people understand the importance of sport.

While I was over in the so-called First World I could not for the life of me find information, let alone coverage, of the series between Australia and the West Indies. While the West Indians were running up three consecutive victories over Ponting and his pack, I was pacing the streets of London, flipping fruitlessly through the newspapers, wondering just what these people do for information. England is just about as parochial as America when it comes to sport. Unless it is soccer or an English team is involved, it simply has not happened.

While I was there the English newspapers were reacting with dazed incomprehension at the revelation that David Beckham is not especially well known in New York. He is over there working the talk-show circuits with the Spice Girl formerly known as Posh, but discovering that no one actually knows who he is. The English papers, even the posh ones, could hardly digest this news. To make up for it, England turned its TV news shows over to David Beckham’s wrist.

I watched the match last week between Bafana Bafana and England – the match in which, as the news organs of the kingdom kept reminding us, Beckham broke a bone in his wrist – from a pub in Ireland, so I was spared the full assault of English parochialism. The Irish were politely uninterested. They could not give a flying O’Flanagan about any English sporting team, with the exception of Manchester United, and to them South Africa is just a place to go on holiday. The lads I was sitting with in Gleason’s public house in Clonmel did briefly rouse themselves to ask me why, if this match was launching our World Cup bid, we were playing it on a pitch that looked like it had recently been used for the running of the Grand National, but they did not press the point.

Then we all drifted off to gentle slumber as Bafana Bafana, a goal down and the world to play for, pushed the ball around at the back, helpfully proving that their disastrous tactics in the last minutes of our last match in the last soccer World Cup were not in fact the result of miscommunication – they were just our tactics. The Irish crowd in Gleason’s did briefly come to life when Beckham was injured and taken off, but we soon settled back to our Guinnesses. It was only when I arrived in England that I understood the magnitude of what had happened.

For two days and more the evening news led with interviews with Beckham’s doctor, people who knew Beckham’s doctor, people who hoped one day to be Beckham’s doctor. There were 3-D computer-generated reconstructions of Beckham’s wrist, there were painstaking slow-mo replays of the incident, complete with arrows and figures to indicate areas of pressure and force and wind speed. There were vox pops and financial forecasts, there was even a special feature explaining the medical technology involved in making David Beckham’s wrist better. What was the thrillingly high-tech technology? Setting the wrist in plaster. Blair and Bush and the Middle East could not get a look-in. It was all D. Beckham’s wrist.

While this blizzard of nonsense was going on, there was literally nothing with which to soothe the starving sporting soul. We do not appreciate how good we have it here when it comes to global sports. When there are developments in Australian or Scottish or New Zealand sports teams, our newspapers bring it to us. When almost any match is being played anywhere in the world, we can watch it on television or read the results the next day. As Martin Tyler declared ruefully during the Bafana match: “They are incredibly knowledgeable about their sport in South Africa. Do you know, they receive coverage of more Premiership matches than we do!”

Whatever else England has going for it – the fabulous weather, the friendly and attractive people – it cannot touch us for sport. Ah, it is good to be back.