LARRY RYAN: Could this finally be the house that Jack built?
But why wouldn’t we? Many more weeks like this and they might be all we have left to lean on.
It was the week sport had its collar felt. The Australian Crime Commission figured out why it had gone up two sizes and Europol discovered where it got the price of the shirt.
A land renowned for its will to win had been willing to do anything to win. A continent was willing to lose if the price was right.
Endurance, strength, speed, recovery, agility – along with own-goals, spillages, misses, howlers, refereeing decisions and floodlight failure; once stitches in the wonderful tapestry of professional sport.
Now just a long list of things we have to wonder about.
Soon, when we can no longer believe in power, pace or stamina and when we no longer trust anyone enough to care about the result, we will only be able to admire men who can lift their heads and drop their shoulders. Men who inject qualities that can’t be injected.
Jack and Wes. Others will put Zebo in that bracket for threatening, with a flick of his heel, to reverse the damage Webb Ellis did one afternoon, long ago. In truth, it was Drico who briefly threw off the crude shackles of his sport to show, with that pass, that it’s sometimes worth rooting for truffles in the dirt.
But it was still rugby, a game in sterile wedlock to power, pace and stamina. So we must return to Jack and Wes. Men who are certain the football is not there to make a fool of them.
What a shame we almost engineered them out of existence, with our safety-first ways, condemned their kind to decades craning their necks at missiles into the channels. And now that we have finally begun to cherish them, they are loaded with generations of baggage.
Wilshere is a golden unicorn the English dare not truly believe in. So this week, they played well but first they played down. Conveniently, they have a manager well practised in the art of deflecting expectation. They do not want to put too much pressure on Jack, yet they are besotted by him.
Ultimately, they fear he will let them down. Perhaps it has much to do with the sad decline of their last maestro. So now when they look at Jack, they cannot help see every slalom run take him a step closer to the abyss Gazza finds himself in.
But then they found flaws in all their maestros. Le Tissier couldn’t be coaxed into a trot.
Hoddle seemed a solid citizen, but who knows what he got up to in a past life? Bowles couldn’t pass a bookies as readily as he could the ball. Marsh loved the ball nearly as much as himself and wouldn’t let it go.
They are almost conditioned to believe a man who can drop his shoulder will invariably drop them in it, somewhere down the line.
Our hang-ups are slightly different. Our two finest maestros are among the most sensible and respected men in the country. Gilesy and Chippy. We crave the arrival of another but want him to announce himself without giving him the ball to feet, just in case.
Watching Brazil this week, Keano, the man who could do everything but drop his shoulders, possibly because they were made of iron, ruefully considered the fear that has always pervaded our football.
“I was probably too uptight to enjoy playing football. They seem to enjoy it. It’s a reflection of their lifestyle, their culture. I never had that obviously.”
Brazil will never feel the need to play things down or knock things long. And even if Neymar and Ronaldinho disappointed this week, they had, in Oscar, a kid who should, one day, take his place among the pantheon of maestros.
In reality, Wes Hoolahan does all the right things, but probably can’t do them quickly enough to be the man we crave. We might be back to power, pace and stamina. But even if he could, how would we have known?
There have been two distinct reactions Down Under to the stark revelations this week that orchestrated doping programmes are a way of sporting life.
Some are keen to pick off the messenger. Phil Gould, general manager of rugby league club Penrith, called it “an extraordinary attack on Australian sport”. There will be more of that kind of talk at official levels before denial gives way entirely to acceptance. After all, the report pinpoints the “lack of appropriate levels of due diligence by sporting clubs and sports governing bodies” as a major factor in the scandal.
Mostly there has been shame on the darkest day Australian sport has known. Digging through the expanse of detail the Australian Crime Commission report unearths is alarming. Throughout, the report refers, not to PEDs, but to PIEDs — Performance and Image Enhancing Drugs. With good reason — we find that Melanotan and PT-141 feature among the popular cocktail of illegal assistance — both are tanning agents and aphrodisiacs.
So we can’t, any longer, take an Aussie’s best time at face value. And we must look sceptically, too, at their bronzed arms and take with a pinch of salt those tales of virility.
More frightening are the risks these flamin’ gallahs are taking with their talents and their lives. The report highlights the usage of a series of substances that haven’t actually been banned — simply because they haven’t yet been sanctioned for use by humans.
Pig brain extract that scientists hope, one day, might be used to treat Alzheimer sufferers. Fair dinkum, I’ll give it a lash if it might buy me a 10th-of-a-second.
As the report says of these products, “their potential impact on the health of players — both short and long-term — is unknown.” The prognosis for the health of Aussie sport is even less clear.
“Hey, Kelly, I didn’t hit him when he was down, did I?”
“No. No, you didn’t. He was on his way down.”
“Ok, all right, I just wanted to make sure.”
Zac Rinaldo of the Philadelphia Flyers had just dispatched a sequence of right-hand haymakers that left BJ Crombeen of the Tampa Bay Lightning flat on his back on the ice.
The first good one knocked BJ’s helmet off. The next two landed while BJ was hanging on, the lights already out.
But when he emerged from a penalty box penance, Rinaldo needed the reassurance of referee Kelly Sutherland that he hadn’t broken the unwritten code. Kelly was happy to sign off on the bout. The complicated life and value system of an ice hockey ref.
Also this week, Tunisian referee Slim Jdidi, appeared to lose all his powers of judgment during the second semi-final of the African Nations Cup.
As men tumbled all around him Jdidi seemed quite unable to detect what was causing them to fall, eventually sending off Burkina Faso’s Jonathan Pitroipa for being clattered across the knees.
Men who won’t fall or men who go down too easily — it’s hard to know which ref’s job is harder.
: Knocked Adrian Chiles back in his box after some scoffing about Samba football. “You know I did used to play the game, I didn’t used to just run around kicking people.”
: Seems we can’t get away from match-fixing. The Burkina Faso coach was banned after allegations in Belgium, but has achieved redemption in guiding one of Africa’s poorest nations to tomorrow’s CAF final against Nigeria.
: It seems to be the itch footballers have to scratch — photographing themselves with a pile of cash.
: Could anyone cause more fuss or lose more friends over what should be one of the most low-key and straightforward coaching jobs in football?
