Now is the time to say goodbye. . . and await sunnier days

WE’VE reached the moment that the Romans celebrated with the Festival of Janus, the two-faced god who managed to look both forwards and backwards at once.

I’ve always thought that was a neat trick, being able to spot who was about to stab you in the back while simultaneously watching for the scything assault from the front.

Or in a rugby World Cup year, probably a spear tackle perpetrated by a brute with no neck wearing black and summoned up from the Underworld.

Or possibly Otago or Auckland.

Just as in the troubled 1920s and ‘30s, and immediately after the Second World War, sport is set to provide an essential counter balance to the harsh realities of life.

So, as we brush the dust and traumas of a miserable 2010 out of our system, it’s time to contemplate what may keep us diverted from the balance sheet and the family accounts in the 12 months ahead.

The first great bonus is that it’s not an international football tournament year.

Club football will continue much as before with all the usual suspects, but we are about to witness the decline and fall of the Roman empire at Stamford Bridge and the dissolution of one of the great teams of the past decade.

Whether that pleases, or disappoints, will depend on your affiliations and/or world view of soccer.

What is interesting is that any potential departure by Abramovich — and his behaviour has become, ever-increasingly, to resemble an exit strategy — marks the end of the first influx of what might be called “serious money” into the international club game.

He has been followed by a host of others . . . the Kroenkes, Usmanovs, Lerners, the Glazers and Sheikh Mansour with effects both beneficial and malevolent.

Quite how long they are going to stay is one of the most intriguing questions in sport. But the oligarchs and tycoons might do well to recall one of Gordon Gekko’s memorable quotes from the otherwise forgettable Wall Street II: “Money is not the prime commodity in our lives . . . time is.”

A possible changing of the guard in football will be accompanied in 2011 by the departure from the stage of several other leading actors. On the other side of the world the final scenes are being played out right now with a principal boy in Australian sport.

You don’t have to be a cricket fan to realise that Ricky Ponting — he was the trick answer supplied by the devilish Prem Kumar in the penultimate round of Slumdog Millionaire — has been one of the giants of the past decade.

Ponting, of the Tasmanian Tigers and the Kolkata Knight Riders in the IPL, is the archetypal, rough-edged Aussie competitor with a record to make your eyes water: most Test centuries by an Australian, most Test runs by an Australian, only the second man in history to pass 12,000 Test runs, most consecutive Test victories as a captain, most Test victories as a captain.

Old war-horses have their day of reckoning, and insomniacs among us witnessed it this week when Ponting trudged sadly away across the huge MCG, his stumps spread-eagled, and most likely into history.

“The tumult and the shouting dies/The captains and the kings depart,” wrote Rudyard Kipling in his poem Recessional. And it is their right to be afforded a collective moment of honour and dignity, a lesson taught to me by my father.

We were watching, in flickering mono-chrome TV, the final international in the 1963/64 All Blacks tour where only a scoreless match with Scotland robbed the New Zealanders of a Grand Slam.

The Scots poured onto Murrayfield as though it were Bannockburn and carried the visiting skipper, Wilson Whineray, from it shoulder-high. Why, I asked my father (I was aged 11). “Because, my son,” he answered, “he is a great man, and great men deserve their tribute.”

But I knew that he was secretly pleased that only the South Wales side Newport had lowered the New Zealand colours in a 37-game tour, courtesy of a dropped goal in a match marshalled by Dai Watkins who, along with Barry John, Phil Bennett, Jonathan Davies and Cliff Morgan, made up a quintet of the greatest out-halves rugby has known.

And rugby, with the World Cup taking place in New Zealand next October, is a suitable place to finish what will be my final column as I am standing down to carry on other duties and to make way for younger blood, an important thing to do with the economy in its present condition.

I recollect that Peter Cook (a Tottenham Hotspur supporter, but funny despite that) and Dudley Moore would end their programmes by singing: “Now is the time to say goodbye . . . until we meet again some sunny day.”

To all those Examiner readers who have written to me in 2010 I hope I have provided courteous, if not always enlightening, replies and I wish you well for the new year.

Yours in sport.

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