It’s good for sportsmen to follow the road less travelled

THOSE pictures of the Rafael Benitez press conference in the buffet car of a train whizzing through the bocage (no doubt at 175kph) somewhere in France were a welcome throwback to days when sporting heroes couldn’t be cocooned from the rest of us in their personal transport systems.

Granted it was a Gallic buffet car. Pain au chocolat instead of bacon and tomato bap. Coq au vin rather than microwave curry. And no cancellation of the trolley service because the replacement crew didn’t turn up at Limoges Junction. No weekend engineering works to double the timescale of the journey. No ticketing system so complicated that you need a Master’s degree in quantum mechanics to decide the precise degree to which you are prepared to be ripped off.

For once, the players had to go through something of the travails of supporters who follow them around Europe. Admittedly they didn’t face the usual reception committee of pumped up paramilitary police with their designer riot gear, Kevlar body armour, pepper spray, Tasers, Heckler and Koch MP-5s (water cannon an optional extra).

Nor did they enjoy the essential match day experience of being kettled two hours after the final whistle to be released just after the bus and metro system has closed and while bar owners are putting their shutters up for the night with an insouciant shrug.

But you can’t have everything, and this was a good start. Welcome to our world superstars.

While the volcanic ash cloud (whatever happened to that?) managed to drag us some way back to an era when players would queue for the bus after a couple of hours of endeavour with their boots wrapped up in old paper and be forced to face their public, the imposition of the no-fly zone also brought home another fundamental truth. Sport is now so reliant on rapid transit systems that you wonder how we ever did without them.

International competition has been with us for more than 130 years. The forerunner of the Lions Tours to the Southern Hemisphere took place in Australia in 1888 following a long sea voyage, lasting up to two months. But it’s doubtful whether anyone throughout that period ever came up with a better one-liner than Clive Woodward.

The former England player and coach was asked on entering the country: “Any criminal convictions sir?”

To which he replied: “I didn’t realise they were still necessary.”

The most famous international cricket series, The Ashes, also commenced in that same decade although, astonishingly, in one of the great unsung stories, the first overseas team to visit England was an Australian Aboriginal side in 1868 which included among its line-up stars known only as Sundown, Dick-a-Dick, Jimmy Mosquito, the star all-rounder Johnny Mullagh, and King Cole who died of TB during the tour and is buried at a cemetery in Southwark.

As well as playing cricket the Aboriginal side would give demonstrations of boomerang and spear throwing and after a match at the Oval watched by 20,000 spectators The Daily Telegraph declared in patrician terms:

“It is highly interesting and curious, to see mixed in a friendly game on the most historically Saxon part of our island, representatives of two races so far removed from each other as the modern Englishman and the Aboriginal Australian. Although several of them are native bushmen, and all are as black as night, these Indian fellows are to all intents and purposes, clothed and in their right minds.”

The 1868 tour had a poignant footnote. A year later the authorities ruled it illegal to remove any Aborigine from the colony of Victoria without the approval of the government minister, thus curtailing the future involvement of native Australians in their country’s national game. Other sports followed the expansionist instincts of rugby and cricket. The birth of the modern Olympics was in 1896 in Athens and the events lasted a fortnight. Only 14 nations participated. Football – the main engine now for our frenetic viewing and travelling schedule – took much longer to become organised. The first World Cup was not until 1930, and the European Cup was not envisaged until 1956 as a floodlit midweek competition. Even then that year’s English champions, Chelsea, were forbidden to enter by the Football League who believed that the tournament was “not in the best interests of the game.” Luckily the 1957 champions, Manchester United resisted similar pressures, changing their destiny forever.

Since then the ubiquity of air travel; the rapid growth of media; the willingness of fans to travel thousands of miles; the voracity of the big TV companies to cram every available minute on subscription channels with competition and the support of global corporations has produced what we have today – unsustainable fixture congestion delivered at breakneck speed.

It took a natural disaster to remind us of the fragility of the infrastructure and eco-system which underpins contemporary sport but there is another point equally as important.

Mae West once said that “anything worth doing is worth doing slowly”. She was talking (as usual) about sex. But perhaps as far as sport is concerned we are on the cusp of having too much of a good thing.

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