Matthew Norman - You Cannot Be Serious! - The 101 Most Frustrating Things in Sport

In my defence, it is among sport’s sovereign duties to provoke every emotion, and rage at the incompetence, arrogance and indeed pretension of armchair know-all writers like myself (see also Simon Barnes, no. 98) is undeniably one of those. If you believe you could do it better, you are almost certainly right. All I can say is that every word of what follows comes from the heart – not from one of that organ’s more gentle or engaging ventrical chambers, perhaps, but from the heart nonetheless.

Matthew Norman

September 2010

101

Roger Federer

Setting aside the bleeding obvious (genius beyond compare, blah blah), it must be admitted, with reluctance and sadness, that the Fed has become something of a wanker.

It isn’t easy to say, and people continue to shy away from saying it, for such is the reverence for the indecent beauty of his tennis and so capacious is the storehouse of glorious memories the Swiss has deposited in those, like me, who have followed his career obsessively for almost a decade. I can’t think of a sportsman who has given me half as much televisual joy as Federer. I’ve barely missed a match he’s played since he announced himself as a generational talent at Wimbledon in 2001 with a thrilling five-set win over the seemingly unbeatable apeman Pete Sampras (see no. 17). Even now, with his decline apparently established and picking up pace, there is no one you’d rather watch.

So it is with far more regret than relish that the masturbatorial quality he increasingly exhibits must, in the interests of the rigorous honesty that defines this book, be noted.

First of all, there are the gleaming white blazers – vaguely nautical, with hints of both seventies disco and something worn on the bridge of the USS Enterprise , invariably with some boastful statistic (fifteen major titles, for instance) stitched into them – he has taken to wearing. With the notable exception of the Green Jacket presented to winners of the US Masters, there are no naffer garments known to world sport.

More disturbing, meanwhile, is the self-pity. The infantile crying fit that followed his defeat to Rafael Nadal in the Australian Open final of 2009, when he had to abandon his loser’s speech, although not the first of its kind, was an embarrassment to behold. For a while after that, it seemed that the birth of his twin girls and his maiden French Open win in the summer of that year had matured him. Admittedly his victory speech at Wimbledon, after edging out a heroic Andy Roddick 16–14 in the fifth, was not impressive. A man with fifteen major titles informing another with just the one, and that years ago, that he knew the agony of narrow defeat, lacked sensitivity. The relief was that Roddick was too traumatised by his loss to take in the clumpingly misplaced condescension.

Worse by far would come after the following year’s shock quarter-final defeat to Tomáš Berdych, when Federer blamed everything – a back injury, a sore leg, bad bounces, Denis Compton and the alignment of Uranus in Mars’s seventh house – other than himself, and offered the faintest and most grudging of praise for the Czech. ‘I definitely gave away this match,’ he said. But he hadn’t. He’d simply been on the wrong end of the sort of hiding he has dished out a thousand times, and lacked not only the humility to accept it, but the will to simulate that humility. No one sane expects epochal titans like Roger Federer to be genuinely humble. You don’t dominate a sport for years without a rapacious ego. All we ask is that they have the wit to give the appearance of modesty on the rare occasions it’s demanded, and this now seems beyond Federer’s grasp.

The emperors of Rome had slaves positioned behind them at all times with the sole purpose of reminding them of their humanity by whispering the mantra, ‘You too shall die, Lord.’ Federer could do with one of those as his career comes to what one hopes will, for all the irritation he can generate, be a very slow and gentle close. That, and a style counsellor on the lines of Reginald Jeeves, who always found a way to prevent Bertie Wooster from wearing one of those white smoking jackets he’d bought in Monte Carlo that were capable of cauterising the retina at twenty paces.

100

Neville Neville

Excuse the self-indulgent lurch into personal philosophising, but I have two iron rules of human existence, and two alone.

The first is that anyone who imagines that something as infinitely complex and perplexing as human existence is susceptible to an iron rule is, axiomatically, an imbecile.

The second is this. Never trust anyone who has the same name twice. Humbert Humbert was Lolita’s paedo-stepfather, and Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy. Like so many iron rules, this has its one exception (Lord Chief Justice Igor Judge, or Judge Judge, seems a good judicial egg). Neville Neville, on the other hand, serves only to confirm it.

Can you honestly blame a man, you might ask, for his parents’ startling lack of imagination? Of course not. What you can and must blame him for is not availing himself of the cheap and simple remedy that is deed poll. What the advantages of hanging on to both names could be, apart perhaps from halving the time required in adolescence to practise the signature, I can’t imagine.

But it’s not the wilful refusal to jettison at least one of those Nevilles that earns this double namer – a football agent with just the two clients (can you guess? Go on, have a crack) – his berth in this book. That refusal did, after all, inspire what may be the second-best football chant of the last twenty years. The first is the Chelsea ditty about Gianfranco Zola, sung to the tune of the Kinks’ ‘Lola’, that went thus:

If you think we’re taking the piss

Just ask that cunt Julian Dicks

About Zola

Who-oo-oo-o Zola …

The brilliance, I’ve always felt, lies in how the Sondheims of Stamford Bridge eschewed substituting that ‘piss’ with the ‘mick’ that would have made it very nearly rhyme. This deliberate avoidance of the obvious strips away any lingering threat of Hallmark-greeting-card tweeness, and imbues the song with an emotional force, even poignancy, it would otherwise have lacked.

The Old Trafford chant regarding our subject, sung in the earliest days of his issue’s Manchester United careers to the tune of Bowie’s ‘Rebel Rebel’, was barely less uplifting, if bereft of the assonant genius celebrated above. This is it:

Neville Neville, they’re in defence

Neville Neville, their future’s immense

Neville Neville, they ain’t half bad

Neville Neville, the name of their dad.

With one of the brothers, this was also uncannily prescient. The future of Gary ‘Our Kid’ Neville, with club and country, was indeed immense. More than that, Gary, one of the more articulate native players in the Premier League (he speaks English almost as well as the less fluent Dutchmen), would prove to be football’s most influential trade unionist in the years between Jimmy Hill masterminding the scrapping of the maximum wage in the 1960s and John Terry’s heroically flawed attempt to spear-head a mutiny against Fabio Capello during the World Cup of 2010.

You may recall how Gary, the Lech Wał sa of his generation, nobly led the England dressing room in threatening to withdraw their labour in protest over the ban imposed on his clubmate and fellow England defender Rio Ferdinand for the amnesiac skipping of a drugs test; and how he spearheaded the snubbing of the media after one international in umbrage at their criticism. Anyone on several million quid per annum who can bring the flavour of the Gdansk shipyard to the England dressing room is more than all right with me.