IT’S a familiar scenario at the outset of what promises to be another compelling season of college football as the chasing pack look to wrestle the Premier League title from a Worcester side out to retain their crown for the third time in succession.
With flame-haired goal machine Mike Hobbiss having graduated, this could be the year where the likes of New College begin a new Oxford football dynasty of their own.
For New’s captain Tom Howell, thoughts of what might have been last season still linger. “Many of our boys still feel robbed of the league last year after a shocking linesman decision cost us three points against Worcester” he said. “We will be fighting for top spot again this year but still expect Worcester to be the team to beat.”
The other Premiership side to watch will be St. Anne’s, whose remarkable 2006-07 season ended with promotion from Division One as champions and a Cuppers final appearance after an odds-defying run. Having proved their strength in defeating Premiership opposition last season, captain Ryan Fox is confident that his side can cope with the step up in class this year.
“It’ll be real test to deal with the quality of the Premier Division” he said, “but with last year’s cup run behind us, there’s no reason why we can’t at least hold our own. We’ve also retained almost all of last year’s side, so with a few decent freshers we should have  enough strength in depth to last the season.
“A great deal depends on our giant striker Ed Border, who was the driving force behind last season’s success. As well as being a fantastic target man, he’s also one of the most skilful players in college football, so it will be an important season for him.”
The First Division is shaping up to be Oxford’s most competitive this year, with almost every side looking to make a decent stab at promotion.
Relegated St. Catherine’s, St. Hugh’s and Keble will want to make a speedy return to top flight football, whilst the likes of Somerville, Magdalen and newly-promoted Exeter will be keen to deny their more esteemed rivals promotion to the elite league.
Exeter can draw on a fine Cuppers run last year where they defeated Premiership sides Catz and Teddy Hall, before succumbing to eventual winners Brasenose. “We managed to beat Hall 8-0 in the cup” said captain Daivd Lee, “so we shouldn’t be written off in Division One this season. We’ll take things one game at a time, but with Jon George, who bagged 23 goals for us last season, we’ll be more than a match for anyone in this league.”
For Keble, however, anything less than promotion is not an option after being relegated last year despite only finishing two points of third spot.
“The end of last season was very frustrating” says captain Sebastian Singh. “We’re definitely not going to underestimate this division, but we should have enough quality and strength in depth to go straight back up.”

Oxford maintained their proud record in Varsity cricket with a comprehensive six wicket victory over Cambridge in the one-day fixture after the four-day match was hit by rain.
It was the Blues’ second consecutive limited-overs victory over the Tabs, and they haven’t been defeated in the longer form of the game since 1998.
Macadam, Dingle, Woods and Hobiss all picked up a brace of wickets to dismiss Cambridge for a total of 135, a score that was never going to be terribly competitive.
Oxford still had a lot of work to do in tricky conditions, but unbeaten 40s from Alex Ball and Spencer Crawley ensured the victory.

The Oxbridge boat race committee has refused to award a Cambridge rower a Blue after he failed to complete his academic course and instead returned to the German national team to prepare for the Beijing Olympics.
Thorsten Engelmann, a former World Championships silver medallist, left during the second year of his economics degree, making him the first Boat Race participant in decades to not receive a Blue despite helping his team to victory.
Engelmann’s departure was in breach of a Joint Understanding between the Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Clubs, which states that all members of the crew must be enrolled and residing at either University for the full academic year in which the race takes place. The rules are intended to avoid either university ‘parachuting in’ international rowers merely to win the Boat Race.
The Vice-Chancellors of both universities are rumoured to have discussed the matter and lawyers have been consulted for suitable action.
OUBC President Nick Brodie condemned Cambridge for knowingly allowing Engelmann’s participation. “Cambridge admitted to us that on the day of the race he knew he would not, and nor did he intend to complete his course, hence a blatant breach of the rules,” he said. “At the end of the  day we were the second boat to cross the finish line and this will always be the case, however according to the rules we were the first eligible crew to cross the finish line.”
Both clubs intend to pursue the matter further and will be meeting several times in coming months to reach a resolution.
“As President of OUBC this year I will ensure that this matter is properly addressed and not merely swept under the rug with the removal of a Blue, not only for last year’s boat but because it is my duty to uphold the standards and traditions of the Boat Race,” he said.
Chairman of the Boat Race Company Ltd, Giles Vardey, said in a statement, “It is our job to protect the integrity of the Race. The organisers of the Boat Race and the University Boat Clubs are guardians of one of the greatest amateur sporting events in the world.
“We all view very seriously any behaviour that is inconsistent with Boat Race traditions,” he added.
Engelmann was unavailable for comment at time of going to press.

N A REPEAT of the 2006 Cuppers Final, Queen’s/Wycliffe were seeking revenge against Catz, who, although strengthened by Vadim Varvarin and Matt Brooke-Hitching, were lacking the all important no.1: Blues player Tim Weir.
In the first round Catz had the advantage, but after barely one set of play the rain poured down on the Queen’s courts. As the players huddled in the Queen’s pavilion, the teams agreed to relocate to the “magical” Catz/Trinity courts, where Catz had won their Quarter Final fixture only 3 weeks previously, in the pouring rain.
As if rehearsing for Wimbledon, the clouds returned and another heavy shower rained down, this time on the Catz courts, but it finally cleared, and play got underway, Brooke-Hitching and Luke Reeve Tucker salvaged a draw against Tyler and Thomas, the strong Queens 2nd pair.
The Catz 3rd pairing, Taylor and Iltchev, also halved against Carpenter and Craig, the Queens 1st pair. Varvarin and Szlachcic had little trouble in overcoming Grainger and Stott, the Queens 3rd pair, with a convincing 6-0, 6-1 win, making the overall score 4-2 in Catz’s favour.
In the Second Round, Reeve Tucker and Brooke-Hitching forced their way past Grainger and Stott, but Iltchev and Taylor struggled to draw with Tyler and Thomas, who raised their game having been a break down in each set. The Queens 1st pair gained a good win against Varvarin and Szlachcic, taking advantage of Varvarin’s twisted ankle. The score stood at 7-5.
In the final round, Varvarin and Szchachic lost 6-4, 7-5, despite being close to winning the second set, while the battle of the third pairs was won by Iltchev and Taylor.
At 8pm, 7 hours after the supposed start time, Catz were up 9-7 with the final match to go between the first pairs. A quick count-up showed that Catz had a large game advantage, meaning that even a heavy loss in the final match would make no difference to the overall score.
For the third year running, Catz pulled off a Cuppers Final Victory, but the captain was keen to give credit to the Queen’s side, who, for the second time this year, gave the Catz boys a serious run for their money, and provided a ‘highly entertaining afternoon of top quality tennis.’

THE STORY of last season’s college rugby campaign was undoubtedly the unstoppable rise of Keble from nobodies to undisputed champions of the university.
After claiming both the Third and Second Division titles in 2005-06, Peter Bolton’s side saw off all comers to win both the Michaelmas and Hilary First Division crowns before seeing off Teddy Hall in the Cuppers final to cap a remarkable year.
What is certain is that the likes of Hall will not want to see another college dominate in the same way this season.
Although they tasted victory in the Sevens tournament, the Teddies will be hurting from last year’s trophy drought and looking to make an immediate impact this time around. Whether they will have sufficient strength in depth to compensate for the loss of Blues and 21s players this term is another question.
Also trying to make amends for the previous season will be St. Peter’s who find themselves promoted back to the First Division after being comprehensively relegated last Michaelmas. An epic Cuppers victory over St. Catherine’s last year will have given them the belief that they can dominate the top flight again, but they’ll have to wait until third week for what will surely be a hard-fought encounter against arch-rivals Hall.
Catz have the ability to cause anyone problems and will hope that their never-ending injury crisis of last year isn’t repeated. St. Hugh’s and Magdalen will start as relegation favourites, but expectations are more than likely to be overturned in what is sure to be an especially competitive division  this Michaelmas.
Division Two promises to be equally tight, with four out of the six sides having played top flight rugby in recent seasons.
Newly promoted Christ Church are the side to watch, however, riding the crest of a double promotion wave that has given them belief in their ability to reach the First Division this time around. “Our aim is to reach the top division if not this term, then in Hilary” said club secretary Jack Marsh. “We’re a strong, powerful side that builds our game around the forwards and solidity at the set play.
“The season opener against Exeter should be a real crunch game, as they just pipped us to the Third Division championship in a tight game last Hilary. With experienced players like Chris Perfect, Duncan Chiah and Chris Hughes in the ranks, we’re determined to get promotion at some stage this year.”
To achieve that goal Christ Church will have to make their way past Worcester and LMH/Trinity, both of who will have felt aggrieved at having been relegated last season.
The Tigers in particular have become something of a yo-yo club, and the smart money is on them repeating the trend by returning to the top flight. Similarly, Worcester handled themselves well in their brief flirtation with Division One rugby, and will rightly be looking to bounce straight back.
The Michaelmas season of college rugby always throws up its fair share of surprises and if the less-fancied sides can capitalise on others’ missing Blues or 21s players, then both the First and Second Divisions could be blown wide open.
But don’t write off the possibility of Keble crushing all before them for a second successive year.

We began our Boat Race build-up on the morning of 18th September, beginning a regime that will take us all the way to the race itself on the 29th March next year. From Tuesday to Friday we do two training sessions a day: gym work in the morning and then an afternoon outing on the water at Wallingford.
The weekend solely involves outings at Wallingford, before we are allowed the excitement of a Sunday evening in Oxford as our night off.
The squad is younger and slightly less experienced than it has been in recent years, but with a huge amount of strength in depth, raw talent and potential. Quality new arrivals such as Mike Wherley, two-time Olympian and three-time World Champion, can only help the younger rowers as we look towards March.
What’s most notable about this year’s squad is the air of determination that everyone seems to share.
There’s definitely a certain hunger and edginess about us, a feeling that we have something to prove. That’s a feeling shared with the coaching team and support staff, who will be with us every step of the way until the big day.
It’s a real honour to be President of this boat club, especially this year when there is such a great spirit and work ethic in the squad. We’re now building towards our first meeting with Cambridge this year on the 3rd November at the Fours Head of the River race in London.
 This will be one of the few opportunities we get to test our relative strength with the Tabs, and it’s important that we put down a marker for the rest of the year.
Also this summer, the new home of Oxford rowing, the £4 million Fleming Boathouse, was officially opened. All Oxford crews will be able to use what is a truly fantastic facility.

LIGHT Blue determination posed a tough challenge for Oxford’s polo players, but the Blues’ excellent  teamwork and superior tactics enabled them to eventually dominate the scoreboard.
The university polo team faced off against Cambridge on 9th of June 2007, for the annual varsity match at Guards Polo Club. This year Oxford was led by their veteran captain and talisman Alexander Gleeson, who superbly marshalled the team to a deserved win over the light blues.
Cambridge, for their part, could not make their three goal handicap advantage count for much, despite the game being played ‘off the stick’, as has been the varsity match tradition.
The first of four chukkas (periods) saw Oxford’s confident play cancel out Cambridge’s opening goal and catapult them into an early lead, with the dark blues ending the period with a comforting 3-1 lead. Jamie Dundas, who would eventually contribute two of Oxford’s goals, had an especially strong showing in the opening chukka, helping Oxford nudge ahead. Cambridge though would not be dismissed so easily, and they got back into the match in the second period, drawing level 4-4.
Oxford, however, would not be deterred in their quest to avenge the previous year’s bitter Varsity defeat. Carlos and Memo Cressida, Oxford’s two professional Varsity match coaches, provided valuable tactical advice which helped the squad regain the initiative. The final two chukkas witnessed an inspiring Oxford revival, with solid teamwork – combined with individual skill – giving the Dark blues the edge.
Henrietta Seligman and Fredrik Vannberg, despite playing their first Varsity match, showed impressive defensive prowess, riding off their opposite numbers and denying Cambridge’s most dangerous player, Ollie Clarke, the space to really show his skills. Quick movements of the ball up the pitch allowed Dundas and Gleeson to catch Cambridge unawares and run in a succession of goals, furthering the gap between the two sides.
Seligman in particular displayed a fearless attitude, brushing off a fall, impressively saving a penalty in the third chukka, and then creating an Oxford goal.
The highlight of the afternoon, however, was a rapid-fire Oxford goal, with Vannberg dispossessing his opposite number, quickly dispatching the ball up the field for Gleeson, the official match ‘Most Valuable Player’, to tear through the Cambridge ranks for another Oxford tap-in, all in the space of a few seconds.
The writing was on the wall: Gleeson would tally seven times in the course of Oxford’s 9-5 triumph, a fitting end for both the afternoon and the season.

OXFORD’S rugby players began the season in fine form with an undefeated tour of the USA in September.
The Blues defeated a New York Athletic Club side twice in two days before walloping the All-American Collegiate XV 44-0 at West Point Military Academy.
The comprehensive nature of the victories in America bode well for Oxford as they look to win a Varsity match for the first time since 2004. After an initial 24-7 victory over NYAC on 16th September, the Blues really hit their straps the following day running out 43-7 winners against the US side.
Jon Chance, Peter Clarke and Chris Haw all landed two tries each, with Tim Catling also grabbing a score.
Captain Joe Roff’s side’s fine form continued five days later with a further seven tries scored in difficult conditions, ending the tour on a resounding high note.
Upon returning home, Oxford’s fine early-season form continued with a resounding 48-14 victory over Japanese side Kanto Gaukin University. Left wing Euan Sadden produced a performance to remember, scoring a hat-trick of tries to help the Blues recover from going 7-0 down early on.
With further tries from Tom Tombleson, Anthony Jackson and Chance, fly-half Craig McMahon slotted four conversions to ease Oxford home in their first game at Iffley Road this season.
They next face Trinity College, Dublin, on Saturday at Iffley Road, kick-off 12.00 noon.

It’s very easy to think of sport and art as two very different, and even opposed, parts of life. There are a good number of ‘artsy’ types who pride themselves on their incompetence and indifference towards sport, and who would rather hear their mother’s chastity raucously questioned than be accused of knowing just how well Arsenal have started this season. And there are all those sports fans (though perhaps fewer in Oxford than I remember from that distant outside world) who seem to think that their hard-won physique will instantly melt away if they even think about doing something as ridiculous as stepping into a theatre or reading some poetry. Personally, I can’t claim to be a great sportsman. And my artistic achievements are never going to amount to anything spectacular. I am, though, a fan of both the arts and the sports. There is no need to chose between them. Sport and art have a long and happy history together, and, (like any good marriage or tutorial pairing) that’s a lot to do with the fact that deep down they’re not so different from each other.
The Greeks were the great sportsmen and women of the ancient world. They also gave us the first great examples of sport in art. Our modern Olympic games are named after those held in Greece for over a thousand years, but that was just one of several international sporting festivals that were held alongside numerous local events. And the Greeks loved depicting these sports in various works of art almost as much as they loved watching and taking part in them. Winners would commission paintings, (now lost to us), and statues to record their achievements, and sporting scenes were popular as designs for ceramic pots – especially vessels for drinking wine. The Ashmolean has a fantastic collection where, more than two thousand years later, we can still watch, in all their naked and rampant glory, ancient athletes competing in the middle of other triumphs than ours.
Other popular designs included scenes of religious life, and it seems right that sport, religion, art and wine should all be mixed up like that. Athletes would ask the gods to favour them, and then celebrate at a party afterwards where short poems written to mark their victory would be recited. It was all part of a celebration of the exceptional in life, and what was special included both sporting and artistic achievement. Music was a very important part of several festivals, and the awarding of prizes for artistic merit, such as those awarded to playwrights in Athens, was done in the same way as the awarding of prizes to athletes.
Sporting victory also had social implications, pointing out that you had the leisure and wealth to dedicate yourself to sport. Making this clear without arousing too much jealousy may have been one of the functions of the poems athletes paid to have written about their victories. Short versions would be recited soon after the contest, whilst more elaborate poems were worked up ready for the athlete’s arrival home when they would probably be performed in public. They often make a big deal of dedicating much of the glory of the victory to the community in general, presumably to encourage them to listen to more of their champion’s self-congratulation without getting too envious. Drunken rugby teams take note.
These poems were only really popular for a short period about five hundred years before the birth of Christ, but many of them have long been regarded as amongst the finest literary productions of the ancient world. The odes of Pindar are particularly admired. These were all written to record sporting victories and are largely responsible for the use of the ode as a form by English poets of the last few hundred years. Without the athletes, who were Pindar’s customers, Wordsworth would not have written his Ode on Intimations and we would never have had the odes of Shelley or Keats. Theses poets weren’t writing about sport, but the art form they were using only exists because of athletic competitions. The great writers of the classical world were often inspired more directly by sport. Homer has a long passage on ceremonial funeral games which led Virgil to include a similar section on sports in the Aeneid. Maybe it’s for the same reason that there’s a short discussion of Gaelic sports in Ulysses.
Sport has often found a place in the art of the modern world as well. One of my favourite books is The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton. First published in 1653, it’s a practical guide to fishing that also manages to touch on just about everything else important in life. It’s a meditation on a much loved sport and all the problems of living a good and happy life that’s gone through more editions than any book other than the Bible. And it has pictures.
More recent works of literature about sport include The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. It’s a short story by Alan Silletoe, later made into a film, about a teenage boy in a borstal in the 1950s who finds a measure of escape from his rather grim life by dedicating himself to the sport of, surprisingly, long distance running. Just like a Greek athlete, he uses sport to transcend himself. More importantly, he’s eventually able to use his achievements to spread a little bit of subversion and strike a small blow at a society that’s always been trying to put him down. Just like Pindar knew, sport can be dangerous when you’re not careful.
The sport best represented in British art is probably cricket. There are pictures of games that look something like cricket in fourteenth century manuscripts in the Bodleian, and depictions in the painted windows of the same age in the cathedrals of Gloucester and Canterbury. Cricket as we know it today emerged during the Eighteenth Century, and the first paintings were made around the 1740s. These paintings and engravings are invaluable to historians who can use them when trying to reconstruct early forms of the game. Many, for example, show just how far apart the two stumps used at the time were placed. More than big enough to allow the ball to pass between them without dislodging the bales by even a hair’s breadth!
Cricket was universally acknowledged to be a fine ‘manly’ game, and it very soon became the done thing for a boy or young man to be painted holding a cricket bat, legs casually crossed. Just as the odes of the ancient Greeks could play an important social purpose, artists were soon able to use cricket to make a point. An engraving of 1778 shows ‘Miss Wicket’ adopting the clichéd but very unladylike pose of the bat-wielding, cricket-playing young gentleman. If that wasn’t warning enough to the men-folk of the world, her friend ‘Miss Trigger’ carries a rifle and a brace of pheasants. The art of cricket was being parodied for a very socially engaged purpose.
Cricket remains a popular subject for artists today, but it’s certainly not the only sport to do so. Even ignoring the kitsch on sale in any sport team’s magastore, (as the are invariably dubbed), sport continues to enjoy a healthy and evolving relationship with art. This time next year, the V&A will be hosting an exhibition on ‘Fashion and Sport’ exploring the relationship between the two. Sporting memorabilia continues to blur the line between sport and art. Think, for example, of all those football shirts framed just like paintings and hung on the walls of pubs. I’m sure the Greeks, with their illustrated amphorae, would salute such a familiar confluence of art, alcohol and athleticism.
Even the last century’s most celebrated artist had a fascination with sport. Pablo Picasso might not have been much of a cricketer – few Spaniards are – but he maintained a life-long interest in bull-fighting. Not only were fights staged in his honour, but he also produced posters for local events. A bull appears in his famous painting Guernica, and bull-fighting featured as a theme in his work throughout his career, just as it did in Goya’s a hundred and fifty years before. Like many other artists of the Twentieth Century, he was attracted by the mythic connotations of bull-fighting and never shied away from its violent nature. In fact, that violence was an integral part of what made the sport such a compelling subject to Picasso and other artists.
Cinema too has had a long love affair with sport. Some of the oldest films from the turn of the last century are records of football matches. Because early cameras could only hold a few minutes of film, there was no way to film a whole match. As a result, there’s not much footage of actual play. It’s hard to predict before a match when exactly the most exciting twenty seconds are going to be. Instead, the cameras would capture the shots of the crowd and the teams emerging from the tunnel onto the pitch. Not quite Match of the Day, but it was a start.
Today, some of the most popular films in history are about sport. Boxing films have a particularly rich tradition producing such classics as Rocky, (winner of the Oscar for Best Picture) and Raging Bull, for which Robert De Niro won the Best Actor award. Whilst Rocky gives us a rather schmaltzy underdog story, Raging Bull doesn’t flinch from the raw savagery of boxing. Like many great sports films, Raging Bull uses sport partly to explore the psychology of its protagonist. De Niro plays Jake LaMotta, a talented boxer from the Bronx who climbs towards the top of his sport before losing it all. He ends up destroying himself with jealousy over his second wife, Vicki. LaMotta’s destructive passions are reflected in the film’s uncompromisingly violent boxing scenes, and the similarity of the story to Othello has often been remarked upon by critics.
I’m pretty sure the Greeks would have recognised this type of art, a complicated exploration of combat and contest. Somewhat ironically, I think they’d have preferred it to the 1981 film Chariots of Fire, which is about the 1924 Olympics. Like Rocky, it won the Oscar for Best Picture, and like Raging Bull it uses sport to explore the psychologies and relationships of its characters. No Greek, though, would share the Scottish runner Liddell’s worries that his religion and his sporting commitments were in conflict.
Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby became another popular sporting film in 1997. Fever Pitch is different to other sports films though. It’s not told from the perspective of a sportsman, but that of a fan following Arsenal in their 1988-9 season. It’s also a romantic comedy as well as a sports film. It’s not so much a film about excelling or beating the odds, but about sport as a part of someone’s life alongside things like love which is, in its own little way, almost as important. The structure of the football season, familiar to any fan, shapes the film and jollies it along; hope and rebirth in late August, confusion and uncertainty through the winter, climaxes of triumph and despair in May. Cricket in the summer if they’re broad-minded. It’s the modern man’s equivalent of the agricultural cycle.
One of the reasons that sport and art go together so well is that they’re so very similar. The experience of going to a sporting event like a big football match isn’t so different to, say, going to the opera. Bear with me on this one. You make a special journey to a venue which is specially put aside from day to day life for one particular activity to see the best people in the world doing something which, a lot of the time, is being done completely for its own sake. We even dress up in a special way for both. Alright, footballers play football because they earn a lot of money, but they’re only paid that much because millions of people care a lot about, and will spend a lot of money on, an activity that has no direct effect on the outside world. Which is where sport differs from religion, which claims to affect the whole world and more. Sport’s a bit closer to how we think about art sometimes, as something that’s worth doing for its own sake. After all, we could keep fit by simply running on a tread mill all on our own, and we’re all a bit suspicious of ideas that sport ‘builds character’ or teaches ‘leadership’, but we still carry on playing sport despite the apparent lack of purpose. In the same way, we can still care a lot about literature and music even if we’re not sure they can do anything to transform our lives or society. We like art just because we like it. It makes us happy.
It’s no coincidence that football is called ‘the beautiful game’. A game of football can be very pretty to watch. Most fans have a few favourites. The Brazil team of 1982, Arsenal 2002-3, Leicester City 1996-7. Maybe that last one’s just me. Its beauty is one of the reasons football’s so popular. When it’s played well, it’s a free flowing game with plenty of opportunity for invention and displays of individual virtuosity. It’s almost unique amongst sports for the degree to which it rewards improvisation, and the best teams always surprise you with the way they can rethink traditional forms of play and movement and do something unexpected with the familiar. Doesn’t that sound like some types of art? Isn’t it a bit like an elaborate, improvised dance form? Some narrow minded people might say that’s going a bit far but as the recent goings on at Chelsea show, (Mourinho was sacked partly, the rumour goes, for not getting his team to play attractive enough football), football fans do care about aesthetics. A team’s never considered truly great until it’s won consistently by playing football that’s beautiful to watch.
People often talk about the aesthetic aspect of cricket. A well timed shot can be graceful, but it’s the ebb and flow of a cricket match that’s really satisfying. Like one of those big Romantic symphonies, a long sonnet cycle or a TV series, a five day test match grows organically with almost infinitely complex shapes and rhythms. If you listen to Test Match Special on the radio, you’ll know how obsessed cricket fans can be by statistics. They’ll count anything, and tell you everything down to when the last time was that three no-balls were bowled in an over from the Nursery End during the second innings of a match where less than three hundred runs were being chased and the umpire had egg sandwiches for tea. This obsession with statistics is one way of making sense of such a fantastically complexly structured phenomenon. It helps pick out all the different shapes and stories which overlap each other in any one match. It’s just like trying to remember all the schemes and patterns and stories going on at once in Paradise Lost or Ulysses. Every single ball is a contest between bowler and batsman that can only be understood as part of that over which you need to think of as part of the way that session’s gone which is just one part of a match which fits into that particular test series which is part of a history of matches going back one hundred years. And then there’s the story of how that batsman’s been playing that summer, (perhaps he’s nervous having done really badly the week before), and maybe there’s a big rivalry between him and the bowler, and then you need to think of the way this particular pitch behaved in similar conditions three years ago… It’s just the same way a work of literature like The Faerie Queene works, piling story on top of story to create an intensely meaningful whole.
Which is why people care. We’re always hearing snotty remarks about how silly it is to be so worked up about whether an artificial bladder crosses a line or not, but quit
honestly that’s very short-sighted. As I see it, it’s a great miracle that people can find meaning in such a silly activity. It’s fantastic that they care. People sometimes talk about fans as if they suffer from some pitiful mental disability, some infantile delusion. But really, it takes anything but stupidity to concentrate intensely on something for ninety minutes. We all know that from lectures. And why should it be pitiable to care about what happens on a sports field? Is it really any different to going to a theatre and being moved by what you rationally know are just people pretending to do things they’re not? When you take the time to learn some of the intricate details of any sport, it almost always proves to be just as rewarding in its own way as any art form. Sports fans recognise this. Manchester United brand their stadium at Old Trafford as ‘The Theatre of Dreams’. They know that what they’re offering to people has a lot of the same qualities as what’s offered up at Covent Garden.
What I like about art is that it offers the spectacle of form and narrative and beauty, all combined in the same action. Well, sport’s exactly the same. A game of tennis, as Robert Frost recognised when he famously said he’d rather play tennis with the net down than write free verse, has form in the same way a sonnet does. And when a master of the sport like Roger Federer plays, he uses that form to do things that are really beautiful and add to what’s known as ‘Tennis History’, which is really just another story. Like King Lear is just another story. The Greeks loved stories, and they loved sport too. I’m sure they’d have loved modern Britain where, today, we’re lucky enough to have some of the best sport and some of the best art in the world right on our doorsteps. So go and join the college hockey team and then write a poem about it.