Spectator Sport

31 October 2009

The bigger they are...

The one bright spot for Johnson will be the return of Jonny Wilkinson at No 10. He’s been playing superbly for Toulon, his metronomic kicking producing match-winning points totals. Now he can add a complete bill of health to his preposterously Greek god looks. But look what his father Phil, who has helped to manage his career, said the other day: ‘Because he hasn’t played a lot for the last four years, he hasn’t been smashed around.’ How much do our rugby stars have to be smashed around before we wonder what the game has become?

Meanwhile, how great to see rugby referee Nigel Owens popping up on the radio, and giving a revealing and charming interview to my old colleague Kevin Mitchell in the Observer. Owens is one of the best refs in the world — though he did have the bad luck to be looking after the ‘Bloodgate’ match earlier this year. He also happens to be gay, and is now happily talking about his life, and the autobiography he has written, Half Time. At the same time last week, Donal Og Cusack, one of the most famous players in the absurdly macho world of Irish hurling, also came out as gay. For Cusack, coming out to his family was the biggest issue. As he writes in his memoirs, ‘My father... is a crane driver. Building sites can be cruel, hard places; he didn’t need this.’ But the fact that both these books can be widely welcomed is a measure of how far we have come. It is just over a decade, after all, since poor, tormented Justin Fashanu walked into a lock-up garage in Shoreditch and hanged himself. On the other hand, reading reports this week of a near-fatal attack on a trainee policeman outside a gay nightclub in Liverpool, maybe not that far.