If there is anything more pointless than signing a five-year contract to be Emma Raducanu’s coach, it is the effort to inject some excitement into England’s interminable qualification campaigns for major football tournaments. Everyone knows they will qualify, almost certainly as top of their group, which usually contains such giants as the Moon, Chad and Tierra del Fuego or, as now, Latvia, Albania, Andorra and Serbia. Good luck, Mr Tuchel, with learning much from those fixtures, though Serbia should be interesting. Sport needs jeopardy: there needs to be doubt about the outcome. Here there’s none.
There are marginal debates: is Phil Foden too far out on the right? What will happen when Bukayo Saka is fit? Should everything revolve around Jude Bellingham as much as it does? Anyway, it’s all OK but it’s not going to change the world. But we love tournament football because there is proper jeopardy. If an England side managed by one of the best coaches in Europe can’t beat Albania, then we’re in a very big mess.
Among the rust there can be some beautiful diamonds though. Bellingham’s pass to Myles Lewis-Skelly, in an otherwise pretty underwhelming 2-0 win over Albania, was exquisite. It makes you see that the assist can be better than the finish. Lewis-Skelly’s was a fine goal, but he had only one person to beat. Bellingham took out six players with one slide-rule pass: he landed it on a blade of grass. A blade either way and it wouldn’t have worked: perfect weight, touch, angle. Footballing perfection.
In the week that the great George Foreman was finally counted out, it was good to see that boxing has been reinstated as an Olympic sport after a brief flurry when it could have been excluded from the 2028 LA Games. There are obviously appalling governance issues around boxing and it had been stripped away from the Games after being plagued by a number of officiating scandals and corruption allegations. Well there’s a surprise. Mind you, the International Olympic Committee didn’t do that good a job when they ran it in 2024 – remember all the controversy over gender last summer? Anyway that’s sorted and the IOC has recognised World Boxing as the new governing body, so we’ll see.
England’s qualifying group usually contains such football giants as the Moon, Chad and Tierra del Fuego
But if the sport of Foreman, Muhammad Ali, Lennox Lewis and Sugar Ray Leonard – all of whom won Olympic gold – had been excluded, the Games would have seemed a very hollow event. Beach volleyball, surfing, tennis, golf and cricket, sure, but no boxing? Come off it. Since the dawn of time, man has wanted to know whether he can run faster than anyone else, lift a heavier thing higher than another bloke and punch the daylights out of someone else in a fight. You could never have a proper Olympics without the 100m, weightlifting and boxing.
Finally, amid all the interminable kvetching about how dreadful everything is, just spare a moment to look at how Britain’s sportsmen and women who compete in individual events have shown themselves to be far more reliable at upholding the country’s sporting reputation than those who make up our national teams. Lando Norris finished first and then second in the opening two F1 grands prix of the year, tennis player Jack Draper had his greatest singles win in Indian Wells, Rory McIlroy won the Players Championship in America for the second time, and the admirable Jeremiah Azu (men’s 60m) and Amber Anning (women’s 400m) won gold at the world indoor athletics championships, where Britain came fourth in the medals table. All heartening stuff. We hear a lot from the gloomsters that the country is going to hell in a shoddily made handcart: these individuals show this is not the case.
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