Can we do it again?

During this summer of catastrophic floods, a good news story washed up on one or two newspaper sports desks. Ben Kay and Martin Corry, two of England’s most experienced forwards who had been preparing for the Rugby World Cup at the appropriately named city of Bath, drove home through Gloucestershire when they encountered drivers in trouble on roads that had turned to inland waterways. Our heroes waded in to help rescue the drivers, winning the admiration of locals in one of the heartlands of the English game.

It was a selfless act in the middle of what has been a largely miserable summer of sport in these wet islands. Apart from the emergence of Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton and Padraig Harrington’s dramatic victory in the Open, there has been little to lift the spirits. In cricket, England’s 3–0 Test series victory over West Indies was a hollow one, the tourists being totally abject in the gloomy early summer weather while the series against India was marred by puerile behaviour from Michael Vaughan’s side. English Premiership football, mired in greed, reached new levels of crassness with the takeover of Manchester City by Thaksin Shinawatra, the former dictator of Thailand whose assets had been frozen in his homeland (but who, at least, had the vision to make the much-maligned Sven-Goran Eriksson manager). And in rugby union, England ‘warmed up’ for the World Cup by sending a second-string side to South Africa. The Springboks, who England meet in a key pool game in the World Cup in Paris on 14 September, promptly put 50 points past Brian Ashton’s callow side in two Tests, with the tourists succumbing to a stomach bug that undermined the coach’s plans for a couple of respectable displays.

Like those two yeoman Leicester forwards, the world champions, England, will be swimming against the tide after the sixth Rugby World Cup kicks off with a game between hosts France and Argentina at Paris’s Stade de France on 7 September.