David Beckham’s elegant but pointless cameo role for Paris Saint-Germain in their Champions League defeat to Barcelona the other day got plenty of play in the British press, despite his ineffectiveness. We love Becks — who doesn’t? — but he’s no longer the player he was, let alone the one he was hyped up to be.
He will always have a role, whether it’s as a football ambassador, or simply as an agreeable figure who gets wheeled out to front anything from marital stability to handing out the canapés at a G8 summit. Becks himself has no doubt about his ability to contribute on the pitch, it’s just the rest of us, and he has never really paid too much attention to what we think.
A few hundred miles away, down on the Côte d’Azur, there is another English sporting icon with a better CV than Becks who is every bit his equal in the looks stakes. But he’s so riddled with self-doubt that he has been canvassing the opinion of team-mates to see if he has still ‘got it’. Jonny Wilkinson has clearly still ‘got it’ — plenty of it — and the evidence is clear: he plays in the key position for the best club in Europe’s premier rugby union league, the Top 14 in France. So effective is Jonny that two of world rugby’s leading fly-halves. Frédéric Michalak of France and the Aussie Matt Giteau, have to play out of position at Toulon.
It is 15 years since Jonny became the youngest Englishman to represent his country for 71 years and ten since he won the World Cup with a swing of his boot in Sydney. After that he got injured every time he played and a new set of tyros appeared in the England number 10 shirt to reduce Jonny to sepia on a clubhouse wall. Think back to 2008 and that famous photo taken at Twickenham of Jonny, on as substitute, being bossed about by England’s starting fly half, Danny Cipriani, as Ireland were thumped 33-10.
You could say that Cipriani never really trained on, though Kelly Brook must offer some solace: a look at Sale Sharks’ league position and Danny’s cap collection being all the evidence you need. The man Wilkinson replaced at Twickenham on that March day in 2008, Toby Flood, got dumped out of the Heineken Cup in the quarter-finals when Wilkinson’s Toulon beat Leicester. Now it is the turn of the man most likely to replace Flood as England’s playmaker to try to stop Jonny and Toulon reaching the final.
Owen Farrell has been rightly praised for his ability to boot points and his hard tackling (sometimes wandering all over the pitch to do his bit for aggression). Some say he has something of the young Wilkinson about him, but in 15 years’ time will young Farrell (his dad isn’t all that old) still be pulling the strings for the best club around? We thought the flame had been passed in 2008, but don’t bank on it changing hands when Saracens take on Toulon on 28 April with a place in the Heineken Cup final at stake. It’s at Twickenham and looks like one of the tastiest fixtures in any sport all year.
So Becks and Jonny may still be brightening up our lives, but is there a better-looking sportsman out there than Adam Scott? The Australian looks boy-band handsome, so it is entirely appropriate that he has the fearsome Steve Williams — Tiger Woods’s former caddy, and not a man likely to take to the catwalk any day soon — to carry his bag. But there was also something lovely about the man Scott faced in the play-off in Augusta on Sunday. Carrying the bag for Angel Cabrera was Angel Cabrera Jnr, the Argentine’s son. That Scott triumphed, bouncing back from his meltdown at the Open last July, is a good enough tale and one that will have enhanced the sport’s reputation among teenagers. But how fabulous it would have been if the embrace the Cabreras had in defeat had been in victory.
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