Frank Keating

Statuesque

Is any new sporting arena fit for purpose without a statue to adorn it?

Is any new sporting arena fit for purpose without a statue to adorn it? Critics of the apparently workaday new Wembley Stadium reckon the most striking thing about it is the towering bronze at its entrance by sculptor Philip Jackson of the straightbacked, relaxed good fellow, lamented Bobby Moore. Statues of sporting figures are suddenly all the rage. Forty years or so ago, when Bob was still captaining the England football team, I’d cover the rugby at Paris’s decrepit, fondly remembered Colombes (where they’d staged 1924’s Chariots of Fire Olympic Games) and, waiting for my ticket check, would always offer a sentimental nod towards the chunky four-square stone sculpture of France’s fabled flying ace and fly-half, Yves du Manoir, who’d died at just 24 when the biplane he was piloting at a Red Arrows-type exhibition gimmick over Colombes crashed before the kick-off of the French XV’s match against Scotland in 1928. Again, I remember being charmed when the England cricket team on the subcontinent in 1982 played a match at Indore, the stadium entrance being dominated by an imposing stone statue of dashing All-India batsman C.K. Nayudu letting rip a wristy hook shot. Back home, all we had was the curliewurlie ironwork of the Grace Gates at Lord’s and the Hobbs Gate at the Oval. Not the same at all.

Now British sport keeps sculptors in caviar. This month at Wimbledon I’ll exchange a mutual wink for good ol’ times remembered with David Wynne’s exquisite bronze of Fred Perry essaying a merry midcourt volley; it was unveiled all of 50 years after Fred’s first singles victory there. Denis Compton was still alive as well when Lord’s named a new grandstand after him, but the statue they put under it depicted not cricket’s postwar demigod playing his ‘signature’ sweep shot, but a coiled and lusty cover-driver; and, later, sculptor Gerald Laing admitted he’d worked from 1930s photographs of Walter Hammond, whose trademark had been the ferocious offside creamer.

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