Frank Keating
Martin Johnson’s England rugby team were “champions of the world” for a fortnight. The view was heady while it lasted. For sure, it added to the dramatic weight of the fall. As well as bruising the lilywhites’ body, spirit and preening pretensions for next year’s World Cup the heart-of-oak French gallants in Paris did international sport a favour by gaily demolishing the idiot notion of a computer-generated “world title”.
England took the field in France with a strut which suggested they believed in phoney ratings. The computer had France way back in fourth place, with Australia third and New Zealand second even though the “champions” (England) had not taken on New Zealand over there in yonks. Certainly the All Blacks would have smiled that slow smile when the news came through from Paris.
Test cricket has also been inveigled into the lunacy of a theoretical “world championship” and, just as the happenings at the Stade de France readjusted rugby into reality, so did South Africa’s abject humiliation in Johannesburg fuse cricket’s misplaced “top dog” computer.
So overwhelming was Australia’s victory that it is hard to believe that South Africa had entered the three-match rubber knowing they had only to draw it a couple of timely thunderstorms perhaps? to be crowned “champions of the world”, if only by a computer. Again it is completely dotty.
What is going on here? These so-called “world champion rankings” are absurd and the sooner administrators and sponsors admit the spuriousness of their headline-desperate gimmicks and call off their stat-obsessed anoraks the better.
Computer games make a mockery of sport as challenge. Cricket’s sham league table was “official” in as much as it was concocted by the International Cricket Council under the guise of “Test match championship of the world”. That a wonky mismatch was on the cards was plain for all to forecast, for had not South Africa been roundly trounced in their three-Test series in Australia by, respectively, 246 runs, nine wickets and 10 wickets?
Yet the fact that a year before (on March 22) India had beaten Australia by a two-wicket whisker in Madras to take the series 2-1 allowed the gormless boffins to contrive the possibility that South Africa could hail themselves as world Test champions had they been able to draw the series this month or the previous one in Australia.
Mercifully, rain was not needed to postpone Australia’s immediate and ruthless tearing-up of the ICC’s barmy numbers racket indeed, with such relish did the Australians do so that the victory by an innings and 360 runs was the second-most cruel and comprehensive by any team in all the 126 years of Test history.
Before England’s rugby almost-as-seminal debacle in Paris it was evident that the “world championship” sponsored by the Zurich financial group was even more wonkily counterfeit. Apparently, the mathematicians came up with the dodge that, had England beaten Ireland at Twickenham last month by more than 16 points, the lilywhites would be looking down as monarchs of all they surveyed. They duly did so and at once Zurich fed the world with its tabulated convolutions.
At least, at cricket, podium-topping is plain to see because Australia and South Africa are playing Test series home and away within three months of each other. In terms of rugby’s fake gold and silver medals, England are not due to play New Zealand in New Zealand until next year only their second visit there since 1985. It is an appalling dereliction by whichever mandarins at Twickenham or Auckland organise the international calendars. Eighteen years one visit. How can the disingenuous calculators cook up a “current” world championship on such pathetically skimpy evidence?
Yet, as they strode, oblivious, to their ambush in Paris, we were still asked to acclaim England as champions of the world in 2002, doubtless because at the end of 2001 they beat Australia and South Africa at Twickenham, both teams lacking lustre at the end of long seasons.
Not that doleful South African rugby can be anything but sparkling in comparison to what their cricketers must be feeling as they make their way to Newlands for the second Test against Australia on Friday. The defeat in Johannesburg was ignominiously demeaning. On a perfect pitch, South Africa’s batsmen came to the wicket with not so much bats as towels to throw in.
It all helped last week to defy the manipulative strategem of the ICC’s mathematicians that set up from a computer base the idea of a theoretical Test world championship.
At rugby England should not utter one more premature boast until they lift the William Webb Ellis World Cup at Stadium Australia on November 15 next year.
Until that comes to pass, and thereafter too, can the gnomes of Zurich please sit down at the back there and kindly shut up.