The abominable (and entirely predictable) failure of the England football team may have cast something of a pall over the sporting summer in some quarters. But elsewhere, we’ve never had it so good. Lewis Hamilton is winning races again. Even when it comes to football, Gareth Bale and Aaron Ramsey and the rest of the Welsh players played like lions (or rather dragons) in their run to the semi-finals of the European Championships. Not forgetting Northern Ireland, of course.
Just as politics these days seems to be a case of one damned thing after another, so does sport. But in the latter case, the things are rather more welcome. A few years back, we’d have had to sustain ourselves on, say, the rise of Itoje (“Can you believe the boy hasn’t lost a match he’s started in since May 2015?”). Mathematicians produced elaborate analyses to show how that Britain just didn’t have enough people playing sport to complete in all the sports we were trying to be good at. Most other countries, they said, would pick football and a couple of others, rather than stupidly believing they could be genuine contenders at football, rugby (two codes), cricket, golf, athletics and so on and so forth. (Honourable exception here for the Australians, but they’ve got the climate for it.)