Grabbing that fun size piece of the action

Kicking a football - kicking a can down the road, for that matter - simply feels good, especially if you time your kick right and send the kicked thing for miles, or exactly where you wanted.

This is true only if you have a small amount of talent.

I never found any pleasure in tennis or rugby because I couldn’t do either, nor much in being an outfield player in football. But you don’t need much talent to have fun. The pleasure of hitting a running forehand topspin at the table tennis table, or turning a shot round the post at football, I always found these things wonderful, and doing them transcended the many and inevitable disappointments and defeats.

People who can run well love to run, people who can leap love to leap. Watching Michael Phelps in the Olympic pool in Beijing last year, you could see that he loved the water, that the process of swimming enthralled him. It’s years since I last competed on horseback, but I still ride horses every chance I can get.

There’s not a sport in the calendar that isn’t glorious fun to do, given a quantum of talent. I have given up asking golfers what the hell’s the point because they always say the same thing - yes, I know, but when you really hit one right, when it really flies...

The innocent delight in physical action, the can-kicking thing, is something shared by all great performers.

Winning comes second. Sport is not a means to procure the joy of victory, sport is a joy in itself. Winning is the hard part, the difficult part, the sordid part.

But the fundamental matter of sport is joy and everyone who has ever dived for a catch and felt the cricket ball miraculously settle in his hand knows exactly what I’m on about.

A good coach coaches joy. Ask Wayne Rooney, the last of the backstreet footballers. That’s what saved England’s bacon in Kazakhstan on Saturday - not Rooney’s lust for victory but his soul-deep joy in the physical action of sport.

England pay price for faith in class divide

Why did the England cricket team lose to the amateurs of the Netherlands in the opening match of the World Twenty20? Because they were professional. I mean professional in the boot-faced, joyless sense in which it is used by athletes to explain that they have satisfactorily excised every aspect of joy from the game.

I can see the post-match interviews that England had been planning to give. They were going to kill the game off, playing with their heads, playing within themselves, allowing class to have its inevitable way, and then they would say, after the dullest of dull games: “It was a professional performance.”

It is an attitude that combines the most sordid American-style victory obsession with the most excruciating English snobbery. An FA Cup victory, 2-0 against the non-Leaguers and close out the game: “We were very professional.” Meaning that we are members of a superior class and so we won without having to get desperate.

In football this smug attitude regularly trips up over the demented enthusiasm of the underdog. And that’s what happened to the England cricket team - they had taken it for granted that belonging to the right class was all it took. They were unprepared for the boldness of their opponents; indeed, they had forgotten that boldness exists.

England were beaten because the amateurs played with joy - amateur, after all, means lover, as in amo, amas, amat. England were beaten because they played without joy, because they tried to be professional. They forgot that when you set aside the love, you set aside the sport.

A few sad truths about football’s happy shoppers

My heart sinks every time I hear people say that the thing they like doing most in life is shopping. Shopping is nothing to do with living. Shopping is a preparation for the future. You buy this garment because you hope you will look good in it at some unspecified time ahead. You buy a bread-making machine because you hope you will eat fresh bread in a week or two. You buy a book or an album because you will read the words or listen to the notes some time soon.

But shopping has become an end in itself. Its seductive power lies in the way it allows us to abandon the present and live in a world of hopes and dreams - to forget about life, in the pleasure of contemplating what life might soon become. Shopping for the love of shopping is a blasphemy against life.

And that is where football is at. As the season continues its slow death, so the transfer stories break out with renewed ferocity: Kak?, Ronaldo, Real Madrid. What will Manchester City do with their millions? Will Chelsea plunge deep again? Will Liverpool spend enough to draw alongside Manchester United? What are Fergie’s secret plans?

And it’s not about football, it’s all about the football that might be played in the future, the goals that might be scored, the matches that might be won, the trophies that might be collected. Football transfer stories have all the appeal of shopping, a chance to live in the future, in that time when every player is a hero and every club a champion.

They have nothing to do with real football and nothing to do with real life.

Tennis courts worrying line in gamesmanship

The answer to all of tennis’s ills is to make Martina Navratilova president for life of the International Tennis Federation. Her wise remarks on the ghastly grunting in the women’s game, with its blue-movie soundtrack, were followed by her suggestion that the eternal ball-bouncing before serving is counter-productive. She singled out Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic as serial offenders and suggested that umpires be encouraged to enforce the rules on timing.

They exist all right, it’s just that they are not enforced. As a result, the game is duller and more prone to gamesmanship. The timing issue has given us one of the most unattractive sights in sport: after each change of ends the umpire says “time” and both players insolently remain seated for a few who’s-in-charge-here seconds.

Sea The Stars knows his place

Every spring, racing looks with insane hope for the horse of the century or the horse of the millennium and almost every year these mad dreams of Pegasus fade and die. But Sea The Stars won the Derby with stunning assurance on Saturday, and that after winning the 2,000 Guineas in May. Great horses know their place and that place is in front of all the others. Old racing expression: cheap horses know it. Great horses know it, too, not in any mystical sense, just that dominance comes naturally.