Loyalty card that will never be part of Andy Murray’s strongest suit

Call of duty? But Murray, being a “stand up and be counted” Scot, has a different feeling about Britain from the English and the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA). Gratitude? Murray came through the junior ranks in spite of rather than because of the LTA, decamping to Spain to work in the right environment. True, the LTA has invested a lot of money in him subsequently, but that’s very much in its own interest.

What Murray needs, what the LTA needs, what we who watch need, is not one more plucky-Brit defeat but a resurgent Murray whizzing up the rankings, holding a top-ten slot and climbing and winning tournaments. Murray follows the tournament in Marseilles with Rotterdam and Dubai and then has two big American hard-court tournaments in Indian Wells and Miami. He was a semi-finalist in both of these last year, so that means that if he does less well, he will slip backwards. That’s how the system works; he has ranking points to defend.

So Murray’s backsliding makes sense and I am not inclined to clobber him too hard – well, not if he is out there winning matches, anyway. In sport, victory forgives most things. Murray owes us a few victories, then.

The cheat who deserves his second chance

Dwain Chambers exists as a walking and running embarrassment to British athletics, back again after serving a ban for drugs and unwilling to go away. There is something inelegant about the way he is being pursued and stigmatised; there seems to be an altogether too desperate need to see him suffer.

One thing I will say in Chambers’s favour is that he came, as it were, clean. He hasn’t talked about having his drink spiked at a party, he hasn’t said that the test must have been wrong, he hasn’t behaved in any of the ways traditional to the cheat. He said that he took drugs to make him run fast: “I went and took drugs, it gave me huge success financially, but look at the repercussions. Now I want to be part of the solution. I want to be used as a positive example of what you should and shouldn’t do.”

I think this is a good speech and perhaps it should be understood as such, rather than as the weasel words of a lapsed cheat.

There are perhaps positive things about Chambers beyond his drugs test. I believe in the blessedness of the second chance, in the opportunity to use the grave errors as a directive to live in a better way. Many of us, vowing never to make the same mistake again, have found ourselves in circumstances to make that vow come good. People make a second marriage work after making a mess of the first; addicts can restart their lives.

There is joy in heaven over a sinner that repenteth, but little joy when the same thing happens in British athletics. But perhaps there should be. Sometimes giving people a second chance is the best thing for everybody involved. A third chance – that’s a different matter.

Premier League talks foreign language

It has to matter. That is the point of modern professional sport. If it doesn’t matter, there is no point playing. That is the philosophy behind the Premier League’s plans to play a round of matches overseas.

When I lived abroad I would occasionally, being a little sport-starved in Hong Kong, go to watch visiting big-name football teams. It was always a disappointment. It didn’t matter, so they didn’t try a yard.

Only once was it different and that was when a Hong Kong XI had the temerity to score a goal in the first minute against, I think, FC Hamburg. The Hamburgers were furious; that wasn’t in the script. They sustained their anger for 90 minutes and scored nine times as the Hong Kong players, astonished to find themselves in a real game, were unable to cope.

A real game, then, is the only way that the FA’s madcap scheme could work, at least so far as spectator satisfaction is concerned. But I commend to the FA one of Barnes’s Laws of Sport: a governing body’s duty is to strive only for sporting excellence. If the priority is elsewhere, sport will suffer.

Sorry England run out of confidence

When there is an epidemic of run-outs, it seldom indicates the brilliance of the fielding team. Rather, it is evidence of the mental disintegration of the batsmen. England had three run-outs in their capitulation to New Zealand in the first one-day international at the weekend; well, I rest my case.

Owais Shah managed to run out Paul Collingwood, his captain, so with terrible inevitability, Shah had to be run out as well. Graeme Swann completed the rout.

It brings me back to the sun-kissed days of the Tewin Irregulars and a match when we needed maybe ten runs in half a dozen overs with four wickets in hand. A stroll, eh? Our captain guided the tail through the crisis as only he could: he ran out all four of his partners in the space of a single over.

Capello gets ready to play Waugh games

Show no weakness! That’s the management style of Fabio Capello, England’s new fotbal manager, as he tries to make a bunch of Englishmen play possession-based football when everybody knows that after the third pass you’re supposed to hoof the ball in the general direction of a big bloke up front. (The sophisticated version of this ploy is a ball over the top to a quick bloke.) Capello has much in common with Steve Waugh, the great former Australia cricket captain. Waugh’s basic strategy was to take a lack of weakness and brandish it in the face of his opponents. No nightwatchmen, his batsmen were men enough to go out and bat, no matter what the circumstances. No farming the strike, his bowlers were cricketers enough to hold up an end against any bowlers. No fielding substitutions – his bowlers could pee at tea-time. No runners – his boys could bat through the pain.

This flamboyant, in-your-face hardness was a deliberate tactic. It is the personal style of the Italian, which means that he wants his team to reflect it.

The only difference between the two sides is that Waugh had in his team some of the greatest performers ever to play the game.