ENGLAND OVER-EXPECTS

Hold the front page! There was no picture of Andy Murray on the front page of The Guardian today. Not since Monday has the gangly, scowling, air-fisting Scottish youth with the devoted mum, the modest tennis-playing ability and a curious fixation on his own (very average) bicep, been off the supposedly intelligent paper’s cover.

You might reasonably wonder if anyone else has been playing in the annual fortnight of overpriced and flavourless strawberries and sport that is Wimbledon. Indeed, there have been photographs of and reports about other players. But the word ‘disproportionate’ does rather spring to mind. I counted the pictures of male competitors printed in the paper from the first day, Monday of last week (yes, you’re right, I do have more important things to do, but there are many forms of displacement activity and this happens to be the one I chose today). Including today’s edition, The Guardian has carried 88 shots of male tennis players who were in the draw on Day One. Of those 88 pictures, 27 (including a totally gratuitous one today) have been of Murray, nearly a third. There were 128 players in the Men’s Singles draw and Murray was seeded twelfth. Roger Federer, the top seed and expected to win his sixth title in succession on Sunday, has been depicted in 14 photographs, just over half as many as Murray; Rafael Nadal, the second seed who defeated Murray easily in the quarter finals, has appeared 11 times as an image.

What’s more, Murray has appeared four times on the front page of the paper’s sports section and four times on the front of the main body of the paper. All other male players combined have appeared four times on sports front and just three times on the cover of the paper proper. Even Jamie Murray, Andy’s elder brother and a doubles specialist, has had his face in the paper six times, including once on sports front, and I’m not counting his picture on the column he ‘writes’ for the sports section (I put ‘writes’ in quotes because such columns are frequently ghost-written by an office hack and published over the name of an agreeable ‘celeb’ who likes getting paid for doing nothing). Oh, and there were two pictures of Chris Eaton. Remember him? You probably don’t; he was a very lowly – but British – competitor who survived to the second round as, by definition, did half of all the entrants.

It is a nakedly jingoistic impulse that drives this coverage. Tickets were changing hands for Murray and Nadal’s Centre Court match for £2,000, not because the buyers had suddenly discovered that they were fans of tennis but because they wanted to see a British victory. Had they known anything about tennis, they would have known that the hope was vain. But the press encourages this stupid jingoism, not just with its pictorial bias but also with the kind of stories it chooses to run. “Murray: I’m fit enough to win Wimbledon” was the headline on a sports front story this Monday. No he isn’t. Nadal is far fitter and has a far more mature game, though he’s barely any older than Murray. The Scot, like the Tinman whom he succeeds as Britain’s Vain Hope at Wimbledon, is an also-ran and – face it – he always will be.

Later this year, one of the most jingoistic of the world’s sports events takes place in Ireland, the biennial Ryder Cup, in which a European and an American team compete in match-play golf. A few tournaments ago, on the most recent occasion that the Americans won, there were disgraceful scenes when the winners began celebrating before the last European player had holed out at the 18th, thereby certainly influencing the putt. All nations are jingoistic about sport but none more than the States, where there is no television audience for any sporting event that holds no immediate prospect of an American victory. (Men’s tennis is in historic decline in the USA and so there will have been few takers there for Wimbledon coverage this or any recent year).

Football bores me to tears but I suppose we should take some heart from the interest shown here in the recent Euro tournament, despite the absence of all the British nations’ teams. This speaks of a degree of genuine interest in the game for its own sake, despite the attempts of the press, notably The Guardian, to talk up some alternative nation whose fortunes British viewers might “follow”.

Meanwhile, the closed season transfer market has been characterised as ever by footballers being bought and sold for eye-watering sums by the wealthiest clubs across Europe, regardless of their own national origins. Two or three years back, Arsenal played against a Spanish side in a cup match, where there were only two British players on the pitch and neither was playing for Arsenal. In what sense, then, is Arsenal an English football team? It and its vast new stadium are owned by arabs, its long-serving manager is French and its playing strength speaks in dozens of different languages. What kind of idiot gets ‘patriotic’ about this team’s results? There is barely a team in the premier league of English football that is owned by anybody or any organisation that is British. Liverpool FC no more represents Merseyside than does Paris Hilton. It just spends more time in the area than she does.

From time immemorial, the fan has equated a team’s or a sportsperson’s talent and prospects with its/their nationality, even while – here in Britain, at least – we ruefully subscribe to the notion that we are “good losers”. I’m not very interested in sport but, if I were, I hope I would value it for its beauty and grace at the highest level, irrespective of national boundaries. Nobody objective could really have wanted Andy Murray to beat Rafael Nadal. Apart from any considerations of tennis talent, the Spaniard is so much sexier.