Back's abuse an affront to great game

Ian Wooldridge

Last updated at 00:00 14 November 2001

Aussie rules aren't OK in my book

SOME YEARS ago, before Carlton played Richmond in an Australian Rules Football Grand Final in front of 107,000 spectators at Melbourne Cricket Ground, I was privileged to be invited to sit in at the pre-match briefing in one of the locker rooms.

'Briefing'? I have rarely been more shocked. The room was blue with obscenities. Exultations took the form of screamed accusations of cowardice in previous matches.

The multi-decibel rant lasted fully 10 minutes as the players sat there and took it, eyes focused on their toe caps, each praying he would not be singled out for personal character assassination.

It was a hell of an insight into Australian sports motivation. I remember thinking that had fighter pilots been 'briefed' with such hysterical malevolence in 1940, they would have lost the Battle of Britain. They would have simply walked out and gone down to the pub.

The astonishing thing is that the coach who detonated this monstrous performance, a friend then and still, is a social pussycat. He knows which knife and fork to use and would roll over and purr if Joan Collins merely said hello to him in Annabel's. It is just that when Australian sport is involved he becomes a bellicose maniac.

Winning is everything. This, as my rugby union correspondent colleague, Peter Jackson, revealed in Sportsmail on Monday, was a strategic tactic adopted by Neil Back, England's acting captain in the absence of the injured Martin Johnson, before that terrific match against Australia at Twickenham.

All week he had been roughing them up in training. Just before the Twickers kick-off he really laid into them. 'I got stuck into them and really made them angry,' acknowledged Back. 'I attacked them, questioned their desire and made some strong observations. I was very direct and spoke to them in a way I wouldn't speak to my mother.' I sincerely hope he didn't.

England, of course, achieved a famous, fired-up victory over the world champions. Did Neil Back's locker-room roasting contribute to that success? I sincerely hope it didn't. I would like to think that the enormous honour of being selected to play for one's country is sufficient motivation but yet again I am probably hopelessly wrong.

Women, subjected to similar humiliation, would probably have sued for damages. Men don't think like that. Abuse is now the name of the game and more's the pity.

Brainless of Tottenham must not be above law

'THERE IS some vile hatred going around. There will inevitably be trouble.

This is a high-risk situation.' So what are we talking about? The fear of revenge assassinations in Kabul? More harassment for those Catholic toddlers on their way to school in Northern Ireland?

Predictions of a full-scale riot in an overcrowded prison?

No, a Premiership football match in north London.

I quote a spokesman for the National Criminal Intelligence Service who pledges a massive police presence both within and outside the stadium when Tottenham play Arsenal at White Hart Lane on Saturday.

Why? Because Sol Campbell is recovering from injury and promises to play.

This is the Mr Campbell who exercised his legal right to leave Spurs on a free transfer and join Arsenal. Naturally to those who knew the meaning of the word, this amounted to defection. A crude effigy of Mr Campbell, with a Judas placard round his neck, was strung up, Ku-Klux-Klan style, and burned.

Apart from being a wealthy and successful footballer, Mr Campbell is also black.

The vilification could not have been nastier had he been Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt rolled into one.

Spurs draw much of their patronage from some of the most well-heeled suburbs of the capital. They also attract the hate-filled, bored, indolent, ignorant, moronic, lowlife dregs of our society whose brains are so coagulated that they regard 'patriotism' as the right to torment a man who left 'their' club to join a rival.

There are laws against incitement to civil unrest and racial discrimination and if Saturday's match provokes the strife anticipated by the National Criminal Intelligence Service, we must hope they are heavily invoked.

Cooper's fighting talk is right on the money

THIS WEEK Sir Henry Cooper gave a remarkable interview to Alison Kervin in The Times. Let me acknowledge my indebtedness to her for filching just one quote.

'Half the world is starving,' said Henry, 'and modern boxers are paid millions for fighting badly. That ain't right.' He was alluding to the Pounds 10m Lennox Lewis will receive on Saturday evening for meeting Hasim Rahman in Las Vegas.

Henry Cooper has long been one of my sporting heroes.

He was a great boxer, the first to put Muhammad Ali flat on his back, but above all he was and remains a gentleman.

Financially, he suffered like so many during the Lloyds of London insurance debacle of the early 1990s.

He had to auction his Lonsdale Belts but came through his financial crisis without a public whinge.

He surveys the present boxing scene with a shrewd eye and asks how any kid could conceivably know the names of 85 world champions.

What he is saying without rancour is that when television finally realises it is hysterically promoting unadulterated rubbish to diminishing audiences, the game is dead.

Gough defection entices Tykes to resume the habitual civil war WHAT is it with these bloont-speaking Yorkshire folk? When they're not denigrating anyone who lives below Stoke- on-Trent as Southern Softies, they are quarrelling like polecats among themselves.

This is particularly so with Yorkshire County Cricket Club, whose players, to the amusement of the rest of the nation, have far more domestic feuds than the Royal Family.

Nothing is kept in-house.

Fred Trueman, Brian Close, John Hampshire, Geoffrey Boycott, all good friends of mine down the years, will shove the stiletto into an outoffavour colleague without a second thought. Ray Illingworth wasn't bad at it either.

Now Darren Gough, England's leading strike bowler, is in the firing line.

His multiple sins include moving his home south to a stockbroking belt in Buckinghamshire, appearing only twice for Yorkshire in their first County Championship triumph for 33 years, trousering a large benefit cheque and then publicly declaring that he is so fed up with the sniping he has received from his captain, colleagues, former Yorkshire players and the local Press, that he is prepared to move to another county.

Right on cue, Fred Trueman says: 'Gough no longer has a right to call himself a Yorkshireman.' It does occur to me that if I were running a rival county club considering signing this hugely talented player, I would have to question whether his value, due to international commitments that would restrict his appearances to two a season, was justified.

Feathers are flying in Yorkshire. They always do up there. I acknowledge this is intrusion into private grief but long ago this column advocated that Yorkshire should become an independent state, financing its own army, navy, air force and nuclear deterrent. This Gough Affair does nothing to diminish that suggestion.