You Cannot Be Serious!: The 101 Most Frustrating Things in Sport. Matthew Norman
expect to reach the quarter-finals, at least, a fortnight later.
The timing of the BDO event, which starts immediately after Phil ‘The Power’ has retained the real world title on Sky Sports, is the equivalent of rescheduling Wimbledon as a warm-up for a satellite event in Cleethorpes, and adds an additional layer of poignancy that isn’t strictly required. That the work of lead commentator Tony Green perfectly reflects the quality of the darts completes a startlingly surreal picture.
Best known to students of game show theory as Jim Bowen’s Bullseye stooge (‘And Bully’s special priiiiize … a reverse lobotomy!’), this John Prescott lookalike, and alas soundalike, must be the most clueless commentator in the history of televised sport. Like the former deputy PM he so closely resembles in girth and jowls, Mr Green boldly pioneers aphasia as a mainstream lifestyle choice.
His trademarks may be boiled down to two. Whenever the director shows a cutaway shot of a palpably bored crowd sullenly watching the apology for top-flight darts on a giant screen (and isn’t that the special appeal of a live event? It’s so qualitatively different from watching at home) he will respond with an elon-gated ‘Yeeeeeessssss, there they are!’ Technically, it’s hard to pick a fight with that. There is invariably where they were. On other levels … well, it’s not Richie Benaud, is it?
The other signature dish is to respond to a cosmically witless pre-prepared pun from co-commentator David Croft with the wheezy breath of an obese hyena dying from emphysema. This death rattle is then followed by ‘Dear, dear … oh dear,’ to suggest a psycho-geriatric-ward fugitive reacting with a mixture of delight and shame to a bladder accident induced by unquenchable mirth at Arthur Askey affecting, on the London Palladium stage in 1957, to be a busy, busy bee.
How Mr Green has been retained by the BBC for so long, in defiance of the verbal facility of the inter-stroke victim, is less mysterious than it seems. The BDO is effectively the property of a cabal – a couple of veteran players, chairman Olly Croft, master of ceremonies Martin Fitzmaurice (the sea monster who screams ‘Are you ready? Let’s. Play. Darts’), cackling sub-Kray blingmaster Bobby George, and Mr Green himself.
Between them, this bunch have transformed the BDO into a hybrid of kitschily ironic entertainment, aversion therapy for those terrified of becoming hooked on televised darts, and crèche for those who might one day grow up to join the PDC.
Mr Green himself refuses to acknowledge the existence of the rival organisation, which unusually for him makes some sense. The immortal Sid Waddell, his one-time BBC colleague, is of course the PDC’s main commentator, and even Mr Green can see the danger of drawing attention to the contrast. Even when the BDO version was won by a disabled man unable to extend his arm fully when throwing, the Australian haemophiliac Tony David in 2001, Mr Green’s confidence in its supremacy remained unshaken.
‘Yeeeessssss,’ is how he greeted the winning double that day, ‘it’s Tony Davis!’ After two weeks of the tournament and two hours of final action, how cruel to come within a single space on the middle line of the Qwerty keyboard of calling the new champion’s name right. For once, Mr Green had stumbled on a certain eloquence. Albeit unwittingly, and with unwonted succinctness, he had told his audience all it needed to know, if only about himself, in a syllable.
93
Frank Warren
How a man of such exquisite sensitivity has survived and made money in the rough and Runyonesque world of boxing is one of the miracles of the age. Mr Warren’s vulnerability to criticism does him nothing but credit. Where others become hardened by long careers in the big-fight game, he has been softened remarkably.
Other than offering sincere admiration, what can you say about the adorably florid-faced boxing promoter and gunshot survivor? Not a dickie bird. While Frank lives up to his own belief that when people have an opinion, ‘they are entitled to express it’ – for example, he repeatedly expressed his opinion of me (‘moron’, for example) in his News of the World column – experience teaches that this passion for freedom of speech is a one-way street. Even the most affectionate of teasing will provoke from Frank the threat of an action for libel. In fact, he’ll more than likely sue over this.
‘If it pleases your lordship, my client Mr Frank Warren, a man of the most blameless character, a pillar of his local community, a tireless worker for many deserving charities, is profoundly distressed by the implication that he may tend toward the mildly litigious, and seeks substantial damages for the injury to his feelings and reputation …’ Somewhere in such an action we might sniff out the stirrings of a defence, should it come to that. And it’s even money that it will.
92
Graeme Souness
Even in the legalised GBH halcyon era of the 1970s and early eighties, English football knew no more vicious a would-be maimer than Graeme Souness. With the thick moustache and bubble perm regarded as mandatory at Liverpool at the time, he may have joined team-mate Mark Lawrenson (see no. 14) as a prototype for the Village People’s construction worker. But had you found yourself sharing a YMCA dormitory or navy bunk with Souness, you’d soon enough have swapped the warmth for a street doorway or Davy Jones’s locker, for fear of being on the wrong end of a studs-up leg-breaker in the middle of the night.
No one ever took such unsmiling satisfaction from endangering careers. His most infamous assault, late in his career for Glasgow Rangers against Steaua Bucharest, crystallised the purity of his malevolence. About the raising and spiteful stamping of his right boot onto the thigh of one Dmitri Rotario there was nothing unusual. What was so refreshingly novel was that Souness, whose reaction to this arrestable offence was to clutch his own leg in mock agony, was in possession of the ball at the time.
The best to be said of Souness’s commitment to violence is that it never lacked integrity. Just as with Roy Keane, who is excused an entry thanks to the accurate character reading he offered Mick McCarthy (see no. 31), he was too magnificent a player to need the brutality. There was no design or purpose to it whatever. This was the Edmund Hillary of football hatchet men: he sought to rupture cruciate ligaments because they were there.
Souness went on to earn his berth on Sky Sports, where despite the hot competition he shines out as a beacon of charisma-free witlessness, in the traditional manner. Only having repeatedly proved his uselessness as a manager, with Liverpool, Blackburn Rovers and Newcastle among others, was he deemed fit to point out their inadequacies to coaches in current employment.
Despite the rich catalogue of failures, his self-confidence remains as strident as it is misplaced. A few years ago I came across him in a bar during one of Tottenham’s then perpetual managerial crises, and asked if he fancied himself the guy to turn Spurs around. ‘Son,’ he said, leaning magisterially back on his stool, ‘the club I couldnae turn round has yet to be built.’
Inexplicably, this remains a judgement shared by no one else. Indeed, in a nice instance of life imitating art imitating life, Souness has come to emulate Yosser Hughes, with whom he famously appeared in a Boys From the Black Stuff cameo (excellent he was, too). Time and time again he has invited chairmen to ‘Gizza job,’ and been answered with a sarcastic chuckle. Although not, one suspects, to his face.
91
Kriss Akabusi
It pays testament to his enduring genius to irritate that even today, years after last setting eyes and (worse) ears on the man, it remains impossible to do the late-night channel-flick of the insomniac philistine without a frisson of terror that Kriss Akabusi might crop up in an ancient repeat of A Question of Sport.
As a useful 400-metre runner over hurdles and on the flat, specialising in stirring last legs of the relay, Akabusi seemed a harmless enough soul. Yet even then the exaggerated can-do enthusiasm of his post-race interviews – for all that they often came moments after he had proved that he couldn’t do, and indeed hadn’t done – hinted at the horrors to come.
Television executives evidently noticed them, and concluded that what the viewing public needed in the deep recession of the early 1990s was the human equivalent of one of those executive toys which, at the