Hold The Back Page

A look at the world of sport

Jumping ship may rock the boat

GOT TO thinking about Ed Joyce, who is eager to come back and resume his international cricketing career for Ireland five years after he declared for England. Obviously, the Irish team would wish to have him for their 2011 World Cup campaign – if the rules allow.

One of the island’s most gifted cricketers, Joyce qualified for England on the residency rule but has since dropped down the pecking order.

While the Dubliner played for England in the 2007 World Cup (the one in which Ireland sent Pakistan home), under ICC rules he can switch allegiance back to Ireland but not before April 2011.

The problem is that the World Cup begins in February 2011. Joyce played 50 times for Ireland between 1997 and 2005, comes from Bray in Co Wicklow and is nothing other than entirely Irish.

The move brings up various issues of identity and allegiance and the question of a population rowing in behind a team in which the players switch their international colours according to the imperatives of their own careers.

If Joyce plays for Ireland there will be another Irish player falling out the bottom of the Irish World Cup squad. It’s unfair, but fairness has long disappeared from sport.

It seemed unfair to ask Ospreys rugby team to play three matches in six days this season but that is what happened.

Fairness doesn’t appear to enter the minds of wealthy Middle Eastern countries that buy the services of East African runners so they can accumulate Olympic medals, while fairness eluded Katie Taylor, who was barely recognised until after her second World Championship win because of a media gender bias in Ireland.

Joyce ostensibly went to England because it is a Test nation and one of the controlling influences in world cricket.

He went to test his ability against the finest cricketers in the world, to stretch himself, to see if his game could stand up alongside household names. He hasn’t let himself down in that respect. In fact he has generated pride in his success.

But it could be argued that his wish to move back to play for Ireland imperils the credibility of any sense of fealty or nationality. The move revives ideas of lack of attachment and loyalty indifference.

Joyce currently plays county cricket for Sussex and last year signed a three-year deal, which will keep him at Hove until 2012. He has played in 17 one-day internationals for England and once hit 107 at Sydney in an English win over Australia. In an Irish context, he’s a breathtaking player.

But it’s not about the flag any more. Not in cricket. Not in soccer. Not in athletics.

Being part of something attractive and successful, even for a short time, seems irresistible and it works because success is now valued over almost everything else. People will invest emotion and energy in a team if they believe that team is going to win.

Perhaps Ireland should do more than simply welcome back players like Joyce and others such as 20/20 World Cup winner Eoin Morgan, when his fruitful career of playing the world comes towards an end.

Even before going to England the Irish Cricket Union should try to tie them into coming back so that 31-year-olds like Joyce will have some good years to offer the country that nurtured him.

In a world where allegiances are generally perishing on the rocks of personal goals and individual careers it seems prudent to acquire a great player at the fag end of a career rather than never at all.

Don't look beyond the big four

“DON’T BET on anyone except Italy, Germany, Brazil or Argentina,” warned a friend this week regarding the Fifa World Cup.

“They are the only teams that ever win the World Cup except when the hosts win it and South Africa is not in the running,” he added.

Such clear and simple advice seemed too good to be true. But looking over all of the World Cups since the first one in Uruguay in 1930, the theory is largely correct.

Apart from the 1950 tournament, won by Uruguay in Brazil, one of those four teams or the host nation has won the event.

Uruguay won the first championship as hosts and four years later Italy followed by picking up the 1934 trophy, also as hosts. Uruguay decided they would not defend their title that year.

The Italians won the 1938 edition in France before Uruguay won it for a second time when it was held in Brazil in 1950.

From that point on the theory of the four teams or the host nation holds for every single World Cup tournament.

In 1954 the then West Germany won the competition and were followed in 1958 by a Brazil team in which a 17-year-old prodigy called Pele featured.

Brazil won again in 1962 in the Chile tournament with England famously claiming a host country win the next time when Alf Ramsey’s side lifted the cup at Wembley in 1966.

In 1970 Brazil won again and were followed by West Germany on home turf in 1974, followed in sequence by Argentina, Italy, Argentina, Germany, Brazil, and France – as the host nation – in 1998.

Brazil won again in the Korea/Japan edition in 2002 and Italy triumphed last time out when they defeated France on penalties in the Berlin final.

That makes 18 World Cups with five won by Brazil, four going to Italy, three to the Germans, two to Argentina, two to Uruguay and one each to England and France.

Apart from Uruguay in Brazil in 1950, only the host country, Brazil, Italy, Argentina or a German team has won the famous trophy.

Facing the music easier than facing the press

WHAT HAS gotten into tennis players? It used to be the case that when Andrei Agassi, Marat Safin or Goran Ivanisevic lost a match in the first week of a Grand Slam they would jump into their courtesy cars and spin off to their sponsored hotel and fly away to the next event – Goran to Split, Agassi to Las Vegas and Safin to wherever there was a large yacht with topless women.

This would be carried out without doing the often despised post-match press conference. On reflection, it’s understandable why those players regularly skipped the interrogations. Their successors just go along with it.

Typical question: “Marat you’re two sets and a service break down in the third set. You’re losing 5-4. You’ve been watching that teenager hit off both wings all day. You’ve lost your rhythm, looking a bit lumpy off the cross-court backhand and you’ve just missed three inside out forehands. You didn’t have good tournaments coming here . . . Indianapolis, Roehampton . . . The French. You’re serving to stay in this competition. The wind is blowing. You’re holding the ball in the air, right there in your hand. At that moment . . . what’s going through your mind?

Safin: Could you repeat the question pleez.

Press reaction: Collective groan.

Question repeated: What were you thinking on the last point?

Safin: The next flight to Moscow. Six o’clock I think.

You might then start asking why any of the players turn up at all. Why don’t they all just pack their bags and head for the players’ exit tunnels, crafty walkways around the stadium that spare them the public gaze.

Typical question: Andre do you shave your chest?

Agassi: None of your goddamn business. Next question.

First questioner’s colleague, also from The Sun: If you do shave your chest Andre, would it be a wet shave with water and shaving foam or do you plug in and do it with an electrical shaver?

Agassi: You guys just pis . . . Are we done yet?

In tennis all the players involved in a Grand Slam like Roland Garros (finals today and tomorrow) and Wimbledon (two weeks’ time) must do “press” after each match or else they are fined $10,000, ostensibly for breach of contract. In the old days Agassi, Ivanisevic and Safin used to take the hit and disappear in a fury.

Sure what’s 10 grand?

FINAL STRAW

Sympathy in short supply

DISTASTEFUL QUOTES, well they’re the business, aren’t they?

Belfast comic Frank “It’s the way I tell ’em” Carson said: “Someone threw a petrol bomb at Alex Higgins once and he drank it.”

Cricketers Ian Botham and Rod Marsh were at another level all together. Marsh’s welcome to England legend Botham as he came into bat was: “How’s your wife and my kids?”

Botham replied: “The wife’s fine. The kids are retarded.”

Richard Krajicek, the 1996 Wimbledon champion, once gave his views on why there should not be equal pay. “Eighty per cent of the top 100 women are fat pigs who don’t deserve equal pay.”

Later, the charming Dutchman clarified his comments. “What I meant to say was that only 75 per cent are fat pigs.”

Boxing promoters often come into their own and none other than Top Rank’s Bob Arum (right), who was the latest American promoter to hitch his wagon to that of the troubled boxer, Edwin Valero.

The troubled former WBC lightweight champion took his own life in a Venezuelan jail in April, barely a day after he confessed to having murdered his 20-year-old wife Jennifer Viera. Arum sweetly pronounced Valero’s suicide “the first rational thing he ever did”.

Shouting the odds over free-to-air

THERE WAS an interesting cameo in the Houses of the Oireachtas this week when the IRFU were explaining to a Joint Committee why Minister for Communications Eamonn Ryan’s proposals to make rugby matches free-to-air would put the sport out of business.

A shouting match broke out between Fine Gael’s Jerry Buttimer (right) and Fianna Fáil’s Senator Paschal Mooney. As both screamed across Room 4 at each other the IRFU contingent looked on in total bemusement.

Why? It was all because IRFU CEO Philip Browne had been criticised for unbecoming behaviour at a recent press conference on the subject held in the Shelbourne Hotel.

Browne had reached maybe three on the emotional scale – mildly ruffled – while his normal setting is just above one. The honourable deputies easily reached seven or eight.

“You’re playing the man not the ball,” cried Buttimer accusingly, ably goaded on by the smiling, honourable colleagues.