...is rubbish, isn't it? Not that winter sport is always a thrill a minute, but summer sport is so much worse. Come summer, the sports supplement in the newspaper generally goes straight in the bin, unread, even unflicked. There's a blatant gap in the sporting year while the football season's closed down, stuffed half-full with dull sports that few people below upper-middle-class even care about. This gap is important in even-numbered years in order to accommodate the spectacle of the World Cup or the Summer Olympics, perhaps even the Commonwealth Games or the European Football championships. However, in odd-numbered years such as this one, the summer sporting drought is no mirage.
I've already slagged off cricket (here) so I won't do that again (tempting though it is, useless bloody sport). Then there's tennis, although that's merely a brief distraction while Tim Henman gets to displace EastEnders in the TV schedules for a week and a bit. There's athletics, but that's a mere 9.78 seconds of excitement stretched out to extreme lengths. There's golf, but I couldn't possibly beat Mark Twain's description of that as "a good walk spoiled". There's cycling, but most people prefer to tour France more sedately and wearing more flattering clothing. There's the odd Grand Prix, but they're just a lot of very fast cars in a long queue failing to overtake one another. There's rugby league, but it's unnatural to play rugby in the summer without mud to smear your tackle. And there's the football transfer season, whose bottomless expense is no doubt the reason so many clubs launch their new overpriced replica kits every July. Roll on the autumn... but maybe not just yet, OK?
Summer sport...
