2010 sports review of the year
Jan 1 2011 by Luke Edwards, The Journal
The World Cup in South Africa was a massive disappointment, but there has been plenty to celebrate either side of another footballing anti-climax. Luke Edwards looks back on 2010.
THERE was another funeral for the England football team in South Africa, but England’s cricketers have gone from Ashes to Ashes and ground Australia into dust.
From boxing to golf, from athletics to cycling, it has been another encouraging year for sport on this small, over-crowded island, but there is no doubt the highlight of 2010 came at its end.
England’s impressive Ashes series has ended more than two decades of Australian dominance. A formerly formidable opponent has been made to look distinctly ordinary in front of their own supporters, in their own backyard.
They have felt the sharp end of an English sword through the heart of their sporting psyche in Melbourne this week. Australia did not just lose the Fourth Test which ensures England retain the Ashes for the first time in 24 years, they were thrashed. They have been toyed with, dismantled and crushed. It has been a magnificent sight for those who suffered for so long at the feet of our bully boy cousins.
This Australian side is not a patch on the great ones which walked tall over world cricket for the best part of 20 years, but there are those of us who feel this group of England players might turn into something special.
There was a time when the England cricket team was cannon fodder for lazy stand up comedians, but they end 2010 as a symbol of national sporting pride. Progress has been steady since the late nineties, but this is something more.
Should England avoid defeat in the Fifth and final Test in Sydney next week, they will have won three out of the last four Ashes series against a side which, until recently, had been ranked number one in the world for more than a decade.
For once we are starting to show we did not only invent the rules of the games we gave to the world, we can actually be rather good at them as well. Not only have the Ashes been retained, but England also won the World Twenty20 Cup under Durham’s Paul Collingwood back in May and their next target should be a desire to secure that number one Test ranking India and South Africa are currently tussling for.
England’s cricketers went to Australia confident they could make up for past failures, England’s footballers did the same in South Africa in the summer and failed in unimpressive style.
Once again billed as potential winners – as they have been at every World Cup since our sole triumph in 1966 – England were woeful in virtually every game and did not even manage to top a group containing the USA, Algeria and Slovenia.
The quality of their football was poor, their big name players, with the exception of Ashley Cole and Steven Gerrard, were woeful and the campaign ended in the second round with a 4-1 thrashing at the hands of the team we all love to hate, Germany.
In truth, the entire tournament was a let-down. The standard of football was poor, there were too many boring games and a fascination with negative tactics.
Even Spain, the worthy winners, were not an attacking side. Once they scored, they played possession football, often in their own half, and rarely played with the swagger the quality of their players warranted.
It is becoming increasingly tiresome following our national football team, the hype and the hyperbole, the bold statements and misguided arrogance. We expect to win every major tournament we enter without ever having done much to back it up.
A solitary World Cup success is not the stuff of greatness and there is nothing to suggest going into 2011 that anything has changed for the better. English football needs an urgent dose of realism, not fantasies based on the fact a Premier League crammed full of imported talent is the best league competition in the world.
There is no place for frauds in the boxing ring, and thankfully Britain’s reputation here has soared thanks to the efforts of world heavyweight champion David Haye, who has defended his title twice in the last 12 months, and Amir Khan who won the fight of the year against Marcos Maidana in December.
Two world champions worthy of that title and, with the likes Nathan Cleverly and James DeGale likely to win world titles in 2011, the future looks bright.
In athletics, the rise of Jessica Ennis gained momentum in the heptathlon when she added the European title in Barcelona to the world title she won in Berlin last year, while the Commonwealth Games in Delhi were a pleasant surprise. But it was a 5,000 and 10,000m double for Mo Farah at the same championships that got the pulses racing. The Olympics in London are just 18 months away, although Britain did claim one Olympic gold this year, Amy Williams, in the skeleton bobsleigh in Vancouver.
After three years of claiming the squad was in a rebuilding process, England’s rugby team has finally started to show signs of progress, beating Australia home and away, although the defeats to New Zealand and South Africa in the autumn show there is plenty of work still to be done ahead of the World Cup. A victory in the Six Nations would be a start.
Andy Murray’s misfortune at sharing tennis’ top table with two of the game’s all time greats, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, continued, although the Scot did put up a strong show at Wimbledon before exiting in the semi-final to Nadal. Former Northumbria University student Victoria Pendleton continued to dominant women’s cycling and Mark Cavendish underlined his status as the world’s best sprinter with five more stage victories in the Tour de France, taking his career tally to 15.
There was less to cheer on four wheels. After providing two world Formula One champions in as many years, Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton could not repeat the feat as teammates at McLaren.
Yet, perhaps the most thrilling win of the season came in Wales, as the European Ryder Cup team edged out the Americans at Celtic Manor, Graeme McDowell holding his nerve to sink the winning putt in the last singles tie of the match.
There was more good news for golf with Lee Westwood finishing the year as world number one after Tiger Woods belatedly lost his grip on that title.
