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Introduction

I love sport. I love it with a passion so obsessive that it strikes me as indistinguishable from mental illness, as my wife would be gracious enough to confirm. In May 1991, three days into the commencement of our courtship, she awoke at 6.30 a.m. to hear me announce that I was leaving the flat to tie a shoelace on the northbound Northern Line platform at Embankment underground station. Spurs were playing Nottingham Forest in that afternoon’s FA Cup final, I explained as her absolute indifference gave way to mild alarm, and because such a shoelace-tying had prefaced our victory over Manchester City in the replayed Cup final of 1981, it had to be done again. She didn’t say anything.

Nor was she capable of speech four months later when, a week into our honeymoon, I checked us out of a quaint Shaker inn in rural Massachusetts and into a filthy, cockroach-infested motel room, on the grounds that the former had no cable TV and the latter did, allowing us (me) to watch the peerlessly melodramatic dénouement to that year’s Ryder Cup.

Almost two decades later, the deranged love for sport remains unabated by the ravages of middle age. I can, and do, spend untold unbroken hours not only watching sport – any sport, other perhaps than dressage, rowing and ten-pin bowling – on television, but also taking comfort from studying cricket averages, the sequence of winners in golfing majors, and the results from the early rounds of 1970s tennis Grand Slam events. When I confess that one of my more thrilling experiences in recent years was chancing upon a website that included the scores from the qualifying competitions for World Snooker Championships, which I duly attempted to memorise, you may understand why I have come to know the condition as spautism. I regard myself as a little less far along the spectrum than those who have not missed an away fixture played by their football team in forty years, or have visited all ninety-two league grounds; but not by much, and more thanks to indolence than anything else.

Hand in hand with any all-consuming, sanity-threatening love, there inevitably travels a portion of its opposite. I resent sport as a whole for its imperious hold over me, as the stalker perhaps does the stalkee, or a heroin addict the weakness of which the drug use is manifestation rather than cause. And I resent those involved in playing, describing and administering it, both as agents of that time-sucking dominion, and in many cases for themselves.

The frustrations, distastes, rages and loathings acquired over forty years have made the writing of this book a painful task. How does one whittle down so many thousands of irritants, dullards, hypocrites, narcissists and plain horrors to a mere 101? On what possible grounds can no space be found for Cristiano Ronaldo or Vinnie Jones, Iron Mike Tyson or Sam Allardyce? What brand of imbecile would put his name to a list devoid of such titans of administrative cluelessness as cricket’s Giles Clark, or Sir Dave Richards, who somehow vaults the towering conflictof-interest hurdle to remain a power at both the Football Association and the Premier League? Whence the sheer gall to include Colin Montgomerie, yet not Nick Faldo? How in the name of all the saints did Chas and Dave avoid an appearance for ‘Snooker Loopy’?

You will each have your own fierce criticisms, as much for the inclusion of those you admire (Peter Alliss’s popularity with many sound judges must, however bemusing, be acknowledged) as for the omissions of those you detest. The ranking of the 101 will also inevitably displease.

In my defence, it is among sport’s sovereign duties to provoke every emotion, and rage at the incompetence, arrogance and indeed pretension of armchair know-all writers like myself (see also Simon Barnes, no. 98) is undeniably one of those. If you believe you could do it better, you are almost certainly right. All I can say is that every word of what follows comes from the heart – not from one of that organ’s more gentle or engaging ventrical chambers, perhaps, but from the heart nonetheless.

Matthew Norman

September 2010