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My mother, a Quaker Maoist, wanted to ban football. It was the Seventies and hooliganism was a thing, and mum, who was Left-wing in a north London-y kind of way, didn’t think much of unruly working class people.
As with her view of nuclear weapons – “get rid of ours and ask the Russians to do the same later” – or of universal wearing of uniforms – “just issue them and people would stop going to clothes shops” – she was not sweating the details, but she did have a firm view that men caught in possession of round balls should be dealt with abruptly.
Dear mum – so much of her worldview seemed to me, even as a youngster, to be barmy, but the football thing? Maybe she was on to something. This Friday sees the start of a real sports tournament, the Rugby World Cup, during which time I will once again ask myself whether mother, after all, knows best: in fact we should all embrace our salvation from soccer.
The World Cup, played over the next month or so in Japan, will be watched by fans from Tonga to Kenya, Russia to New Zealand; even the USA, where it’s become a big deal in universities. And, of course, in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, both north and south.
If football really is our “national game” we are, as a group of nations, pretty bad at it. It certainly doesn’t bring us joy. Sometimes when I listen to Garry or Rob, droning on during The Today Programme sports news about some ghastly score draw in the Scottish League (the only news line being that someone chucked a coin at the goalie), I wonder whether the sporting powers that be properly understand the truth: that the game really binding us together as a nation is not football but rugby union.
Every corner of the UK is good at it. The Scots are unlikely to win the World Cup but they have a fantastic team who will last the course with the world’s best – and they are the weakest of the Home Nations. The Irish (including several players from Northern Ireland) could win, as might either Wales or England. Indeed Ireland, England and Wales are all in the top five world rankings.
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SubscribeThank you, Tom, for this helpful exposition. There is an inevitable tendency for people to look for simple answers to complex questions, not helped by our media being dominated by Arts graduates.
Thanks for this work and the others ones you posted. I may say you plainly deserve to be called a science writer. Any hunch of why you are so fiew ? incompatibility with journalism ?
Nicely argued apart from the conclusion that comparisons are too complex to be of much value. On the contrary, it’s comparisons that highlight critical factors for the further investigation that’s key to progress. For example, France has less collateral health care damage and care home morbidity than UK. Why? Is it because France separated Covid19 from other hospital treatments and isolated their care homes better (which they did) or are there other reasons?
The real issue is that R is not a precisely calculated fact, but is more like an educated guess based on imperfect measurements fed into imperfect calculations, which are then blobbed together in a manner which is not free from bias – in many ways it is like the educated guess that gives us global temperature graphs that prop up global warming theory, which are also then presented as fact.
Covd-19 seems to be a case where Simpson’s Paradox may not be the explanation for counter-intuitive results. Assuming 21 days from infection to death (in cases where death is the outcome), peak infection occurred a few days before the lockdown (as observed by Professor Heneghan). The period of steepest decline then came over the next 10 days or so, prior to the earliest point at which the lockdown could have taken effect. From the peak to this “lockdown point” Rt must have been negative (else the numbers infected would at least have been flat. From the lockdown point to mid April. the rate of decline flattened (and the trend line has an r-squared of pretty much nothing). Now this could be a result of the lagged sub-epidemic in care homes, but if so the flattening out of the fall in Rt would not be an instance of R in care homes also falling. It would just be the effect of adding the two populations together, with their different phases giving the overall distribution a secondary peak (or hump). The failure of lockdown as a policy is two-fold, in failing to prevent the second peak and being irrelevant to the decline that followed the first peak.