Sports review of the year: From Murray to Mayweather and kneeling to Neymar
The real heroes of the year were not necessarily the highest-profile ones
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Your support makes all the difference.You can keep your Roger Federers and Serena Williamses, your Cristiano Ronaldos and Mo Farahs, your Real Madrids, your All Blacks and your Golden State Warriors. The real sporting heroes of 2017, for my money, were Carew Cricket Club, who despite being the reigning Pembrokeshire League Division One champions, will start next season in Division Two, for reasons that require some explanation.
In August, Carew went into their deciding fixture against rivals Cresselly knowing that they would win the title even if they lost, as long as they prevented Cresselly from gaining any bonus points. And so they declared their innings closed after just 2.3 overs, with just 18 runs on the board: ensuring defeat, but clinching the title in the process.
The uproar was instant. Carew’s heinous act of skulduggery made headlines as far away as Australia. It was variously seen as unsporting, disgraceful or that perennial favourite: “not cricket”. Faced with a global media tornado, the disciplinary committee of Pembroke County Cricket Club - which one imagines consists of little more than three middle-aged blokes and a plate of Welsh cakes - decided to relegate Carew to Division Two, ban their captain and fine them £300.
So what was so heroic about it all? Simply put, it affirmed what for many people is the pure essence of sport: that whatever the level, however small the stakes, it is something worth fighting for. Carew may have gone the wrong way about it, but there was something really rather charming in the moral depths to which a group of blokes were prepared to stoop to secure a tiny, little-known Welsh cricket trophy. Somehow, the longer you think about l’affaire Carew, the more the rest of the sporting firmament seems to make sense.
Happily, this was a year in which our men and women of sport seemed content to win by more conventional means. As Britain’s golden sporting decade nears its end, the accolades and silverware continued to roll in. Lewis Hamilton tightened his iron grip on Formula One. Chris Froome added the Vuelta a Espana to his now customary Tour de France crown, even if a dubious blood sample threatens to detonate his career sky-high. England’s female cricketers won the World Cup; England’s youth footballers swept the board at under-17, under-19 and under-20 level. Anthony Joshua unified the world heavyweight boxing titles against Wladimir Klitschko in one of the greatest brawls ever seen at Wembley Stadium. England sealed their place at next summer's World Cup in Russia after one of the least exciting qualification campaigns every seen at Wembley Stadium.
Against this, there were naturally a few disappointments. Eddie Jones’s irrepressible England rugby union side won 10 of their 11 internationals in the year but will still mull over the one they did not, a tempestuous, rain-soaked Grand Slam decider in Dublin. Farah’s gold and silver in the world championships in London masked a worrying broader picture in British athletics, in which nobody else won an individual medal. Andy Murray began the year as world No1 and ended it at No16, after an injury-ravaged season in which he never genuinely looked like adding to his three Grand Slam titles.
The regression of Murray and Novak Djokovic, as well as the ongoing power vacuum in the women’s game, offered a chance for new names to establish themselves in tennis. Instead, it was the old names who returned with a vengeance: Federer and Rafael Nadal spectacularly shared the four Grand Slams between them, while Serena Williams won the Australian Open to pass Steffi Graf’s record of 22 Grand Slams.
In football, too, it was a year where the game’s pre-eminent powers began to re-establish themselves. Chelsea returned to the top table under Antonio Conte, Real Madrid claimed their third Champions League crown in four seasons, and as the year draws to a close Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City already look to have the Premier League title sewn up.
By the time January is out, of course, all this might have changed. Such is football’s furious pace and churn that the world transfer record is more than double what it was a year ago, Paul Pogba surpassed by Ousmane Dembele, Kylian Mbappe and most audaciously of all Neymar. This time last year, Claudio Ranieri was still in charge of the champions Leicester. Now, not only Ranieri but his successor have been and gone.
Even to recount events from earlier this year feels like delving into a dog-eared history book. One of the all-time great FA Cup competitions culminated in Arsenal denying Chelsea the double, non-league Lincoln City biffing their way into the quarter-finals and Sutton United’s corpulent goalkeeper Wayne Shaw eating a pie on live television. If Carew’s early declaration was the ultimate act of gamesmanship, then in a way Shaw was its absolute antithesis: the point at which football became a canvas, less a game of victory and defeat and more a vessel for fleeting internet renown.
There was wonder to be found, too, of course, and occasionally in the least likely places. Barcelona’s 6-1 defeat of Paris Saint-Germain was one of the great sporting comebacks of the year. Almost two decades after his first tilt, the much-loved Sergio Garcia finally clinched a major golf title, slipping on the Masters green jacket after a sun-drenched play-off at Augusta. The verve of Tonga, the skill of Fiji and the passion of Papua New Guinea elevated the rugby league World Cup into a classic tournament. And in the other code, a superb Lions series in New Zealand ended in that most perfect of outcomes: a draw, and the bewilderment of two teams who had no idea whether there would be extra time or not.
The great thing about sport is that it can be both literal and allegorical, concrete or abstract, depending on your preference. For some, it’s about the struggle. For some, it’s about the numbers, the lines on graphs, the fine print. For others, it’s about the colour and the fervour, the tribal passions and the naked emotions. Whatever you fancy.
Occasionally, though, it can stand for something more than all of these. It was only a matter of time before American sport became co-opted into the country’s Trump-era culture wars, but even so few could have predicted how vividly and suddenly it would happen. A simple throwaway comment by President Trump, declaring that NFL players protesting during the national anthem should be thrown out of their team, catalysed an extraordinary resistance movement that encompassed players, coaches and owners, of all races, across a wide range of sports.
There is a reason the sporting arena is such a powerful place to make your statement. In a way, they are our secular cathedrals, places where we all come together. Qatar knows this, which is why it is fighting so hard to launder its reputation ahead of the 2022 World Cup. The Royal and Ancient knew this, which is why it prevented Muirfield from rejoining the Open Championship rota until it had moved into the 19th century by allowing women to join as members.
And Juan Mata knows it too, which is why his Common Goal initiative, in which footballers pay a portion of their earnings to fund development projects around the world, is such a quietly impressive act. Mata, unlike so many of his peers, realises that there is little point in having a podium unless you have something to say from it.
But perhaps the biggest sporting event of the year really had very little to do with sport at all. To witness the extraordinary circus surrounding Floyd Mayweather’s fight against cage fighter and professional talker Conor McGregor was to witness a seminal moment in the way sport is packaged and presented. Mayweather won - I couldn’t be bothered to look up which round - but really, that was hardly the point. It was a sporting event with all the focus on the latter rather than the former: a spectacle so confected, so ersatz, so clearly made-to-order, that it was hard to believe in it at all, even if in many ways it represents sport’s cold new reality of high stakes, endless hype and piles of cash.
Sport has never purely been about the winning. But sport without the winning is just a television game show on grass. Carew understood that. Which is why, for my money, I'd take a cynical bunch of Welsh cricketers over the world’s richest boxing fight any day of the week.
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