Cat and Dog Blog

Bath Flanker Julian Salvi Set To Return To Australia

Bath’s Australian openside flanker Julian Salvi is to return to his native country to resume his career with former club CA Brumbies.

This kick to win the match, this kick and they’ll believe the dog ate my homework, this kick to make everything all right, this kick to save my life, this kick and the entire universe will be safe throughout eternity.

Place the ball carefully, like the thing of great value that it is, despite being faded, scuffed, the victim of a million kicks and never the same since the last time the dog joined in.

You don’t raise your arms, in case anybody is watching. And then you collect the ball. There will be more desperate ordeals in the future; in the meantime, the world being duly saved, it is time for fish fingers and milk jelly.

There can be very few adult males who have not saved the world in the course of their childhood, and done so with a wild kick and a damaged football. We all know how it feels; and that is why David Beckham and Jonny Wilkinson are so greatly beloved.

This week Beckham snapped his Achilles tendon. He will miss the World Cup this summer. It seems that his career as an England footballer may be over; perhaps his life as a professional footballer has ended.

This same week Wilkinson was dropped as fly half for the England rugby union team. This was partly because of his inaccurate place-kicking. It’s like sacking the Queen for foul and abusive language.

Wilkinson goes to the replacements’ bench, so he may even get on the pitch in England’s last match of the RBS Six Nations Championship against France in Paris tomorrow. He might recover form and play some more great games for England; Wilkinson is not of the giving-up kind.

One kick for the world. The World Cup, anyway. The rugby union team won it; the football team at least qualified for it; and both times it was a miracle of composure and accuracy, a simple, private skill enacted in the maelstrom of a match with thousands watching and screaming and many millions more in tears on the sofas of old England.

He became an emblem of persistence and inner strength as he accepted a dreadful series of injuries and worked without let-up for a rehabilitation most normal people thought impossible. The two are antithetical in their off-pitch lives, Beckham needing fuss and fame and attention, Wilkinson craving quietness and privacy.

There is a division, for only one of them won the World Cup. But it is the combination of the fantasy fulfilment and the moral centre that unites them and makes them the best-loved English athletes of the past decade.

We like our sporting heroes not just to be good at sport, but to be good people as well. Although there is no obvious connection between sporting ability and moral worth, we have a deep need to believe that successful athletes are people worthy of admiration on more than one level. Beckham and Wilkinson, Jonny and Becks: both good at kicking a ball to save the world, both thoroughly good eggs as well.

We are more or less willing to canonise the pair of them: St Jonny of the oval ball, St David of the round. Each was responsible for a miracle, or what seemed like one; each was responsible for answering the prayers of a nation in a single Damascene moment that made believers of us all.

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