The romance of sport

Take last weekend. The unheralded and unseeded Jo-Wilfried Tsonga reaches the Australian Open Tennis final and goes one set up against favourite Novak Djokovic. Non league Havant & Waterlooville travel to Liverpool's famous Anfield and have the temerity to go 2-1 up in the 31st minute in the FA Cup.

India's Virender Sehwag, after a gap of over a year, returns to India's Test side and scores 286 runs in four innings against Australia including a magnificent 151 in India's second innings at Adelaide. There is no common theme connecting these events - other than their improbability and the pleasure that they gave to the sporting romantic.

Thankfully the enduring memory of this year's championship will be the success and the style of Tsonga, rather than the tantrums of the deeply unpleasant Andy Roddick. Let's get Roddick out of the way first.

In the third round Roddick lost to German Philipp Kohlschreiber. Along the way the American assaulted the umpire with a tirade of abuse. "You're an idiot," he yelled. "Stay in school, kids, or you'll end up being an umpire."

Am I alone in thinking that this type of behaviour warrants not a warning or a fine but a red card? Indeed why doesn't tennis adopt the card system from other sports - yellow for a warning, red for a repeat offence? But enough of Roddick what about Tsonga?

In the jingoistic British media, Tsonga's first round win over ninth-seeded Andy Murray was characterised as a failure by Murray rather than a success by the Frenchman. But in fact what we were witnessing, although to be fair few would have predicted it, was the emergence of a player who looks quite exceptionally gifted.

You don't beat the tough and brilliant Rafael Nadal in straight sets unless you can play a bit. If the injury-prone Tsonga can stay fit, then the sky's the limit for the young man.

The legend of the FA Cup

One of the many fascinations of football's oldest competition, the FA Cup, is that it can pitch a famous team like Liverpool against a band of part-timers like Havant & Waterlooville. These matches rarely fail to be enjoyable - in the same way that we always cheer if an underdog artisan gets the better of a rich toff in any walk of life.

Playing with gay abandon, the Havant team led twice before the far greater power and skills of Liverpool eventually prevailed. But for a time there were some worried faces in the Kop and all the neutrals who were hoping for an upset were smiling with disbelief.

One of the fascinations of soccer compared with other forms of football is that surprises do quite often happen. The match at Anfield had lasted nearly an hour before Liverpool took the lead and Havant were far from disgraced by the eventual 5-2 win for the Merseysiders. Contests like this are at the heart of what is good about sport - pride, ambition, effort ...and romance.

There was romance galore at Adelaide as well, not just the pleasing return to form of Virender Sehwag but the last performance on the Test match stage of the much liked Aussie wicket-keeper Adam Gilchrist.

Sehwag is a rather mercurial and sometimes controversial character - but like his countryman Sourav Ganguly before him, a long break for the game seems to have worked. India look a far more formidable team with Sehwag at the top of the order.

But it was not the return to form of Sehwag which had the crowd on its feet at Adelaide - it was the last Test innings of Gilchrist. He was cheered all the way to the wicket, and back again after a characteristic cameo of an innings (14 runs off 18 balls). He was applauded as well by the Indian team - which was good to see.

Gilchrist is unique - no other specialist wicket-keeper has averaged as high as his 47.60 runs in Test cricket, not to mention his over 9,000 runs in one day internationals - another unchallenged record for a keeper. He is also self-evidently a decent man and the timing of his departure was shrewd as well. He is now free to play in the "Indian Premier League", which launches in April and for whom he recently signed a contract worth $800,000. Few would begrudge him this nice little earner at the end of his career.

Why Sport really matters

These vignettes of sporting romance over a couple of days in January show why for many of us sport remains one of man's finer achievements. Simon Barnes put it brilliantly in his superb treatise "The Meaning of Sport".

"Sport goes deeper than the more human in us. Sport goes to the heart of our mammalian selves. No wonder sport transcends all cultural boundaries..." Amen to that.