RESPECT CHARTER IS MODEL FOR THE FUTURE

ENGLAND’S new playing kit, from New Balance, was launched earlier this month with a welcome return for the cable-knit sweater, a classic piece of design if ever there was. Accompanying the launch was a letter, signed by 17 current England players, to Test cap number 677, the next new cap and, as such, not yet selected.

The letter, which has an accompanying video, is the kind of thing marketing agencies love and this one was conceived by London-based BMB. But it works better when it is recited over the short film clip, which pulls off the trick of being both moody and uplifting. On the page, though, aside from some misplaced apostrophes, it appears clunky with the mushy core to many of the sentiments being exposed.

Having this kind of mission-statement-cum-charter is nothing new. The All Blacks have long produced various credos for admission to New Zealand’s most exclusive sporting club, the latest of them being: “Better people make better All Blacks.” Taken by that idea when England captain Andrew Strauss introduced the motto: “The England team is not a hire car,” an epithet that caused more than one brow to furrow in confusion until it was explained that it was about treating things with respect.

The natural conclusion is that Strauss, the England and Wales Cricket Board’s director of England cricket, must have been behind this latest declaration except that it is actually part of a global campaign by New Balance called – “Letter to my future self.”

The principle idea is that the greatest opponent most sport stars face is often themselves, something acknowledged by a series of written selfies of which the next one to appear will be by Joe Root.

For me, sport is best enjoyed by both participant and spectator when it is not overthought, but then I may be old-fashioned in that regard. New Balance’s short film makes plain the path possible from playground to Test arena (an old ECB slogan), but then complicates the issue with its open letter to 677 whose other message is that greatness is not a given.

What is a given, though, and something that may not have dawned on the letter’s signatories, is that the advent of 677 will mean somebody losing their place in the team. As Steve Waugh once said when captain of Australia – there are no fairytales in sport, only reckonings.