Why the waistcoat is tailor-made for award
THE loudest member of the field will probably command most of the attention this evening.
Tyson Fury’s likely presence on the BBC Sports Personality of the Year shortlist will be controversial given the way he has divided opinion. For many, he earned redemption by twice climbing from the canvas to tie with Deontay Wilder. For some, he did not.
Personality invariably seems to carry greater weight where this competition is concerned. It is why Fury has been only marginally behind Lewis Hamilton in the betting. Hamilton’s fifth F1 title this year has elevated him into the conversation about being the best racing driver of all time, yet his modest SPOTY track record reflects a struggle to find the level of national affection you might expect. Damon Hill and Nigel Mansell have fared better in SPOTY than him.
Geraint Thomas provided some badly needed personality to Team Sky this year, and the Tour de France winner’s vote will tell us more about public perceptions and suspicions of his own sport.
Other contenders include Dina Asher-Smith, the first British athlete to win the 100m, 200m and 4x100m at the same European Championships. Lizzy Yarnold became our most successful Olympian when she defended her skeleton title at Pyeongchang’s Winter Olympics. But it is hard to bet against a winner emerging from England men’s World Cup campaign in Russia. The five footballers to win SPOTY have generally done so in a World Cup year.
It is why Harry Kane, winner of the tournament’s Golden Boot, has led the SPOTY betting this time, with his hat-trick in England’s 6-1 defeat of Panama one of the summer’s high-points. The tournament did not find Kane at his best, though, despite his six goals. The Croats were the first to say he looked exhausted when England suffered their heartbreak in the semi-final.
The individual who did the most to take the team on that journey and build a new relationship with the nation was the one who wore a waistcoat. Gareth Southgate forged a new England, respected in Russia and at home in a way unknown for years.
The changes were manifest in barely perceptible ways. Like the Saturday night, after England’s quarter-final win over Sweden in Samara, when he corrected himself. Relating how ‘the FA’ had hired him, he immediately qualified his words to say ‘the English FA’ — revealing in doing so that England no longer consider themselves to be football’s reference point.
Though English fans sang about football ‘coming home’, Southgate did not want to parade any sense of entitlement.
He and his players were the humble semi-finalists: a group still developing and as yet without ‘renowned world-class players’, as he put it in a deeply articulate post-match press conference. This divided nation needed that self-effacing modesty, which the players shared.
As the Brexit crisis deepened back at home, Southgate was asked at the World Cup whether the national team might help salve divisions. Less erudite managers would have blanched at such a question, though he replied with assuredness. ‘Yes,’ Southgate said. ‘The chance to connect everybody through football and to make a difference to how people feel is even more powerful than our results.’
A coach has never won tonight’s award, yet the BBC’s criterion stipulates that ‘the sportsperson whose actions have most captured the public’s imagination during 2018’ should win. That is as good a summation as any of what Southgate achieved.