Jim White signals his disappointment at English rugby and cricket's seeming endless descent into mediocrity in The Daily Telegraph
"Our rugby and cricket teams appear to be bound together on the same vertiginous black run downwards to ignominy. From the highs of winning the Rugby World Cup in 2003 and the Ashes in 2005, both teams are now so bereft of confidence and hope that the coming weekend looks about as appetising as Antony Worrall Thompson’s balance sheet. Never mind dreaming that we might be the match of New Zealand and Australia, we are about to be hammered by Wales and the West Indies.
"There are more theories right now for the dual decline than runs posted on the Sabina Park scoreboard. The rush for celebrity, the rush for money, the rush for excuses: all have been blamed. Yet it is hard to see what is going on as anything other than an exhibition of corporate incompetence on a level we had thought was restricted to the boardrooms of city institutions.
"Both the Rugby Football Union and the England and Wales Cricket Board, in their lurid rush to exploit their moment in the sun financially, destroyed the very thing that had taken them there in the first place. What we are watching is not sport. It’s collective suicide."
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