Sport is adventure by other means

It is difficult to generalise about national identity, especially from sporting prowess, which in a highly professionalised age often reflects nothing more than the adequacy, or otherwise, of a nation’s infrastructure – but it is a generalisation Argentina’s vice-president, Victoria Villarruel, was happy to make ahead of her country’s World Cup semi-final against England. The English, she wrote, are ‘usurping pirates’; the match, for her, was never ‘just another match.’

A piratical hunger for danger does indeed lurk somewhere deep down in the English folk imagination, but not quite in the way Villarruel implies. That the Englishman, who appears to be never happier than at home, secretly yearns for the wild, and for a life of peril, and yet desperately wishes to return, is a theme that saturates The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. Bilbo Baggins, in its prequel The Hobbit, and then his cousin Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, leave behind a life of ‘hearth and home’ for rather different motivations, Bilbo driven by a sense of adventure, and Frodo, to save his home, the Shire. Bilbo returns changed by his journeys, partly because he stumbles across a golden ring. But he finds his old ‘hole’ Bag End much as it was, although some of his relatives had tried to sell his furniture. Bilbo eventually feels the call of the wide spaces beyond his homeland (‘I want to see mountains again,’ he tells Gandalf before he leaves Bag End forever). On Frodo’s return from his quest, he finds that he cannot stay in the Shire either, too traumatised by the horrors he has passed through. The Shire has been ‘saved,’ he tells his friend, Samwise, but not ‘for him’.

It is an old theme. Robinson Crusoe – a hero whose family name was originally Kreutznaer, of Bremen, changed into Crusoe by use in English – emerges from Defoe’s fabled gentle ‘middle station’ and is told by his father to enjoy his lot, not too low and not too high. And yet, he is pulled towards life on the high seas, on the oceans that lap Britain’s shores, forsaking the comforts of home. Once his adventures appear to be over, he returns to England, grows old and rich, only to eventually return to sea after all.

Modern Britain is the middle station incarnate. It is surrounded by friendly countries. Its population is old and comfortable and rich in relative terms and has experienced nothing but plenty for decades. But there is always this secret dark desire, what Crusoe calls his ‘original sin’, to go out in search of life lived in a larger sense – appetites that now play out within the artificial confines of sport. It’s ‘a dangerous business,’ Frodo recalls Bilbo once telling him, ‘going out of your door.’