Why do we need sport in times of conflict?

Given the horrors of Putin’s criminal war in Ukraine, it feels somewhat indecent to be writing about sport; yet one remembers that sport went on throughout Hitler’s war. 

Club and unofficial football and rugby internationals were played here in Britain. The Derby was still staged, though at Newmarket rather than Epsom. Football matches were still played in the Soviet Union and the quality of the Moscow Dynamos team that came to England and Scotland a few months after VE Day suggested that Russian football was in a surprisingly healthy state. 

Even in Germany, crumbling under invasion from East and West, sport continued. The last league or perhaps cup match in Nazi Germany was played in Munich only a month or so before Hitler killed himself and the Nazi State collapsed. I suppose it offered spectators a short relief or escape from reality.

Boxing was popular in Britain throughout the war. Bruce Woodcock who won the British Heavyweight title by knocking out the holder Jack London at White Hart Lane in July ’45 — that is, while we were still at war with Japan had fought twenty times during the war at a variety of venues, including the Royal Albert Hall and various football grounds.

Well, now there are cricket Test matches being played: Sri Lanka in India and, more remarkably, Australia in Pakistan, a country where the security situation — that is, the lack of security from terrorism — has deterred touring teams for twenty years. Happily, even as I write, the Pakistani batsmen are well on the way to running up the sort of score England repeatedly failed to make against the same Australian attack this northern winter. Joe Root’s England have an early opportunity to put that Ashes horror show a few paces behind them whether their 3-Test series begins in the West Indies this coming week.

Is all this escapist or frivolous? I don’t think so. Sport is not just a distraction that offers moments of relief. Sport, and especially football, exercise soft power. Putting Russian sporting bodies and clubs into sports Coventry and harassing the oligarchs who have invested in clubs or bought them — not only of self-gratification but also of whitewashing their ill-gotten billions and seeking respectability — are more than gestures of disapproval. They put pressure on Russia and the Russian public, even if Putin, in what seems to be a senile frenzy, is blind to the damage he is doing to his subjects and the country he absurdly professes to love.

And since I mentioned boxing earlier, who now can fail to be impressed by the sight of Oleksandr Usyk, holder of three of the four World Heavyweight titles, exchanging his boxing gloves for a rifle and returning home to share in the defence of his country? Or, by the stance adopted by the Klitschko brothers, Vitaly and Wladimir, both more World Heavyweight champions, now aged 50 and 45 respectively, both now among the leaders of the Ukraine Resistance to Mad-Dog Putin.

“War,” in the famous Carl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum, “is not a phenomenon in itself, but the continuation of politics by other means.” No doubt this makes Putin his disciple, but in the 21st century, we are coming to realise that there are other means by which politics may be advanced, and one of these is sport. In one of these means — a small one in comparison to the horrors in Ukraine — we recently saw the young English footballer Marcus Rashford shame our Government’s neglect of care for the welfare of poor children. Likewise, on a grander scale, the readiness with which international sporting organisations have shamed Putin’s regime is itself a political act, one which will have enduring consequences.

Dictatorial regimes have long recognised this, hence their eagerness to engage in what we have come to call “sportswashing”. Now we can see the other side of the coin, first employed or pioneered against the South African apartheid regime, and now being directed at Putin and his repulsive cronies. The sport now being played in Pakistan and elsewhere is an affirmation of civility and human dignity. As such it is a rebuke to Putin’s barbaric and crazy war.

Clausewitz also said that no battle plan survives its first encounter with the enemy. The enemy for Putin is human decency, and this is a battle he must eventually lose.