My experience of Spanish rugby began with the destruction of a truth I’d previously considered incontestable: that Astroturf was only for hockey and five-a-side football. 

It was with this worrying news that I took to the plastic in 30 degree heat with the Theta Cisneros, a team which takes its name from a play on words involving a letter of the Greek alphabet and the Spanish word for breast.

Rugby has a long and proud heritage amongst those who are part of its community in Spain, and the Spanish Federation currently has more registered senior male players than Scotland. The national side reached the 1999 World Cup group stages, while Oriol Ripol, who won the Premiership with Sale Sharks in 2006, is probably its best known name. 

My club, C.R. Cisneros, was based at one of the colleges of the Universidad Complutense. Its first team was recently promoted to Spain’s top league, the División de Honor A. The Theta, however, battled several rungs further down in Madrid Regional Two. 

Having always had a passion for rugby inverse to my ability and physique, I was looking for a recreational and social experience. Thankfully, this was much in tune with the rest of the Theta, a team which, in my opinion, exemplifies all that is good about rugby.

The team’s home ground, Paraninfo, is comfortably the worst pitch I’ve ever played on with the exception of its alternative home ground, Cantarranas. Both were rock hard, becoming mud baths after rain. I soon learnt that the exfoliation sessions on artificial pitches were the lesser of two evils. 

The Theta was led by the indefatigable captain Cuartero, who composed one match report in the style of a Spanish ballad, and another as the diary of a seaman aboard a naval ship.  In both cases, the style was carried off superbly. 

Arguably though, the team’s spiritual leader was talismanic player-coach Gonzalo ‘Zoydberg’ Benito, a swashbuckling and hugely adept number eight. Indeed, it was clear that Zoy had honed his skills during many a Theta season spent at the base of a fast-retreating scrum. 

Madrid Regional Two, as it turned out, was a bit of a graveyard for running rugby, full of very big, very slow men. The Theta is largely made up of students and I think we gave away 10 to 15 kilos per player against most teams. Trailing by thirty points at halftime, we would invariably mount a plucky comeback against an exhausted opposition, in a race against time to overturn the deficit.

Sometimes we scraped to victory, sometimes we were beaten by the clock, but there was rarely a dull moment and a battle against relegation became a charge up the table to a respectable fifth placed finish.

However, the Theta is not really about the quality of rugby but rather the enjoyment of the sport and everything it offers. It is a social union as much as a sporting one, and Cisneros as a club puts the values of rugby at the forefront of everything it does, doing tremendous work in introducing young men and women to the benefits of rugby, both on and off the pitch.

Such is the enthusiasm of those already involved in the sport it’s not unrealistic to expect Spain to compete in a good few World Cups in the next 20 years. As I see it, there are two main issues for the Spanish federation to tackle. The first is that a lot of players only take up rugby at university, meaning that they miss out on years of skills training and game understanding. Most tier three and low tier two countries produce decent athletes but lack the intuition of the world’s best players, the result of not growing up around the game.

The second problem for Spain is simply a lack of good facilities. The Complutense’s pitches are used for training and matches every week, not only by the college sides, but also the faculty sides, as well as the Cisneros and its entire academy. 

For those taking up the game, rugby is just not as fun on such surfaces. Grass is a precious commodity and difficult to manage given the climate, while synthetic pitches require investment.

However, until such investment arrives, I’m sure that rugby in Spain will continue to thrive in spite of the obstacles it faces. As for the Theta, I hope they one day make it to Regional One.

On Saturday evening, cricket fans were treated to something rather incredible: the perplexing sight of England cruising to victory over Australia to clinch the ongoing ODI series 3-0. Even more surprising, the series been more a cake-walk than a contest for England

Indeed, the significance of this event has not been lost on commentators, as they remember a time not too long ago when even solitary ODI victories over the Aussies were to be gratefully savoured: tasks of herculean application and effort on England’s part.  

In this light, fans could be forgiven for doing a double-take when Alastair Cook’s side crushed the Aussies with all of 13 delivers and 8 wickets to spare at Durham on Saturday.It was a performance of clarity; professionalism and control, moving Australian coach, Mickey Arthur to say his side were nothing less than “bullied” around by the far superior England.

With all the hype surrounding England now, the only real question left is this: to what do we attribute England’s phenomenal success? Is it really a product of England’s own brilliance?

The pessimist in me would say no. England, it could be argued, have been the lucky beneficiaries of absurdly advantageous home pitches, brittle opposition and overworking international schedules. Indeed, England’s Test record abroad in the UAE and in Sri Lanka leaves much to be desired.  

But for how long can critics keep raising these same tired points. The fact of the matter is that England have dominated not just Australia, but Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan and the West Indies in the last year.

Captain and opener, Alistair Cook has scored a staggering 522 runs at an average of 58, while Ian Bell’s average has soared to 78.20 for the current year.

The bowling, moreover, has been exceptional. England can now balance between a stable of exceptional ODI fast bowlers, including Stuart Broad, Tim Bresnan, Steven Finn and Jade Dernbach. Finn, with his glossy 22 wickets this year, devastating variations and 90mph effort balls, has been an absolute joy to watch over in Durham and heralds even more good things to come.

The current series against Australia, moreover, is merely reflective of this prodigious and lucrative passage of English cricket. From Eoin Morgan’s devastating 89* from 63 deliveries in the first ODI on a turbulent Lords pitch, to Ravi Bopara’s clinical 82 from 85 balls at the Oval, England have exhibited both flair and discipline: hallmarks of a successful ODI team. 

 But that last statistic begs the obvious question. Is it the case that England are performing superbly, or in actuality, is it merely the Aussies playing poorly? The latter is true up to a point. The Australians are, after all a team in transition, having lost Ponting, Gilchrist, Hayden and Warne: men who could wrest matches away within the first 10 overs.

The replacement top order of Shane Watson, David Warner and Peter Forrest have shown obvious promise and excitement on this tour, but lack consistency on the English pitches. Warner, for instance, has scored just 68 runs in the last three ODI’s of this tour.

Such abysmal results have made coach Mickey Arthur question whether “There’s just something missing. Is it character, is it ambition?”, as he watched bowler Brett Lee, who bafflingly has the highest Australian batting average on tour, and Shane Watson return to Australia after both picked up calf injuries at Durham.

But we must not overstate this point. Yes, the Australian outfit is not what it once was, but they have a lot of fight left in them and feature the likes of Michael Clarke and David Warner: men who demolished India just seven months ago, while Clarke cruised to a colossal triple century.

Such feats are well within the ambit of Australian cricket even now. It is within this framework that we simply have to hand it to England: they have played with discipline and outmuscled their Australian opponents convincingly. 

After the final 4^th ODI, England will ready themselves for a Test series against South Africa. Let us hope it makes for a more gripping contest than the current ODI tour.

In the space of four sets on Centre Court yesterday, Andy Murray ‘lost a match and won the heart of a nation” as author Tony Parsons put it, to Roger Federer. 

Post-match comments about the “two champions” in the match flooded in, like the tears down Murray’s cheeks. Actor Russell Crowe even tweeted, ‘Andy Murray, you are a champion in my eyes’.

Murray’s reaction to his defeat was emotional, apologetic and endearing but it didn’t change the result of the match. Yes, we saw beneath the rugged, taciturn exterior of Andy Murray, the tennis player, and got a glimpse of Andy Murray, the young man, but ultimately, the crowd’s ‘sustained applause, collectively placing an empathetic arm around [his] shoulder’ (Tom Fordyce, BBC) will not bring him any closer to winning a grand slam title at the fifth time of asking.

Their empathy, like a parent’s ‘don’t worry son, it’ll all be okay’, only endorses the monolithic phrase of sporting mediocrity, that ‘it’s not the winning that counts, it’s the taking part that matters’. How naive, how glib.

We could endow Murray’s match against Federer with a kind of patriotic grandeur, basking in the historical significance of our first Wimbledon finalist since Fred Perry, 76 years ago, but this is no time for a typically Anglo-Saxon appraisal of courage in defeat.

The facts remain unaltered by emotion. Murray was quite simply outplayed by a much better player. He managed only 56% of his first serves; produced only three-quarters as many winners and converted less than a third of his break points. On numerous occasions the crowd was forced to watch on helplessly as Murray let 40-15 leads slip to deuce and, crucially, failed to convert a number of games that he should have won.

In that light, this is no time to exhort second place. Although Murray was indeed aggressive, and showed more than fleeting glimpses of true brilliance, it is ultimately the winning and not the taking part that counts. To misappropriate Talladega Nights’ Ricky Bobby, ‘if you ain’t 1st you’re last’. Only the British crowd, it seems, want to remember second place.

Murray’s old coach, Miles Maclagan, said afterwards that ‘Andy has almost resisted being liked, he has wanted to be liked for winning titles, not for who he is’. Teary-eyed moments, like yesterday, come dangerously close to blurring this boundary between the articulate young man he is off-court, and the ruthless champion that he needs to become. Tennis is more than a game; winning matches is not for mere enjoyment but a profession. Murray neither needs our sympathy, nor he another British” nearly-man” like Tim Henman: never quite good enough to win a grand slam.

He should therefore not be consoled with clichéd platitudes like ‘it’ll be alright, just stick at it’. I was thus encouraged to see, when reading his BBC Sport column, that Murray is ‘more determined than ever’ and acknowledges the pain of Sunday’s defeat.

As Al Pacino famously declares in ‘Any Given Sunday’, and Hawk-Eye reminds us, ‘life’s this game of inches … one half a step too late or too early and you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow, too fast and you don’t quite catch it’.

Murray must remember the pain of this defeat and disappointment because it will help him to make those extra inches, to strain a bit harder for that drop shot, to run a bit harder as he charges along the baseline, and hopefully leave Wimbledon next year with a grand slam title under his belt.

Let’s face it: the last major international football tournament was something of a disappointment, promising much but failing to deliver.

In ‘The First World Cup On African Soil’, no team carried the hopes of the continent beyond the quarter finals, and the competition as a whole was blighted by controversy, negative tactics, and the twin curse of the Jabulani and the vuvezela.

Precisely the opposite could be said of these enjoyable Euros. The tournament got underway quietly: an underwhelming opening ceremony preceded an unglamorous first contest between Poland and Greece, both of which were overshadowed by the darkening clouds of racism and fan violence that so preoccupied the media. However, those clouds dispersed peacefully, and the football itself has, for once, been the only real talking point.

Thankfully, there has been much to talk about. For all that the Champions League has done for the profile and standing of club football, the evident and poignant anguish of Italy’s players in the aftermath of their final defeat was a timely reminder that international football still captures the imagination of players and fans like nothing else.

The modern footballer, like modern football itself, often gives the impression of being cynical and soulless: yet Balotelli, Pirlo, Ronaldo, Gerrard and many others produced some of the finest and most resonant performances of their careers in Poland and Ukraine. Their motivations seemed to be glory and pride, rather than greed or shallow self-advancement.

But this tournament was far more than just a story of individuals. Each of the successful teams integrated star players into tactically disciplined collectives: none more so than the champions, Spain. 

Moreover, the two teams that reached the final enshrined traditional, lofty football virtues of technique, control and creativity, ensuring that the more pragmatic virtues of recent times: physical conditioning, pace and functionality, though of course omnipresent, were everywhere touched by the sublime.

Nowhere did this balance find better expression than in the two stars of the tournament, Pirlo and Iniesta: likeable, honest, hardworking, physically unremarkable, technically outstanding, tactically sensitive, and full of imaginative genius.

Both seem to take an uncynical and childlike delight in playing beautiful football, fuelled by a fierce competitive spirit that is unusually joyous and creative rather than aggressive or destructive.

Under the sway of this spirit, the competition throughout possessed a quiet and tense drama, punctuated occasionally by the brutality of penalty kicks or by the dull predictability of a one-sided victory.

But frequent cards, play acting, malicious tackles and abuse of officials –  the unwanted pests of the modern game – surfaced rarely, if at all. The refereeing was for the most part gloriously anonymous.

And nobody had much to say about the Adidas ball.