There’s a wonderful book that opens with the sentence: “Who is John Gault?” And then it spends about 1400 pages of tiny little, 5-point type telling you. But today, to save you reading Atlas Shrugged in its entirety, I’ll start with a different question.

Who is Kyle Edmund?

Won’t take many pages to answer. He’s a tennis player, inn’he? And he’s ENGLISH. Not ‘British’, certainly not ‘Scottish’ and definitely not ‘European’ soon. And last night he reached the semi-finals of the Australian Open in Melbourne. One of our own. And that is quite amazing because until last week I’d never even heard of the man. Not that I spend much time reading up on the obscure international tennis tournaments in Abu Dhabi and Chechnia and Madagascar through the year. I only like Wimbledon. But the ‘opens’ are big. I have to take note. And this pale and pallid, skinny ginger-haired kid starts winning, in temperatures that even normal people with normal colouring are struggling with, and I need to get involved.

I thought he was Scottish. The nightmare. Just as it looks like we’ve finally got rid of Andy Murray, here come Ginger McTavish to replace him. But no. He’s English. Like… oh, like Tim Henman.

All the old ‘British champs’ are pundits on tv. They have to be. They never won any prize money so they have to pay the rent. And when they come on the little flash-up badge says ‘Buster Mottram, top British player 1982 to 87′, or some such flattering nonsense. He was ranked 873 in the world and reached half of a ’round of 16′ match before losing the rest of it to a Lithuanian schoolgirl with biceps like Arnie. They never mention his involvement with the far-right. Not relevant. Only to me.

Andy Murray, for all his faults (that’ll be: miserable and Scottish), ‘is’ or possibly ‘was’ (depending on the success of the surgery) an amazingly brilliant tennis player. Tim Henman never was. Buster Mottram certainly wasn’t. But they all start with promise. And Kyle Edmund is certainly doing that. He’s 23, ranked 46 in the world and he’s in a grand slam semi-final.

England have even won some cricket in Aus too. The One Day Internationals. Smashed those Aussies out of the park. Brilliant. Easy. World Class. Shame about the Ashes.

So all is looking good. Especially for Alexis Sanchez who is to be paid by Manchester United between 450 and 500 thousand pounds a week (depending on where you read it). I don’t give a shit about Alexis one way or the other. But to give you an idea of how massively, expensively destabilising this is going to be for the Premiership, he’ll be earning more than twice what Eden Hazard gets paid. Four times Harry Kane. Greedy agents and stupid, desperate managers, the horns of the devil.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx