It’s all down to whether your birthday falls in the football or cricket season that dictates sporting prowess

With the clocks rejigged to end British summer time this weekend, I was pondering seasonal matters when I came across one of 2009’s bestseller paperbacks, Outliers: The Story of Success (Penguin, £9.99), by New Yorker whizz-kid Malcolm Gladwell. In an enviably skilful mix of pop psychology, anecdote, smoke, mirrors and statistical analysis, the author gaily and glibly piles surmise upon ye bleedin’ obvious to conclude life’s a doddling cinch as long as you’re born in the right place at the right time.

Dead-cert success, Gladwell reckons, is to get yourself born in the first three months of the year. January, February or March makes for a very happy birthday indeed. With star-billing assured: well, the finest Canadian ice-hockey players managed just that; so, for good measure, did most leading Italian footballers.

Such a single criterion might have sold a zillion books worldwide, but it does not remotely apply in British sport and I spent half of yesterday poring over parchmenty old reference books in proving it.

Only two (Crouch, January; Barry, February) of the England footballers who started against Belarus at Wembley last week were born in the first three months of the year. A few years ago, Sir Trevor Brooking wrote a book listing Britain’s 100 Best Footballers ever: only 17 of the 100 had birthdays between January and March.

Likewise, I’m looking at Rugby World’s nomination of Europe’s 50 finest all-time rugby players: just 16 of them were born in a year’s first three months. Christopher Martin-Jenkins recently did the same sort of thing for cricketers: of his England Top 10 – Grace, Hobbs, Barnes, Hammond, Rhodes, Hutton, Botham, Compton, Trueman and Bedser – only one (Trueman, February) had a birthday to back up Gladwell’s dogmatic submission. Need I go on?

Far more intriguing, I fancy, are my own findings. Does Gladwell want them for his next money-printing, party-piece potboiler? In Britain, goes my thesis, the sporting season Read more…

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One of the most irritating complaints heard from some Australians this summer has been about Andrew Strauss’s ethnicity. “Aw, mate, he’s just a Saffer like Pietersen,” they say, ignoring the fact that you could not find a more stereotypical plummy-voiced product of the British public school system than Radley-educated Strauss.

Sure, he was born in Jo’burg, but his mother is English and he has lived here since he was 6. Strauss is so English that he sips Earl Grey with pinky extended while watching his team bat from the Lord’s pavilion. He is so typically Pom that his upper lip starts to quiver whenever he hears Elgar. He enjoys queuing (heck, he told my colleague John Westerby today that he was thinking up strategies for Edgbaston in the queue at Legoland). He has English teeth.

Strauss is as English as Andrew Symonds, that Birmingham-born, heavy-drinking, wild pig-wrestling, zinc warpaint-wearer, is Australian.

He was, however, born outside England. I will concede that. In fact, we have had England captains hail from nine countries other than England, including Peru (Freddie Brown), Italy (Ted Dexter) and Trinidad (Pelham Warner). We’re just a multicultural nation with tentacles Read more…

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