Boxing belongs in the Olympics

If there is anything more pointless than signing a five-year contract to be Emma Raducanu’s coach, it is the effort to inject some excitement into England’s interminable qualification campaigns for major football tournaments. Everyone knows they will qualify, almost certainly as top of their group, which usually contains such giants as the Moon, Chad and Tierra del Fuego or, as now, Latvia, Albania, Andorra and Serbia. Good luck, Mr Tuchel, with learning much from those fixtures, though Serbia should be interesting. Sport needs jeopardy: there needs to be doubt about the outcome. Here there’s none.

There are marginal debates: is Phil Foden too far out on the right? What will happen when Bukayo Saka is fit? Should everything revolve around Jude Bellingham as much as it does? Anyway, it’s all OK but it’s not going to change the world. But we love tournament football because there is proper jeopardy. If an England side managed by one of the best coaches in Europe can’t beat Albania, then we’re in a very big mess.

Among the rust there can be some beautiful diamonds though. Bellingham’s pass to Myles Lewis-Skelly, in an otherwise pretty underwhelming 2-0 win over Albania, was exquisite. It makes you see that the assist can be better than the finish. Lewis-Skelly’s was a fine goal, but he had only one person to beat. Bellingham took out six players with one slide-rule pass: he landed it on a blade of grass. A blade either way and it wouldn’t have worked: perfect weight, touch, angle. Footballing perfection.

In the week that the great George Foreman was finally counted out, it was good to see that boxing has been reinstated as an Olympic sport after a brief flurry when it could have been excluded from the 2028 LA Games.