In Richard Ford’s elegiac novel The Sportswriter, the protagonist Frank Bascombe reckons there is “nothing as noble and enduring as the willingness to come off the bench to play a great game knowing full well that you’ll never be a regular”.
Bascombe was talking about the baseball he watched and wrote about, but the sentiment could have applied across most sports before satellite TV brought about a wages bonanza. Indeed, players on the fringes back then probably deserved our sympathy, suffering as they did the frustrations of being the ‘nearly but n...