Is team spirit an illusion glimpsed in a time of success? Not in county final season

It is one of the greatest-ever quotes about sport. If we said its provenance was one of the more austere poets, you’d swallow that. I know I would have. Only someone who went through the hard times, the deprivations and the boredoms of, say, a Charles Bukowski, is entitled to gaze down on the human condition and smite it such. Big Archibald had served his time as a car mechanic, staring up at sumps of Ford Cortinas. A squirt of oil in the eye was an occupational hazard.