It was a preview of an American football game transplanted into our midst and the article started with the fanciful speculation that the collision of muscular evangelists might send a shudder along the girders of Wembley and on through some of the mouldier presumptions of British sport. But the teams concerned weren’t the New York Giants and the Miami Dolphins, who are due to regale us with the spectating pleasures of gridiron action in north London this evening. That piece of mine dealt with a visit by the Chicago Bears and the Dallas Cowboys 21 years ago, so there is reason to ask if the sales pitch underpinning the export strategy of the US’s National Football League has become increasingly seductive in the past two decades and if the British market is likely to be more susceptible to it. The short answer to both questions must be no.

A seat at Wembley for the first NFL regular season game to be played outside North America has been the hottest ticket in town lately. The meeting of the Giants and the Dolphins could have sold out the stadium six times over. But there are no long-term omens in the clamour. In 1986 the eagerness to witness a mere warm-up for the serious schedule so exceeded capacity that relentlessly pestered workers in the League’s London office told me they had learned to live with “being screamed at from all sides”.

Back then they might have imagined they were pioneers engaged in a colonising venture with real prospects of succeeding. Their sport seemed to be enjoying a genuine growth of popularity in this country, benefiting from a combination of its own exotic appeal and a trough in the attractiveness of our indigenous version of football (where happenings on the field were often dull while crowd activity, thanks to the hooligan scourge, was rarely dull enough) to the extent that a Channel 4 programme showing week-old highlights drew respectable numbers of viewers.

When Super Bowl XX was televised live to Britain from New Orleans in January 1986, at least four million disdained sleep to watch Chicago maul the New England Patriots 46-10 and by the time the Bears arrived on these shores later in the year they already had the makings of a fan base. They also had individuals with auras no public relations department could fail to exploit, a group of outstanding talents led by the great stutter-stepping running back Walter Payton. And then there was William “The Refrigerator” Perry, the defensive tackle whose immense bulk was so at variance with the British idea of how a games-player should look that he was an inexhaustible photo-opportunity and source of headlines for as long as he was around.

Yet, for all the excitement the Bears’ presence among us caused in the run-up to their 17-6 defeat of the Cowboys, the effect on the sports enthusiasms of the nation proved to be barely a ripple and the same could be said of further evangelical sorties from the other side of the Atlantic.

By the 1990s all that was left in these parts of what had impressed many as a budding love affair with American football was the receding memory of a fleeting infatuation. Of course, there are some who never ceased carrying a torch and they have found themselves much less isolated recently as remarkably extensive coverage on Sky (more than 125 games from the NFL season transmitted live) has shown that ardour can be kindled among a small but far from negligible minority of a new generation.

Nevertheless, the hopes expressed last week that the US’s most popular spectator sport could yet attain major status here are surely ill-founded. The difference between the basic demands most Americans make of their team games and the equivalent requirements of fans in Britain, the gulf separating the two concepts of what is supremely thrilling, exhilarating and satisfying, seems unbridgeable. They respond to staccato, preferably explosive bursts of action in which achievement can be measured not only in scoring but through percentages, yardages and decimal calculations.

Brilliance that can’t be represented mathematically is profoundly suspect, which means there is a sourly baffled response to fluidly dramatic but statistically unproductive play. When I told an American friend that one of the most wonderful football matches I ever saw was England’s 1-0 loss to Brazil in Guadalajara at the 1970 World Cup finals, he said: “One-zero? What the hell were they doing for the rest of the hour and a half?” They certainly weren’t having all the halts for huddles, timeouts for touchline consultations or any of the other interruptions that endlessly punctuate the coach-driven confrontations in the NFL.

Having seen quite a lot of the US game, regularly when a year spent in New York made the Giants my local team, and on expeditions to 10 Super Bowls, I happily admit to being enthralled frequently by the intensity, grace and technical mastery its finest players can produce.

George Will, who occasionally breaks away from writing political commentary to rhapsodise about his addiction to baseball, was overdoing the snideness when he suggested that American football brings together two of the worst elements in his nation’s society – committee meetings and violence. Will cannot, however, be challenged when he declares the beauties of baseball infinitely more alluring. But it so happens that we on this side of the water already have a rather glorious bat-and-ball game.

Rugby should get off its high horse

All the euphoric praise for England’s incredible climb back from the brink of total humiliation at the Rugby World Cup to honourable participation in the final could be readily justified. So, too, could the celebration of the admirable standards of behaviour that were conspicuous throughout the competition on the field and among the huge multiracial congregation of supporters in France. There wasn’t the slightest excuse for either surprise or demurral when the levels of conduct, especially the respect shown by the players for the decisions of referees, were used to subject the professionals in another, bigger game to condemnation-by-comparison.

So many people in football, both on and off the pitch, have so persistently invited censure that it is difficult to conceive of the volume of criticism that would entitle them to feel badly wronged. And yet it must be said that the incessant cacophony of eulogies of rugby and just about everybody in it quite soon began to grate. In several areas, the laudatory din seemed in need of at least mild qualification.

For a start, are we to believe that rugby now tolerates only players who are paragons of sportsmanship? Has it rid itself entirely of the traditional tendency to stretch its macho code to the point of considering illegal and dangerous violence part of what the manly must endure in the heat of battle? Was Brian Moore, the former England hooker, expressing an outdated ethos when he wrote of a past encounter between the national team and France: “Serge Blanco’s claim that we deliberately set out to kick him is untrue; it was an incidental benefit of finding him at the bottom of a ruck, under their posts, early in the game”? Maybe he was.

Another worry last week was the willingness to let the deserved tributes to England’s courage and resolution, their discovery of an unbreakable spirit, swamp any mention of how impossible it was for neutrals to derive a vestige of pleasure from a playing method that was about as aesthetically uplifting as mud-wrestling. “To hell with neutrals – we were at war” might be an acceptable response to that observation if there wasn’t such an eagerness in some quarters to tell us rugby’s superiority to its round-ball cousin extends all the way to the satisfaction it delivers to spectators.

Tastes in sporting enjoyment are, of course, inviolably subjective. None of us should ever presume to tell somebody else what is beautiful or glorious in athletic endeavour. But I’ve got to own up that watching England’s slog into the nation’s hearts in France delighted my senses a shade less than does witnessing Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal in full flow.

Frankie’s flying blind

Almost ceaseless rain and blustery winds, poor organisation and unwelcoming locals are apparently making the Breeders’ Cup meeting at Monmouth Park in New Jersey the most miserable staging in the history of the great annual racing event. No humans are suffering more than the jockeys, as Frankie Dettori can testify. As he went out on to the track in a gusty downpour on Friday to ride a four-year-old gelding called Perrycarditus in a nonBreeders’ Cup race, Dettori was wearing eight tear-off visors over his goggles, one on top of the other, so that he could peel off the mud-spattered layers as the action progressed. But he reached his last pair ahead of schedule and soon found himself blinded. “I couldn’t see where I was going and was screaming at the boys: ‘Have we finished yet?’” He came in eighth, or so they told him.