1. Time for England to play like grown-ups

When a team have had a battering, you don’t look for spirit, or resilience, or bouncebackability, or even defiance. That’s losers’ talk. What you seek is coherence. As the RBS Six Nations Championship begins, we have the relaunch of England’s relaunch as they begin their run of five matches by taking on Italy at Twickenham.

After Australia, South Africa and New Zealand last autumn, that represents as good a chance for a decent relaunch as any fixture in grown-up international rugby. Which means that defeat would be a disaster, and that in itself sets up inhibitions.

So I won’t be looking for fluency or confidence or for an epic performance. Instead, I shall be looking for a certain amount of balance. Coherence. I will be looking for a sense of purpose, as if each man knew what he was about, as if the team were all working on the same game plan. Perhaps most important, I will be looking for leaders.

I shall be looking for a team with a clear idea about Plan A and also for a team who have no need for a Plan B. In short, I hope to see an England team play like grown-ups.

2. Keane’s £4m sojourn sums up crazy game

We should try the idea in newspapers. Let’s say we send our Sports Editor to The Daily Telegraph for six months. During this time he does hardly any work (please insert own joke here) and doesn’t affect the Telegraph one way or the other. When the six months are up we welcome him back with open arms and the Telegraph gives us four million quid.

I think we could all live with that. Of course, it’s not the sort of thing that would happen in the real world, but I’m talking football here. Robbie Keane went from Tottenham Hotspur to Liverpool in the summer for £20.3 million and was treated as a gate-crasher at a rather exclusive party.

So Liverpool have just sold him back to Spurs for £16 million. Rafael Benítez, the Liverpool manager, is painting a picture of Keane as a kind of Ian Rush figure, failing to adapt to an exotic foreign country and fancy foreign ways. But after a few hours down the motorway, Keane is home again and his club have been given a ridiculous sum of money for letting their man take a sabbatical.

So I suppose Keane should score a hat-trick against Arsenal tomorrow and we could all have a good laugh. But is it Rafa cracking up — or football?

3. Hoping for the Wigan who had no peers

Some elements of partisanship are a part of you — a football club, the national side, the England cricket team, whatever. This phenomenon is largely defined by pain. If a defeat causes you genuine distress, you suffer from partisanship. It is an inextricable part of sport.

But there is a second sort of partisanship, and it is the vicarious kind. You wish a team well because defeat causes pain to someone you know. Thus I have mild but clear goodwill for West Bromwich Albion, team of my dear brother-in-law, and for Stevenage Borough, who matter to my nephew.

As the engage Super League season starts, I find myself once again longing to see Wigan return to the top of the tree, to see Wigan as the natural champions, the inevitable cup-holders, Wigan the unbeatable. My father is from Wigan, you see, and when Wigan play Wakefield Wildcats tomorrow, the question of a good start to the season will matter to him.

I have been to Wigan only a couple of times, but I would still like to see an explosive start to Wigan’s season. I would love to see signs that the lost glories of the 1980s can be restored. Wigan Warriors, they are called now; time was when that were a tautology, lad.