Bodyline is the longest whinge in sporting history. But that’s because it mattered so much, because it still matters. Oh, I know it was only sport, only a game, only a few flannelled fools, but all the same, you cannot hope to understand Australia until you get your head around Bodyline. It is one of the nation’s founding myths.

Now I know that Australia have since played cricket at a level of ferocity that makes Bodyline look like rounders. And I know that Australia has produced sporting heroes - Ian Thorpe, Rod Laver, Cathy Freeman, David Campese, Shane Warne - almost as brilliant as Don Bradman.

But that is not the point. The point is that Bodyline was the most vivid expression of the relationship between two nations: one unformed, insecure, chippy, envious of history and roots, yet possessed of a sporting genius; the other ancient, self-certain, smug, envious of thrilling newness and possessed of a sporting leader of brilliance.

It was as if the mother country was seeking to stunt the growth of its turbulent but potentially brilliant child, as if any initiative, any threatening hint of genius, had to be slapped down. This was the drama of nations played out in symbolic form in the sporting arena. It was, for the Australians in particular, a drama about the profound question of who we think we are.

So much so that anybody who attempts to write a social history (or any other kind of history) of Australia without writing about cricket and Bodyline and Bradman has failed to do the job. Nor was Bodyline a side-show, one of history’s amusing little jeux d’esprit. Bodyline mattered and that is because it had - and has - a symbolic and mythic importance for the Australian people.

Sport can do that. Time and again, throughout history, sport has hit the spot. Sport can have the most profound significance for people who are capable of being moved by it, sometimes to the utter bewilderment of those to whom sport means nothing.

Some day, some great academic, already secure in a reputation for dizzyingly high seriousness and intellectual depths, will write a proper book about the way sport affects the lives of nations and the movements of society. Alas, most academics are fearful of sport, because such an interest might compromise their credibility under the false argument that if sport is trivial; a book about sport must be trivial.

The same false argument holds about high and low culture. But in the end, a great literary scholar had the courage and self-belief to write a great book about Bob Dylan*, and so I have hopes that a great historical scholar will one day write a book about sport - and Bodyline will be but one of the great topics to be discussed. Repeatedly, sport has had a Bodyline Effect on a time, a nation, a society.

The entire modern history of South Africa is inextricably intertwined with sport. Sport reached into every nuance of apartheid: D'Oliveira, rebel tours of cricket and rugby, the ban from the Olympic Games. Sport carried the banner against apartheid and, in the end, sport won and Nelson Mandela wore a Springbok shirt at the rugby World Cup final in 1995.

The turbulence of the United States in the 1960s and 1970s can hardly be discussed in all seriousness without reference to Muhammad Ali, a man who openly waged war on white society and refused the draft for the war in Vietnam. Ali was not the power behind the civil rights movement, in many ways he was diametrically opposed to it. But his fame, his sporting beauty, his reckless, combative nature gave him a symbolic importance that other, more politically adroit people lacked. Ali became a story, a mythology, by means of which people, black and white, understood what was going on.

At the same time - in 1968, to be precise - two American track and field athletes made the most beautiful and eloquent statement that was ever made on these issues. Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gold and bronze medal-winners in the 200 metres, each raised a black-gloved fist - different hands, because they had but one pair of gloves between them - in a black power salute during the US national anthem. The salute would have meant little or nothing in any other context but at the Olympic Games, before the eyes of the entire world, it meant - well, it meant the world.

England’s defeat at football by Hungary in 1953 was an event that mattered far beyond mere sport. Again, it doesn’t seem all that much of a big deal these days - England’s defeat by Croatia the other week was traumatic, but hardly a bolt from the blue. The defeat by Hungary marked the end of an age; England’s and Britain’s natural, easy assumption of world dominance was over.

The list goes on and on. Sport has been used for specifically political ends. Hitler staged the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin as a demonstration of power. China reentered the world by means of table tennis, inventing ping-pong diplomacy. The Gaelic Athletic Association was specifically created with the long-term aim of Irish independence.

Sometimes sporting events are simply right for the time. The four-minute mile gave us a new understanding of human possibilities in 1954; Suzanne Lenglen showed the power and grace of female athleticism in the 1920s; India won the cricket World Cup and launched a world of nationalistic self-confidence in 1983.

Sport matters because people care about it. Sports excites the passions but, far more importantly, it stirs the imagination. It produces heroes and villains, people we admire, people we identify with, people who become part of ourselves.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the doings of these people resonate outside the sporting arena. It is hardly surprising that Bradman mattered to the emerging Australia more than anyone else in the entire country, hardly surprising that the plan to unman him - coming as it did from the old colonial masters - should be seen as perfidious and evil.

Sport matters, and it will matter for as long as the human imagination matters. We are our heroes: our heroes are us.

*Dylan’s Visions of Sin by Christopher Ricks

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