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Features

This could be the year that sport starts to die

Without the public’s trust, it’s nothing. And it’s working hard to forfeit that trust

30 January 2016

9:00 AM

30 January 2016

9:00 AM

Like religion, sport can take any amount of passion in its stride. It’s indifference that’s the killer. Sport can be bubbling with incontinent hatred, poisonous rivalries, ludicrous injustice and the most appalling people doing the most appalling things: but as long as people still care, as long as the sporting arguments still echo, as long as newspapers are read from back to front, then sport’s future is safe.

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Simon Barnes’s latest book is The Sacred Combe. He is a former chief sports writer of the Times.

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