You couldn’t miss the heartbreaking irony of one of the greatest rugby players who ever pulled on his boots passing away just as the latest tournament was getting under way featuring 18-stone behemoths smashing into each other. Barry John, who retired at 27 and died last Sunday at 79, could have walked through brick walls and emerged unscathed. Was he the finest fly-half ever? He was certainly the most beautiful to watch. He played just 25 games for Wales and a handful for the British and Irish Lions, including the 1971 tour of New Zealand when he helped them to their only series victory against the All Blacks. It was then that the Kiwi press, not known for its admiration of players not wearing black, christened him ‘King John’.

He shimmered and swerved, side-stepped, dummied and passed, and kicked with pinpoint accuracy 

He shimmered and swerved, sidestepped, dummied and passed, and kicked with pinpoint accuracy. ‘You throw it, I’ll catch it,’ he told scrum half Gareth Edwards: that was their tactical briefing. It was as if he was in another dimension of time and place, as the official history of Welsh rugby put it. Would he have wanted to play now? Peter Jackson wrote in the Daily Mail that John was not convinced by the modern game. ‘It’s not a question of would I play now, but would I want to play? No I wouldn’t. It used to be a game you played to find space and run into it. Now they look for people to run into.’

He left the game in 1972, unable to endure the adulation that came with his talent. His later life was scarred by drink, divorce and depression. We mere mortals find it difficult to understand why someone blessed with John’s talent packed it in at the moment he did. But that’s the point about mere mortals: we’re merely put on Earth to worship gods, not to understand their mysterious ways.

As for the opening weekend of the Six Nations, a mighty Irish team looked unstoppable, though their opponents, France, played with all the enthusiasm of a bunch of people heading for root-canal treatment. England nicked a three-point win over Italy in a game described even by commentators as ‘turgid’. You feel that Barry John would have enjoyed Wales’s thrilling fightback to within a point of victory, though he would have been appalled that they ever let Scotland race to a 27-0 lead. RIP Barry.

So it wasn’t really the bowling that was the problem for England’s cricketers facing the ultimate test in India: the bowling has been pretty good, but the batters have struggled a bit, especially the middle order. Joe Root, where are you? At least, after years without a stable opening partnership, Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett seem to be blossoming, regularly putting on 50-plus partnerships for the first wicket. But just as England have their greatest-ever seamer – fit as a butcher’s dog at over 40 and bowling really well – as terrible luck would have it, India have someone even more effective. Jasprit Bumrah is a remarkable player, with the control of Jimmy Anderson and Glenn McGrath combined, delivered at high pace from a height that makes him almost impossible to read.

I was once lucky enough to visit trainer Willie Mullins’s racing stables in Co. Carlow and it felt like being given a tour of Michelangelo’s studios in Florence. Mullins is the master artist of training, and it was no surprise when he saddled nine winners, including eight Grade 1s, at the Dublin Racing Festival at the weekend. But is that such a good thing? Mullins is so outstanding that most owners want to send their horses to him and he now has a feast of favourites for the Cheltenham Festival. But what racing needs is not the dominance of one man, however talented: it needs fierce and proper competition with rich and varied fields.