A Great Summer of Sport?

If you don't like sport, you should be booking your holidays now. Timbuktu is nice this time of year, apparently. Best stay for a couple of months, though, because the Great Summer of Sport - which is what the BBC used to call this period when it had a monopoly on sports broadcasting rights - is about to begin.

In fact, thanks to Tim Henman's shock performance at the French Open, there has already been an outbreak of Henmania in the home counties, but be warned: this is only the beginning. The Headingley Test match begins today. The flags of St George are already fluttering from every cab bonnet and council block, as England awaits Euro 2004 in a fortnight. The Derby is run on Saturday. Wimbledon is three weeks away and, scarily, Henman has a chance of winning. Then comes the Open golf championship, the British grand prix, a Test series against the West Indies and, finally, the daddy of them all - the Olympics. Pitta bread and circuses.

Now, I love sport as much as the next man or, occasionally, woman. I sat rapt in front of the television last week as Nasser Hussain carved out a wonderful century to win the first Test. Many of us will be gripped for the next three months while marvelous stories unfold. Television will be full of them; the heroes will be lauded on pages front and back. In that uneasy balance between life and sport, sport will be the winner.

The political left have always had a problem with that, seeing sport as a diversion from the business of life. More than that - a deliberate mechanism to keep the masses in their place. Some years ago, while studying the ferment of near- revolutionary discontent that swept across industrial Britain in the 1840s - Marx and Engels were convinced that this was where the revolution would begin - I came across, in an official report, a suggestion from one government inspector that the dangerous, stroppy, newly urbanized working classes be taught cricket. A game with rules, played under a captain, taking place in a tightly defined space, channeling aggression. Sport as social control.

It worked a treat. There was no revolution. England quietened down after the Chartist revolt ran out of steam in 1848. Society rapidly suburbanized. The Football League, the Rugby Football Union and the County Championship were formed and we all lived happily ever after. Victorian Britain had a choice between two burly blokes with beards - Karl Marx and WG Grace - and it chose Grace.

The philosopher Noam Chomsky smells conspiracy in the sports-fest that is life. "When I'm driving," he once told an interviewer, "I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount ... On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality which is beyond belief."

Chomsky doesn't blame apolitical sports nuts; he blames the system. "I think this concentration on such topics as sports makes a certain degree of sense," he says. "The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization that's far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that's in fact what they do."

That's some condemnation - and not one I entirely share. Chomsky is blind to the ritualized power of sport, the way it can bind communities together. But as Iraq burns and Saudi Arabia smolders, I do suddenly appreciate the point he is making. You can see why the pretzel-eating president loves sport. The "war on terror" becomes a tedious fact of life, something that retired generals and former ambassadors get agitated about. It is too complicated, too long drawn out, too unresolvable. The narrative is just too messy, the denouement too unpredictable. Give us sport, with its neatly drawn lines between success and failure, good guys and bad guys, goals and bookings.

George Orwell, writing about the ill-tempered visit to the UK of Moscow Dynamo in 1945, described sport as "war minus the shooting". But that's not the real problem. The danger is that sport, in this supercharged summer, will make us forget the war and the shooting. We will have our eyes on the Circus Maximus when we ought to be worrying about what the emperor is up to when he's not watching ESPN. See you in Timbuktu.