This article is taken from the December/January 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Sports Personality of the Year usually promises more than it delivers: it is pre-Christmas Sunday night comfort TV rather than a comprehensive review of the sporting year. There is one aspect of the show, however, which is both resonant and important. This year marks the twentieth award of the Unsung Hero trophy, “celebrating the best volunteers in sport whose work is making a real difference every day”.

What they do may not be as seismically life-changing as the examples here, but nor is it negligible

The first winner, Nobby Woodcock from Newport, was rewarded for “his unstinting work with grassroots football in Wales”. Among those who have followed in his footsteps have been Oswestry’s Val Hanover, who organised Special Olympics for thousands of people with learning difficulties; Ben Geyser, who set up three boxing clubs in Dorset; Jill Stidever from Leicestershire, who for nearly 60 years taught special needs children to swim; and Sergeant Matt Ratana who transformed East Grinstead rugby club in his short time as head coach there. Ratana’s 2020 award was tragically posthumous: he had been shot by a suspect a few months before, and at the time of writing remains the last police officer in this country to be killed in the line of duty.

The criteria for the BBC’s award is strict. “A nominee must actively help others participate in a sport at any level on a voluntary basis. The work they do must not be part of their job or take part within their places of work, and they must not be a participant in the sporting group they are helping.”

But widen the scope a little, and the unsung are everywhere in sport. What they do may not be as seismically life-changing as the examples above, but nor is it negligible.

I have seen this time and again even at my own modest level of running. My family have with good grace suffered the intermittent demands of my midlife crisis/training programme, and some of my fondest racing memories have been of those helping out: the marshal after dark on a Jurassic Coast cliff who told me I was “looking great” deep into a 44-mile ultramarathon (a kind but barefaced lie); the volunteers who flitted round a Winchester sports hall after a brutal off-road marathon and pressed bananas into our weary hands; and the small boy who ran alongside me near the end of the Great West Run waving Jelly Babies and shouting “Free drugs! Free drugs!”

Professional sport also relies on those who fly below the radar. In our rush to idolise and venerate the superstars, it is easy to lose sight of those who make their success possible.

Professional sport also relies on those who fly below the radar

Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton don’t just leap into their cars and drive off: they are the capstones atop pyramids of talented designers, engineers and mechanics. Tennis players travel with small armies of coaches, physiotherapists, fitness instructors and nutritionists, without whom they may as well not bother turning up. And Premiership football pitches only look and play as well as they do because the best ground staff in the business work tirelessly on them.

Even in those top-level teams themselves, where by definition everyone is operating on levels inaccessible to and perhaps even scarcely imaginable by mere mortals, there are still those whose contribution is no less valuable for going largely unnoticed. Think of the great Real Madrid team of the early Noughties, or the perhaps even greater Barcelona side late in the same decade.

The former boasted Zinedine Zidane, Luís Figo, Raúl and Roberto Carlos, the latter Lionel Messi, Thierry Henry, Xavi Hernández and Andrés Iniesta: but the lynchpins of each side were the defensive midfielders Claude Mekélélé and Sergio Busquets respectively, the workhorses who allowed the stars to shine so brightly, and without them neither side would have been nearly as effective. “If you watch the whole game you won’t see Busquets,” said former Spanish nationa lmanager Vicente del Bosque, “but watch Busquets and you’ll see the whole game.”

The only England rugby player whom Sir Clive Woodward never dropped was Richard Hill, the blindside flanker whose mountainous work rate was largely conducted in the dark places of rucks and mauls where TV cameras cannot peer and which the casual fan does not see.

In cricket, a sport where statistics run the rule over every player, a kinetic wicketkeeper can act as unquantified force multiplier by energising the entire team in the field. And cycling takes the unheralded to its logical extent by having an entire team of domestiques — “servants”, literally — riding in service of their leader. All these men and women may not be the ones whose names adorn the replica shirts or whose faces front advertising campaigns, but those who rely on them very much appreciate the value of what they do.

It is often said by those who receive an OBE that it stands for “Other Buggers’ Efforts”: a line which is sometimes faux-modest and usually uncomfortably true. The Unsung Hero award is the opposite. Whoever wins it will thoroughly deserve it, but will also know that it could have gone to any one of thousands, which in turn elevates the award still further.

The unsung are the glue in the cracks, the ones without whom it all falls apart. They are constant reminders of what John Donne meant by “No man is an island”, of how the Zulu concept of ubuntu means “I am because we are”. They are the best of us.