Ain't sport grand?

Ain't it just a stunner how, week after week, year after year, on and on for decades – until the days grow cold and we grow old – it's like this endless parable in living and breathing colour, throwing out lessons on good and bad, right and wrong, even as it throws up characters that would pass for the Good Samaritan on a good day, and the Devil, on a bad'un?!?!!

Your humble correspondent has already noted stadia in cities around the world are the cathedrals of our time, and here's the reason. While sport has, yes, a few who drone on and from their pulpits, it still manages to produce the kind of stories that can thrill and chill, that grip the soul, that so capture the imagination, they will be told for yonks afterwards.  We even get messages from the heavens, right from the sporting Gods, on what pleases and displeases them, how they want us to behave.

And never before, my children, were their twin messages sent so strongly as this week, by the twin parables of the Parramatta Eels, and the Leicester City Foxes.

The papers have been so full of it this week, I needn't go into too much detail, but the guts of it is there before our eyes, even if, with the Eels, we are still in heavy "alleged" territory, as there is legal action under way and it is only fair to note that none of it has yet been proved.

What it boils down to though is this: as witness the Eels, if you ignore absolutely everything in the Good Book – the NRL's Rules and Regulations on How You Must Run Your Club If You Want To Play – and try to cheat your way to a premiership, you come a cropper like Cain and Abel would recognise. You lose everything! You become a byword for bad, and while in the future the poor will be rich, and the rich will be poor, the lesson of this whole saga is that those who are rich but pretend to be poor enough to fit under the salary cap, will be fined a million bucks and have 12 points taken off them. And yea, verily, it is written, thy season shall be shot to pieces.

And of course Parramatta are shaking their fists at the NRL, saying Why hast thou forsaken us?

They will, it seems, soon be reaching for a real Bible in the court of law, as they pursue their rights under "natural justice," and "due process". We can let the court decide what it thinks. But if the NRL case stacks up, the Eels calling for the law to help them will be seen as the moral equivalent of a flagrant arsonist calling the fire brigade to protect his own home.

And then you had Leicester City in the English Premier League, who before this year had never won the comp, after well over a century of trying! Last year, they were lucky not to be relegated. And yet, my children, what did they do? They believed! They had faith that working hard, that believing in the virtues of team above all, that playing for each other they could one day win, that the poor man really could be the rich man and pass through the eye of the needle into sporting heaven and … and … and they were right! As you know, they just won the league, despite starting the season as a 5000-1 shot.

It is the equivalent of leaving the light on for Harold Holt, and not only did he turn up, he brought Elvis with him! This is like the Good Samaritan on his donkey, not only being nice to strangers, but actually entering the Melbourne Cup and winning it by a couple of lengths! Not by cheating, not by Fine Cottoning his way forward, but by believing the donkey could win, by nurturing all that was good about sport, in just the one team!

And oh, the stories along the way. As a reader pointed out to me, one of  the players, Jamie Vardy, was four years ago playing in the fifth tier of English Football – whatever that is – and is now the football writers' Footballer of the Year, with two international goals to his name.

Riyad Mahrez came for the bargain basement price of just $800,000 from Nantes and is the Professional Footballers Association's Player of the Year.

Danny Drinkwater was a Manchester United reject. Robert Huth was a player who couldn't get into the Stoke team, and is now a superstar.

The combined salary for all these players and all in the whole Leicester squad was dwarfed by many of the teams in their wake. When, in January this year, the board of Leicester said to the team and the coach, they could now afford to buy a couple of big stars, the team was united. No. We believe in each other, and will continue playing just the way we have. And they did.

Somehow, this band of misfits has thrilled a nation and achieved something that will warm the cockles of their soul till their dying day.

Aint' sport GRAND!?!?

Twitter: @Peter_Fitz