Of all the irrationality that has flowed in the wake of the Thierry Henry affair the prize surely must go to those who drone that we should never confuse the ups and downs of sport with those of real life.

It's the schoolmasterly tone that brings on the worst threat of cortical damage. They don't actually say, 'pull up a chair, boy, and let me explain something you have so pitifully missed,' but they might just as well.

Sport, they say, is really just a bit of lark occupying a fragment of time and that is why it can be so easily discarded. So Henry broke the rules and won one of the great prizes, a visit to his fourth World Cup, a privilege that George Best was never granted once, but how absurd of the Irish to go on about it as though it was some re-incarnation of the potato famine. But of course that wasn't what the Irish, or appalled neutrals, were suggesting.

They were merely saying that something capable of warming every corner of the world when represented by someone like Pele or Ali or Woods, something quite precious this side of the imperatives of life and death, had been terribly cheapened.

The most annoying presumption is that if you care about sport in a way that makes you angry when its values are thrashed, as they were so comprehensively in the Stade de France last week, you cannot possibly be exercised by any of the injustices that heap up beyond the boundaries of a sports field.

When one heart-sick Irishman complained that Henry's behaviour was less than might have been expected of a chavalier of the legion d'honneur he was advised by one of our occasional commentators on sport, “Ooh, calm down dear, it's only a game of football.”

Only a game of football, only something that has the power to rivet the world, only a diversion from real life that the French Nobel prizewinner Albert Camus, former goalkeeper of the Algiers University 2nd XI, claimed had taught him more about the human condition than marathons of intellectual chit-chat with Jean Paul Sartre in Left Bank cafes.

Ironically enough, Camus is back in the news more than 50 years after he died in a car crash with the proposal of President Sarkozy to move his remains into the company of other French heroes in the Pantheon. What chance Henry such an eventuality with that besmirched ribbon of the legion of honour?

His Barcelona manager Pep Guardiola is certainly not optimistic, judging by his weekend comment, “He's not proud of what happened, and he knows it wasn't good, but it happened very quickly. Besides, it's not as if he ripped someone's ear off.”

But then if Henry's heroic status is now problematical, and so many of the games we play have never been so besieged by working duplicity, some will surely resist the idea of the lecturing persuasion that sport has become as emotionally disposable as an old dishcloth.

Nobody died in the Stade de France but a little joy, a little hope, not to mention a lingering belief that some decency may have survived the pressure to win and augment already vast personal fortunes did — and dramatically enough to signal growing strength in the argument that technological help for match officials is a necessity that can be delayed no longer.

In the meantime those who understand that there are sane dividing lines in the various degrees of mourning, can only be grateful for sport's unending ability to remind us that if sport is a triviality it can so often be a magnificent one.

Redemption, even at the top of sport's food chain is, after all, never far away. Lee Westwood won £1.65m at the weekend in Dubai, but the expression of satisfaction that covered his face was not about that large injection into an already sumptuously upholstered bank account.

It concerned something he spoke of on a trans-Atlantic flight before the US Masters of 2008. He said he had all the money, the life of ease stretching out before him, but in the little time he had left at the top of his game he wanted to prove something to himself and all those, including the great Gary Player, who believed that he had not made the best of himself as a competitor.

His superb performance at the weekend, a classic of concentration and will, was a climax to two years of steady progress which suggests that he may yet win his first major title.

What Westwood was saying on that plane, and which he has been more or less relentlessly repeating each time he has gone on to the course, is that if sport has given him a life of fabulous rewards it has also provided him with a purpose. It is to satisfy himself that ultimately he will not have neglected his gifts. A metaphor for real life, a mere mirror, you may say, but it is real enough to Westwood when he measures a winning putt — and to those who saw in his performance a triumph of will that was as tangible as any you might find in most walks of life.

If the consequences of sport can be tossed away like chip paper, why bother with it in the first place?