My admittedly rather banal tweet last weekend, expressing excitement at setting out for Wigan to see the England v New Zealand Test series decider met with a surprising response from one follower who suggested that “it doesn’t seem right”.

Suspecting this might be prompted by some cross-code jealousy I invited further explanation which suggested it was inappropriate to be playing sport given the events taking place in Paris.

Given that my correspondent also indicated that he had personal knowledge of one of the victims it was impossible to disregard the emotions that motivated the message and, in any event, would have been crass to continue discussion of it on a public forum confined to phrases of 140 characters.

However the following morning, as huge sections of Facebook were, again wholly understandably, being adorned with the French tricolour, a message sent via a cricketing friend in the Wirral, but written by a medical student in Cape Town, caught the eye.

It pointed out that atrocities are happening all over the world and that we should be recognising the human suffering involved in all of them, not just when it affects us directly or comes closer to home.

“I unapologetically refuse to hold the lives of some higher than I do others and I refuse to selectively mourn the lives of human beings,” Tsepang Matekane asserted. Her message merits the fullest support and is worth reading in full.

To return that to the context of sport no suggestion came my way on the weekend of rugby union’s World Cup final that there was anything wrong with an event that was important in the context of sport but far from so in relative terms, going ahead in such proximity to the tragedy of the Russian airline disaster.

Of course it was right that sports fixtures due to be played in France last weekend were postponed, while it was also right to postpone Germany’s midweek meeting with Holland when a serious security risk was identified ahead of that football match.

However I touched on similar ground previously too when addressing how the demonisation of Sepp Blatter by the British media in particular had, in a strange way, almost certainly reinforced his position as president of FIFA for a long period.

Much of the rest of the world is sick of being preached to by “the west” which for so long indulged in greed-fuelled colonisation and politicians like Blatter have, in all sorts of spheres, been able to manipulate that.

In developing nations they cannot fail to recognise the hypocrisy of those in “the west” who want sports leaders who have not toed the line by awarding events to them, to be called to account, while friends of the establishment who brought the world to its knees, western bankers, have been bailed out by public money and left free to go and commit the same crimes all over again.

That, in its way then, takes me to Martyn Rooney, the British athletics team captain who had the courage to identify the nakedness of his sport’s emperor when noting that whether or not he knew about what had been happening on his watch, Sebastian Coe’s role as vice president of the IAAF in the past seven years makes it very difficult to see how he can now be the man to sort out the sport’s problems.

Turn it around, imagine Sergey Bubka had beaten Coe to the top job, that eastern European officials had then demanded there be an investigation into the sport and that its conclusions were presented as they have been, but with Britain, the USA, Canada or the Caribbean - all with chequered histories when it comes to performance enhancing drugs – receiving specific attention.

How would we be feeling about this if Bubka, supported by a compliant media in playing down what had been happening in his own backyard, claimed he was the man to clean up the sport and that one particular western country was to be singled out for treatment?

I wondered about that just as I have wondered why Coe was reported as having offered supportive messages to Alberto Salazar, Mo Farah’s coach, immediately after television’s ‘Panorama’ turned the spotlight on him earlier this year. It’s been a while since we were promised Salazar’s explanation yet Coe, during his election campaign, turned on the media examining such issues by claiming it was waging war on his sport, instead of accepting the strength of the case to be answered.

The contrast between that apparent unwillingness to react strongly to issues in the west as compared with those in the east in this instance was reminiscent of those who readily seize upon failed dope tests by eastern European or Asian sportspeople as evidence of endemic problems while always readily accepting excuses offered by Scottish or British sportspeople when they are caught, on the basis that they are good lads and lasses who would never knowingly do such a thing.

It is human nature to be most supportive of those we know best, but the insularity that often accompanies such instincts means we must work harder to understand problems currently facing us in a broader context whether in the world as a whole or in the field of sport, which has its place, if only in providing temporary distraction from the horror.