The Awards 2008 (as seen by Mouth of the Mersey)

Yes it's a cliche, but it's fun too. Comment is welcomed below, but pseuds' own nominations are welcomed posted to the address above. As personal as possible please! 

Team of the Year

Such is the volume of football available to the subscription holding viewer that it is easy to become sated with the game, but Euro 2008 lit up a dank English summer with free-flowing, imaginative and skillful play. In Spain, the tournament found worthy winners, the best national team since France's 2000 squad and amongst the top half dozen I've seen. England were not missed - naturally.

Man of the Year

Before the Beijing Bolt, the leading man in sports was Rafael Nadal. His extraordinary success on the clay continued at Roland Garros where he is unbeaten since 2004. But he stamped his mark on the season with his epic victory at Wimbledon over grass courts' acknowledged master, Roger Federer. It was a reward for his bold expansion of his game and a refusal to rest on his laurels. This bull of a man retains his boyish charm and is unfailing polite in the media, which allows us to forgive his on-court ticks.  

Woman of the Year

Sport celebrates its winners, but should acknowledge its losers too. Lolo Jones went to Beijing as favourite to win the 100 metres hurdles and was about to deliver the gold when she hit the penultimate obstacle and, at 26, her dream disappeared forever. Once the initial shock wore off, her reaction showed a depth of understanding of the nature of sport that reveals a more rounded personality than most sports stars, as this interview shows. Lolo comes from a less than privileged background, but she knows that her obligations run beyond winning races and making money. Her er.. natural advantages will guarantee a post-athletics career in the media, should she want one, but few would begrudge her.

Event of the Year

After seven races in just a few days, then adrenelin was ebbing, but the expectation was mounting. Merely Gold in the Olympic 200 metres suddenly wasn't enough: Michael Johnson's "untouchable"  world record was required now. It hurt, it really hurt, but Usain Bolt rounded the bend and stoppd the clock at 19.30: a new mark that nobody but he is likely to threaten for a generation. Orson Wells was cursed by his achievement of writing, directing and producing Citizen Kane at the age of 25. Bolt completed his masterpiece at just 21. 

Thanks to all pseuds who have written above and below the line and a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all.

Eboué and the Rights and Obligations of Football Crowds – Mac Millings

Last Saturday, Arsenal’s Emmanuel Eboué was booed mercilessly by his own team’s fans during their game against Wigan. Such was the vehemence of the jeering, that it prompted Richard Williams to write on the Guardian SportBlog that, “It was the self-expression of the new breed of football fan, with his £1,000 season ticket and his increasing sense of entitlement…it is nasty, and it needs to be stopped.” Within hours, the article had become the most commented-upon on the Blog. The verdict was far from unanimous, and fans of every shirt had all kinds of opinions. So how are we to judge the reaction of the crowd towards Eboué? In order to answer this, we must address a broader question: what are the rights - and the obligations – of the ticket-buying crowd at a football match?

The mere purchase of a season ticket, even one that costs £1,000, does not, of course, guarantee to the buyer that they will be watching either high quality or successful football. And football being a game of passion, the first thought of the watching fan when things aren’t going well for his side is probably far more visceral than “You’ve got to do better than this – do you know how much my ticket cost?” But if that £1,000 price tag were reduced to £100 (or a £500 one to £50), yet the standard of football on offer remained the same, we’d have to expect fans to be at least a little happier. On that basis, we must admit that it’s not entirely unreasonable to factor ticket prices into fan dissatisfaction at least a little.

More important than the financial “investment” that fans are making when they pay to see their team play, is the emotional one. By purchasing a season ticket, fans enter into a loose form of contract with the club. The club, for its part, will provide entertainment in the form of a chance for the fans to see their side “live”. In turn, the fans will to provide support and encouragement to the team. In this way, we may say that the “contract” is mutually beneficial – the crowd gets to see its heroes up close, and the team reaps the benefit of a supportive crowd.

Supporting the side takes many guises, and includes both “positive” and “negative” types (in football, intimidation of the visiting side is arguably as important as support of the home team). Thus we find singing in praise of the team and/or individual players, jeering of opposition players and drowning out the cheering/jeering of visiting fans.

Fans may, of course, turn on their players when things aren’t going well., and we will address this issue shortly. Generally speaking, however, we may safely say that the main obligation of the football crowd is to protect the interests of the team.

Since these obligations extend to all fans of all clubs, we might consider them “rights”. In accordance with our tradition of free speech, jeering, booing, and criticising are permissible, although naturally there are exceptions. Fans’ rights do not, of course, extend to criticism on the basis of, say, skin colour or sexual orientation. However, they may include mockery regarding, for example, on-pitch performance and shirt colour.

Crowds jeer their opponents because it works. They suspect that the singing of songs aimed at encouraging an individual improves that individual’s performance, so they do it. Conversely, they suspect, and have doubtless seen that, while some may thrive on it, many opposing players are adversely affected when targeted for abuse. Crowds therefore know that it is counter productive to employ the same tactics on their own players.

As a result, loud criticism by fans of individual players on their own team is rare (which is why the Eboué case received such attention) – in cases of displeasure with an individual player, the crowd might instead target its wrath at the manager (who picks and deploys the players). Alternatively, the fans might sing the praises of a player on the bench whom they consider a superior alternative to the one with whom they are dissatisfied. A recent example in the US, showing what many considered to be both the acceptable and unacceptable sides of crowd dissatisfaction with a player, was when the fans of the Cleveland Browns football team, unhappy with the incumbent quarterback, Derek Anderson, chanted the name of their hoped-for replacement, Brady Quinn (acceptable), but later cheered a season-ending injury to Anderson as he was helped from the field of play (unacceptable). Like Alanis Morissette, I’m not an expert in what constitutes true irony, but the fact that a couple of games later Quinn himself suffered an injury that ruled him, too, out of the rest of the season might qualify.

So how does this all relate specifically to the Eboué situation? He was heavily criticised by the crowd that day - but acceptably, or not? Why did the Arsenal fans boo him? Those posting under the line on the SportBlog gave two main reasons: that he’s a “diver and a cheat”, and that he’s “crap”. The former doesn’t stand up. Fans do not, in my experience, boo their own players when they cheat – indeed, while they may be embarrassed in private, at matches some may even revel in it. It helps, of course, if he’s a good player. Skill, productivity, a good work ethic, even likeability, all contribute to encouraging fan support for an individual – or at the very least to protecting him from abuse. If, however, his performances are perceived to be to the detriment of the side, everything changes. He is no longer guaranteed the support of the crowd, whose main obligation, as I suggested earlier, is to protect the interests of the team. If the player in question happens to be a diver, lazy, and unlikeable (as some bloggers contended is the case with Eboué – I personally have not seen him play enough to comment), then abuse is likely to come his way the quicker.

“50,000 Geordies can’t be wrong” I once heard Kevin Keegan say. We’re all aware, of course, that the herd instinct and self-interest of a crowd mean that 50,000 people can be wrong. Perhaps, as some bloggers suggested, there are too many Johnny-Come-Lately “Tarquins” in the Arsenal crowd, meaning a lessened understanding of the game among those in the stands. Perhaps 20 years of success have resulted in too-high expectations from those watching. Nevertheless, if the crowd were booing him in order to express their belief that he was harming the team, even if they were wrong to do so, they were within their rights. Our advice to Mr. Eboue must, therefore, be to suck it up. To his credit, it appears that may be exactly what he is going to do.

"The Runyonesque Archetype" (a response to Ringo37's "Talking the Talk") - Beyond the Pale‏

A few words of response and clarification may be in order re. Ringo37's recent post here on the great sportswriting tradition of which the work of Damon Runyon (1880-1946) still stands as both prototype and principal representative.

First, Ringo37 credits Runyon with capturing "the familiar spirit of the Polo Fields and Madison Square Gardens".

To be a bit of a fact-stickler, actually that was not Polo Fields but Polo Grounds--at 157th Street, beneath Coogan's Bluff, in New York City, where assembled the cream of New York's sporting society in the baseball season of 1911, when Damon Runyon, the hottest young spark in the Hearst journalistic empire, freshly imported from Denver (where for the Denver Post he'd reported on the activities of Bat Masterson, ex-sheriff of Dodge City and prominent promoter of sporting and gambling activities in Denver) took up the baseball beat, covering the New York Giants of manager John McGraw for Hearst's American. Not polo but baseball--and business--took place at the Polo Grounds.

And among the kinds of business that took place there--like those which took place beginning in the late Twenties at Tex Rickard's Madison Square Garden, a singular garden in fact largely of gambling, blood and dirty money--were shady-side activities that Runyon knew intimately and wrote of with the authority of an insider.

Ringo37 and commentators on his piece have introduced several parallels among Runyon's contemporaries and successors. The first of these, and the best comparison, is Ring Lardner. Lardner began not at the Saturday Evening Post but as a junior writer at the American (when one of his pieces happened to appear above one of Runyon's, there was hell to pay, and it never happened again). But in their time it was well known that the differences between Runyon and Lardner were greater than the similarities. Both came from America's heartlands and wrote brilliantly in an invented and stylized version of the vernacular, but the likeness ended there.

Runyon was a tough, laconic teetotaler--a reformed drunk in fact--who lived and worked and traveled among the seamier precincts of Broadway. Lardner cultivated a slightly more genteel demeanor, drank heavily, was a Long Island neighbor of F.Scott Fitzgerald, and was socially conversant with a "literary" crowd (Scott and Zelda, Dorothy Parker, Edmund Wilson) who stood off from Runyon as the polite always stand off from those regarded as associates of the truly dangerous: Runyon's own associates included the dapper playboy Mayor Jimmy Walker, picturesque hoods like Abba Dabba Berman and terrifying gangster lords like Al Capone (who would one day be Runyon's neighbor in Florida).

In a fascinating review of what remains a useful book on the subject of what Ringo37 calls "the Runyonesque Archetype"--Tom Clark's The World of Damon Runyon--Lardner's son Ring, Jr. (himself no slouch as a writer, his credits including the M*A*S*H screenplay) underlines the basic opposition of character and temperament between his father and Runyon.

"Half a century ago in the Georgica section of East Hampton, where my father and Grantland Rice had bought land together and built adjoining houses on the ocean, there was a slight taint attached to the name of Damon Runyon...I got the impression in my teens that there was something vaguely shady about Damon Runyon. As Tom Clark points out, the disapproval was all on one side. Runyon couldn't understand why his colleagues would want to spend time a hundred miles from Broadway finding their favorite diversion in a game he disparaged 'because golf doesn't require any courage, except the pants'... He shared none of my father's fondness for Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker...or Granny Rice's for some leading figures of the social and business worlds. And they, moral and fastidious men both, couldn't understand what they regarded as a moral deficiency in him. It wasn't only gangsters and con men and ordinary denizens of the underworld whom Runyon chose as friends and drew on for fictional characters. He had quite a close relationship going with Al Capone, just as his friend Walter Winchell did with Lucky Luciano. And they felt there was something not quite right about a sportswriter getting involved in the actual promotion of athletic events, especially of prizefights with prearranged results."

Over the years Runyon covered the baseball Giants, a frequent guest in the Polo Grounds owners' box of the club was Arnold Rothstein, a New York gambling king. Rothstein would be made legendary by Runyon in short stories where he appears thinly-disguised as an imposing character called "The Brain", and also, somewhat more thickly veiled, would figure as the shadowy-grotesque "Meyer Wolfsheim" in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Among other questionable activities, he bankrolled the bucket shops and rum-running operations of one of the boxholding club owners Horace Stoneham; backed the Havana racetrack enterprise of Stoneham and manager McGraw; and even invested in a pool hall run by McGraw (Rothstein, as Runyon knew from first-hand observation, hung out there shooting nine-ball at $100 a game). When three policemen were shot in Rothstein's gambling parlor, the Partridge Club, another of the Giants owners, Judge Francis McQuade--as Runyon would report with typical close-mouthed cynicism--obligingly dismissed charges against twenty of twenty-one persons arrested. Rothstein had indeed personally brokered the McQuade-Stoneham-McGraw purchase of the Giants; it was not until a few years after it became apparent not only to Runyon and Fitzgerald but practically everybody else that Rothstein had also masterminded the infamous "fixing" of the 1919 World Series, that he was finally discouraged from appearing any more in the owners' box.

The difference between the Runyon "insider" strain of Golden Era sportswriting and the less-involved, more distanced Lardner "literary" strain is worth going into because it brings out an underlying class difference--which in turn sheds some interesting light on the latter-day parallels offered by Ringo37 and his Pseuds commentators.

For my money the only parallel cited by Ringo37 and his commentators that bears much weight is that brought up by Guitou: i.e. Jim Murray, the late, legendary Los Angeles Times sports columnist who consciously and openly patterned his writing approach after Runyon's, and to a great degree managed to live up to that high standard in his work over many decades.

As to others cited: Ringo37 mentions Hornby, Plimpton and Mailer. But Hornby's work is a bit too clever, selfconscious and distanced to really bear much relation to the tradition under discussion, and the more literary he gets the further away he moves from the prize ring/poolhall ambiance that is Runyon's home ground; "cute" is certainly one term not applicable to anything Runyon ever wrote. Plimpton and Mailer, even more, were "literary" writers whose other-side-of-the-tracks assignments on sporting beats always felt very much to this writer like high-class slumming. (Plimpton, for whom I once worked, was a prince of a fellow in many ways, but a tough guy he definitely was not; in fact he didn't have to be; it's a little-known fact, speaking of class as we were, that among the possessions of G.P.'s New England WASP family was the original manuscript of one of The Canterbury Tales.)

MouthoftheMersey introduces The New Yorker's Roger Angell and Anthony Lane into the discussion. The New Yorker and everything it represents, in terms of U.S. sociology, are diametric opposites of "the Runyonesque". Angell is a nice, polite, sensitive baseball writer who would have been entirely out of his depth on any Runyon assignment--say, interviewing Jack Dempsey about his days "riding the rails", or covering the murder trial of Ruth Snyder, who eliminated her spouse with one hefty swing of a sash weight. MacMillings hits the target here when he deftly dismisses Angell from the discussion as a "chin-stroking" type. And as for Anthony Lane, the movie critic, with this suggestion we have moved all the way across the board from the fight-ring to the fey (and I don't mean Tina).

One final note: Ringo37 laments that "England doesn't really have a sportswriting tradition". Is he being a strict purist and eliminating writers of Irish origin from consideration, or can it be he's really never heard of the wonderful historian of the London prize ring of several centuries ago, the immortal Pierce Egan? To put it as Egan's great fan Damon Runyon might once have, Pierce Egan's furbishment of fistic fact has never been surpassed. And that, fellow Pseuds, is saying something.

Histon v Leeds, 30 November 1973 - mountainstriker

Histon’s recent victory over Leeds was a classic FA Cup tie featuring ITV coverage that equalled its glory days of the World of Sport and The Big Match. Leaving the Guild Hall in Hartlepool where Big Daddy - roared on by a crowed of homicidal grannies high on a lethal cocktail of gin and mint imperials - had finally triumphed over Jim Breaks, Steve Rider, his bouffant greying visibly on camera, welcomed us to the Glassworld Stadium - home of Histon Town.

Battered throughout by a North Sea gale that seemed to pick up mud as it hammered across the Fens, the pitch had been reduced to a quagmire on which carefully weighted passes became becalmed like dumplings in my old Mum’s stew. Not that you could tell mind. Every time the lens panned towards the Histon goal, it was met by a volley of rain that obliterated everything as completely as Kevin Keegan on a bike. Shots between cameras were accompanied by the off screen squeak of hanky on lens and, as the half wore on, a halo of steam leant the action the kind of soft focus usually only afforded to Joan Collins.

It got better. As another clearance was shanked onto the A14, Peter Drury, who now surely deserves to be mentioned in the same breadth as Gerald Sinstadt, was heard to chuckle ‘That’s your ball Jim!’ before seconds later Leeds fans grabbed a pitchside microphone and treated the nation to a heartfelt rendition of ‘ITV…is fucking shit…’

As the combination of mud, rain, pies and Thermos steam rendered the players and crowed increasingly indistinguishable, the sense of time warp grew stronger – scarves became longer and more stripy, shorts got shorter, coloured boots became a uniform shade of brown and hair got longer. Then, just as you thought it couldn’t get any weirder, Histon’s Mathew Langston, sideburns flaring to Dave Watson proportions, rose like a miner from the pit to put the part timers in front with a header so firm that the smack of wet leather on head could be heard as far away as 1973.

It was all too much for the west Cambridge electricity grid, which (and I swear this is true) suffered a power cut that sent us scrambling for long forgotten transistor radios. Tuning our dials carefully, we were shocked to hear the sounds of Sport on 2 where Peter Jones was noting that Langston was a postman who was only able to play that day because he was on strike. Mercifully, a 120% pay increase was immediately forthcoming and power was quickly restored thus allowing us to see a Peter Lorimer hot shot unwittingly deflected over the bar by Histon sub Antonio Murray. For all the world, Murray appeared to have merely wandered across the goalmouth en route to his local corner shop for a can of Younger’s Tartan Ale and a packet of Spangles. ‘Oooowww! Leeds are NEVER gonna score!’ howled Sinstadt. ‘Not until at least 1992’ I thought.

At the final whistle, Histon fans invaded the pitch as the sound of Queen’s We are the Champions echoed around the ground. Marvelling at a truly great day for the FA Cup, I turned off my telly and sat in silence as the white dot faded gently from the screen. It was Sunday, so I picked up the paper and returned to the grim tidings of recession, war in the Middle East and the threat of international terrorism. Ah, I see that Slade are releasing a song entitled Merry Christmas Everybody…

The fighter still remains - Ringo37

In the week I was born, and in the city where I was born, Paul Sykes fought the Connecticut heavyweight Dave ‘Doc’ Wilson at the Theatre Club, and beat him up so badly Wilson was hospitalised for a month. A year later, in the summer of 1979, he challenged Hackney’s John Louis Gardner for the British Empire Heavyweight Championship, and lost; nine months after that, in Lagos, Nigeria, he was knocked out in the first round of his last professional fight.

Sykes died last month, at the age of sixty.

I remember him only at his worst – as a big man sat on a bus-station bench with a can of Special Brew in his fist, all bristle and bile, all mad-eyed belligerence and garbled snarl; to my dad, around town in the late 70s, Sykes was a face, and a face to be avoided if he’d had a few.

A tribute was paid to the ex-champ (BBB of C, Central Area) by the Baptist Church he attended during his period of homelessness. “There will be many things said about Paul in the next few days,” read a note posted on the church’s website, “but infinitely more important will be God's words to him. May they be full of mercy and grace.”

Mercy and grace; precious little of either in a boxer’s life.

Emollient churchisms aside, Sykes’s death passed pretty much unremarked by the world at large; his obituary runs to six digits – W6, L3, D1 – and beyond that no-one, save for those who knew and loved him, seems to have had much to say.

But a boxer leaves marks.

There’s a temptation, in looking over the old fight cards, to play at Six Degrees of Separation – something along the lines of, I danced with a boy who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales. Well, Paul Sykes fought with a man who fought with a man who fought with Muhammad Ali.

“I hated Ali,” Joe Frazier told Thomas Hauser in 1997. “Twenty years, I’ve been fighting Ali, and I still want to to take him apart piece by piece and send him back to Jesus.”

Frazier’s bitterness towards Ali is breathtaking. Is this how boxers remember boxers?

“Look at him now; he’s damaged goods.”

No peace, yet, for Frazier; no mercy, and no grace. Ali left marks on Smokin’ Joe.

“He’s finished,” Frazier insisted to Hauser. “He’s finished, and I’m still here.”

The last man to knock Paul Sykes down in the ring was the Nigerian Ngozika Ekwelum. Ekwelum, like Ali, seems to have found peace beyond boxing – but, where Ali turned to Islam, Ekwelum found his calling in self-help. On his website, the Heavyweight Champion of Africa turned cornerman for the soul doled out wisdom that ranged from the arbitrarily severe (“You must be awake by 5.00 a.m.”) through the baffling (“In order to succeed in boxing, you must have the right metalatitude”) to the soporifically banal (“Winners are positive thinkers who see good in all things”).

But it’s peace, still, of a sort, and not to be sniffed at.

“Paul loved listening to the music [at church services],” reports the website of Wakefield Baptist Church. Even that is something; many a fighter, forgotten or not, finishes up with less.

Rule Changes in Sport. Carpe Diem - PhilWest

[Editor's note: this was a lot more timely, but I'm rubbish at uploading things at the moment. Don't blame Mr West though]

In this modern era where time is of the essence, some sporting contests just go on for too long. There’s a long unnecessary build-up of tension.

Must we really be forced to watch a tennis match for three hours, an F1 Grand-prix for close to two hours, and darts for three and a half pints?

No. Let’s cut to the chase.

To enable true fans to be able to enjoy their sport and yet also allow them time to email all their friends/work colleagues/partners; update their Facebook page; and drink themselves senseless; I propose the following:

Basketball:
The game starts at 90 – 90 with all players on four fouls. Games to last two minutes. All fouls to the free-throw line. No time-outs.

Darts:
Best of one. 159-down.

Cricket:
Only play Twenty-20. Assume England have made 113-9. Give the opposition the Duckworth – Lewis target for five overs.

F1:
All races to be three laps. Drivers placed on grid in reverse order.

Athletics:
All field events to be reduced to just one round. Track events over 1500m to be abolished.

Boxing:
First punch to the chin wins.

(I thought I’d leave boxing as it is)

Tour de France:
To be decided by the total time over two stages: The first being the top 2km of the “Col de la Forclaz”, and the second being from Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe.

Golf:
Put Tiger on the tee of any hole anywhere. Tell him he needs a birdie to win. If he fails, share the prize-money between everyone else.

Must dash!

Talking the talk - Ringo37

During the summer of 1913 the Chicago Record-Herald, somewhat alarmed by the extravagant fancy of its baseball reporters, asked its readers if they would prefer a return to plain English. Such of them as were literate enough to send in their votes were almost unanimously against a change. As one of them said, “one is nearer the park when Schulte slams the pill than when he merely hits the ball”.
- HL Mencken, The American Language (1921)

England doesn’t really have a sportswriting tradition. Of course, that’s not to say that it doesn’t have a truly great tradition of writers writing about sport – but there really isn’t such a thing as an English sportswriter. Neville Cardus wrote on opera as well as cricket; Nick Hornby publishes marvellous books that aren’t about football as well as marvellous ones that are; Hugh McIlvanney would have been a great writer even if he’d never set foot in Rugby Park or the 20th May Stadium.

What, then, differentiates the sportswriter from the writer who writes on sport? Well, looking like this helps, but it isn’t strictly necessary. A sportswriter, for me, has to live and breathe the smoke, sweat and slang of his place of work – and, for me, that place of work is always the locker-room, the racetrack, the ballpark, or the boxing-ring, because, for me, the sportswriter is almost always an American.

Take Damon Runyon, for years the familiar spirit of the Polo Fields and Madison Square Gardens. Or Ring Lardner, whose baseball yarns for the Saturday Evening Post seem to reek of the bleachers and the bullpen even if you don’t know a swing from a bunt from a hole in the ground. Or the great Red Smith, whose approach to sportswriting was to “get to where the cabbage is cooking and smell the scents”.

The words are the thing: the words make the game, and in return the game makes the words.

Even when the sportswriter comes with a college degree or a Pulitzer prize attached, the focus seems still to be on the words that bubble up from the soul of the sport: see the relish with which George Plimpton recited the “splendid variety” of nicknames adopted by golf caddies (“Cut Shot, Violence, Texas Sam, the Wolfman, the Rabbit…”), or Norman Mailer’s willingness to play the role of amenuensis to Ali’s illiterate-but-gobby cornerman Bundini Brown in The Fight.

English writing on sport has traditionally adopted one of two distinct approaches. If it’s front-line, phoned-in-at-the-whistle reportage, you can expect a stultifying bodge-job of cliché and banality. If, on the other hand, it’s highbrow copy for the quality press, you’ll have to wait – till the next Sunday supplement or issue of Sports Illustrated, maybe, or till the William Hill shortlist shows you the way; it’s writing designed for leisurely digestion over the breakfast egg or chin-stroking rumination amid tactics chalkboards and old Subbuteo sets. Where are the English sportswriters who can spit out stories as punchy and pungent as tobacco-juice? – the guys (and dolls) who, in AJ Liebling’s phrase, can write better than anyone who can write faster, and faster than anyone who can write better?

Well, maybe they’re right here – online. Minute-by-minute reportage by the likes of Cricinfo, the BBC and, oh okay then, the Guardian has brought an immediacy to the written sports report that outstrips the rattling typewriters of even the most deadline-crazed old-school pressroom. And it’s here that we find hoicks and nurdles, flays and funks, slugfests and gamefaces – here, just like on the pitch or in the ring, spontaneity takes precedence over pontificating, and the language is as lively as the onfield action.

Half the time, I don’t give a damn whether a sportswriter knows his stuff or not; half the time, all that matters is that he talks the talk. The poet Carl Sandburg said that slang was “a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work”. True enough – but it’s also a language that more than earns its corn when it just pulls on a fedora, lights up a cigar and goes out to play.

Seven rule changes - MacMillings

Like a love affair, the rules of sport must be inflexible, subject to video replay, and should favour one side over the other. The following changes are the only ones necessary.

Formula 1 – How can I take you seriously if all you do, essentially, is drive around in circles for an hour and a half? That’s not a measure of driving skills. Traffic lights, roundabouts and pedestrians to be added to all F-1 circuits.

Tennis – if a player’s first serve is a fault, the second serve should be taken left-handed. This will, quite rightly, favour left-handers.

Boxing – With UFC on the rise, it’s time for boxing to get back to basics. All fighters should be naked and oiled-up, as the Ancient Greeks intended. You’re a homoerotic sport, Boxing. Act like one.

Basketball – Introduce handicap system based on player height.
Under 6’: Step ladder
6’ to 6’6”: Shoes with springs
6’ 7” to 7’: May only hop
Over 7’: Not allowed to use hands.

Football – Everton to present the 1984 F.A. Cup to the rightful winners, Watford, who only lost because big cheater Andy Gray headed the ball out of Steve Sherwood’s hands and into the net. It’s not really a rule change. I’m just saying.

Cricket – Bowlers have to use different types of ball, according to their ability.
Warne: Beach ball
Boycott’s Mum: Orange
Harmison: (Home) Balloon; (Away) GPS

Golf – Players to run between shots and hit a moving ball, while having their picture taken and being verbally abused. You know, like in a real sport.

The road to Vancouver - Allout

Quirky Scottish sports have a mixed record in gaining popularity abroad. A bizarre game featuring the hitting of a little white ball with odd-shaped clubs is now played all over the developed world. On the other hand tossing the caber, like deep fried Mars bars and black pudding suppers, remains a Scottish eccentricity. In the middle of these two extremes lies curling, a game involving the throwing of three stone lumps of granite on a sheet of ice towards a target 40 metres away..

Three weekends ago David Murdoch’s team (it is customary in curling to use the skip’s name to refer to a team) from Lockerbie won the right to represent Scotland at the European Championships next month in Örnsköldsvik beating Warwick Smith’s Perth team in the key match. Örnsköldsvik is in northern Sweden, just under the Arctic Circle and in December there are only a couple of hours of light each day. In sporting terms though Scotland are hardly entering the twilight zone and they start as favourites, with Murdoch having skipped (the skip picks the tactics and, usually, plays the final and most important stones) Scotland to two victories in the European Championships in the last five years. In the same time frame the team have won the World Championships once and finished runners-up twice. In addition, Murdoch and his third (vice captain) Ewan Macdonald, are both now in their early thirties and should therefore be at their peak over the next couple of years – a male curler’s peak being somewhat different from a female gymnast’s!

Sweden and Switzerland, the two other traditional forces in European curling will, of course, fancy their chances of victory as well. Sweden will be particularly motivated playing on home ice, although their line-up looks weaker than in previous years following the retirement of three-time World Champion Peja Lindholm.

However, as much as winning the trophy itself, all teams will have an eye on general form as Vancouver in February 2010 gets ever closer. To a minority sport the Olympics is the Holy Grail. For curling in Britain, the fact that it is in the Winter Olympics (rather than the summer version) is even better. Team GB (did I really just use that phrase!) may have won 19 golds in Beijing but even the lottery millions will struggle to produce a “Cool Runnings” style bobsleigh team. In short, curling is one of Britain’s only medal chances and when gold is on the line people watch; as proven by the 5.7 million Britons who watched Rhona Martin, a Renfrewshire housewife, play a perfectly judged tap-back to defeat Switzerland in the Salt Lake City final.

The 2010 Olympics being held in Canada provides further motivation. Canada is not only home to lumberjack competitions and massive ice hockey hits; but also over one million curlers and is, by a massive distance, the curling world’s dominant country. The interest means that the arena in Vancouver will be regularly packed; a far cry from the empty seats in Turin (2006). Thus, playing in an Olympics in Canada is every curler’s dream.

Murdoch’s team in particular will have a point to prove in Vancouver. In Turin they were the dominant team in the round robin stages. Their crushing win against a strong Swedish side was particularly convincing with Ewan Macdonald playing every stone perfectly (each stone is critically measured by watching experts and entered on a database). This was unheard of in Olympic history and an 80% success rate is generally considered a reasonable performance.. Looking back though, the team peaked at the wrong time and lost momentum in a dead rubber having already qualified for the final four. They went on to lose both the semi final and the bronze match, finishing a disappointing fourth.

Since 2006, the performances of Murdoch’s team have confirmed their status as one of the world’s very best. They may very well come back from Örnsköldsvik with gold but, should this happen, they will no doubt keep the champagne on ice [cue drummer]. The newly ambitious British Olympic regime has targeted two golds (womens and mens) for curling in 2010 and everything from now on is geared towards that end.

On the Clapham omnibus - Allout

Charlie, the thirty something man on the Clapham omnibus, carefully picks the one graffiti free seat and stretches back following a hard day at work. Out of the corner of his eye he sees a large sports bag and, eschewing the obvious explanation that it is being used to transport the takings of a local break-in, he thinks how unusual it is to see a Briton participating in sport, rather than drinking copious amounts of lager whilst watching others sweat. Showing lateral thinking he didn’t think possible, his mind turns to the personnel of the England Test cricket team.

And who could be more “cricket” than the well-spoken, public school educated opening batsman Andrew Strauss. Unfortunately, Strauss’s career is beginning to resemble Charlie’s year so far: it started with fireworks but got pretty bad, pretty quickly. In fact, the only serious runs Strauss has scored for the last two years were against New Zealand (or New Zealand 2nds as some Mouthy bloke on a pinko-liberal sports blog aptly calls them).

No, Strauss has clearly been found out thinks Charlie as his mind moves to a more enigmatic batsman. Oscar, Charlie’s former work colleague and born optimist, has told Charlie for months that Ian Bell is the most technically adept batsman in the side with a highly respectable Test record. Charlie is more streetwise though. Bell will always be soft and prone to being bullied by the likes of Shane Warne; his debut Ashes series proved that. With his character he will never score runs when it really matters. Charlie grins as he thinks back to flushing younger kids’ heads down the toilet as a schoolboy.

There is one England batsman who will never be intimated though. Charlie hadn’t known what to make of KP when he first broke into the Test side – he hadn’t liked the sound of someone choosing England because of a quota system in their country of his birth. Pietersen had won him over with his batting form though. And nobody can claim that KP only thinks of money any more. After all, he decided not to pump his team up for the possibility of winning $1 million a man for a couple of hours work, preferring instead to save them for the proper challenges ahead.

And what about Andrew Flintoff? Great man chuckles Charlie to himself thinking about both his outstanding performances in the Ashes 2005 and his hungover demeanour at the post-series celebration. Just a pity he has been at more breakdowns than the AA over the last three years. Or maybe the other AA would be more appropriate thinks Charlie mischievously as he considers the infamous Fredalo incident.

Then there’s Steve Harmison. How many chances does he get? In real life you only get one chance. Oscar learned this the hard way when he got into a booze-fuelled fight with the boss at the office Christmas party. Unsurprisingly, a P45 was on Oscar’s desk the following Monday. What chance was Harmy on? Sixth maybe, or seventh? Charlie had lost count. Yet still some people view him as the saviour of English cricket.

Charlie has always had a soft spot for spinners, and he smiles as he remembers Monty Panesar in 2006: unable to bat and field, and with limited bowling variety and cricketing nous, but with a beautiful high action and dangerous on turning pitches. Yes, he had a lot of rough edges but he was young and would improve with coaching and experience. Charlie’s smile turns quickly to a grimace when he realises that the Monty of November 2008 is exactly the same but two and a half years older.

Not much of a team, but at least the Aussies are suddenly struggling. Plus, reflects Charlie, Beefy thinks we will win the Ashes and he took more than 350 Test wickets and scored over 5,000 Test runs, so he should know.. Right? Unable to answer that question definitively Charlie’s mind turns to more pressing matters, like whether the long-legged girl from accounts will make it to post-work drinks at the Rat & Parrot on Friday.

England's dilemma by Mouth of the Mersey

Should England's cricketers board a flight to India and play two the Test matches scheduled for December? They are now with their families and friends in England and it's a fair bet that few wives and parents will be urging them to return, but you can't always get what you want.

England's security adviser is assessing the position now and his report will be keenly awaited by players and administrators. I hope he will be free of any influences seeking a pragmatic and hence negative report, which would be convenient for his employers and the players with whom he must work in the future.

If he assesses the security risk as acceptable, what should the England players do? I suggest that they consider the the following issues.

When London Transport came under attack in July 2005, Londoners, including tube and bus drivers, did not refuse to go to work, indeed made a point of carrying on business as usual. Cricket, a sport that has always been played in dangerous places, needs its leading lights to show that same fortitude - there is no future for the game and, by extension, for the players (or rather the players that will follow them) if matches are only played in "safe" locations.

The handsome central contracts agreed by many of the England party were concluded in full knowledge of an itinerary which included visits to places recently hit by terrorist attacks - since India's cities have been targets of some time. Does the Mumbai outrage make a terrorist attack any more likely in Chennai come mid-December? Those central contracts also allow the families back home to buy their way out of other risks, a point made by KP, the England captain in his famous remark about who was going to pay for his kids' school fees.

Finally, the cricketers might consider that risk is a part of life. More people will be killed on Britain's roads in the days the team are scheduled to be in India than were killed in the Mumbai outrage, but that doesn't stop them driving their cars. They may also reflect on the fact that many of the people paying for their central contracts through Sky subscriptions will work in dangerous places, from building sites to rescue services through to armed forces in theatres such as Afghanistan.

I don't deny that this is a difficult few days for KP and his men, but I hope that they will see that the goodwill they will engender from cricket fans everywhere, and especially among the teeming millions on the sub-continent, makes fulfilling their fixtures worth it. I also hope that the captain and senior players will see the bigger picture I have outlined above and show the greatest quality required for success on the sporting field on anywhere else - leadership.

Leeroycal's BB5 piece

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, they say. This truism is at its truest when it comes to television programmes. UKTV Gold and its constantly multiplying off-shoots are testament to just how lucrative the fuzzy memory of the viewers can be. (It is a little known fact that by 2015, 85% of digital TV output will be repeats of Howard's Way and Turnabout). But, if you actually take the time to watch any of it, the overriding feeling is not of fondness, more the dull yearning of disappointment. An emotion all too familiar for viewers of Match of the Day.

The BBC lost Match of the Day to ITV between 2001 and 2004. MotD was and is the fulcrum of the average football fan's Saturday night - or Sunday morning if you have small children and it's your turn to get up - and this loss in itself was difficult enough for the average football fan to bear. This was before the full horror of ITV's The Premiership was unleashed.

The list of problems with the ITV offering was fulsome. It was on at the wrong time; U2 theme tune; only 28 minutes of actual football in a 70-minute show; punditry featuring Andy Townsend in a trailer; and there was an inexplicable "Premiership Parliament" section featuring invariably fat fans yapping pub level analysis and rants. Even the presence of Des Lynam, who jumped from the BBC and over the shark simultaneously, could not save it from losing a ratings war with The Weakest Link. The whole debacle was overseen by the then ITV Head of Sport, Brian Barwick, who so impressed the FA a few years later they put him in charge of the English game.

By week three of the 2001-02 season fans were screaming for Match of the Day to return.

On its reappearance in 2004 very little had changed, but who cared? It was the BBC; it was Gary, Alan and Lawro; no adverts; not a single faux-Irishman in a trailer; no U2: the world was back on its axis. However, like having your hand trapped in a car door is preferable to having it hacked off with a rusty machete but still not exactly a pleasurable experience, the return of the BBC flagship may have been preferable to the dreck served up by ITV, but this did not mean it was a great programme.

Michael Robinson, former Liverpool striker and the writer, director, presenter, doyen and darling of Spanish TV's La Liga highlights show El Dia Despues is withering of the great BBC beast. "It's been hijacked by ex-footballers." he said "There is a screaming necessity for a journalist to challenge them." How right he is. Like so much other sports coverage, Match of the Day has fallen into the trap of exclusively hiring armies of former pros, and this increase has unfortunately coincided with an exponential decrease in the quality control of the personnel they hire. Alan Hansen was a true maverick when he appeared in the early 90's: articulate, insightful and brave - can any of these adjectives apply to latest recruit Alan Shearer?

"There's no recognition of culture." Robinson continued, highlighting another issue. "Just get Lineker, because he was football's Julie Andrews. Sling him on with Hansen. The others are cheap ex-players throwing three dodgy verbs around. They don't feel football". .

So where do the BBC go with their coverage? The answer may in fact lie within their own network. Match of the Day 2 is a lighter mix of quirky analysis, press reviews, and a little bit of fan culture that is less reverential and certainly a lot braver. Adrian Chiles is not to everyone's tastes, but you can at least feel the love of football in his work, and he is prepared to challenge the accepted clichés of punditry as opposed to using his presenter's chair as a platform to launch sub-Lynam, teeth-scrapingly awful one-liners. It could be time for the corporation to bring another good show over from the second station to BBC One.

Another truism that the ubiquitous 'they' offer up is "be careful what you wish for". In the case of the return of Match of the Day, four years on, they are probably right.

The Rome derby on a laptop - PrivateDic

Sports fans of a certain age reminisce about huddling round a crackling wireless to listen to the ‘Matthews Final’, or joining half the street in cramming into the living room at no. 20, where they had a TV, to watch England win the World Cup in black and white. It sounds quaint in the age of wall-to-wall Sky and Setanta, yet a fortnight ago I found myself experiencing the modern equivalent as I hunched over my laptop squinting at the windowette of live feed from Rome’s Stadio Olimpico, scene of the biggest football match in Europe that weekend.

It seemed worth it when, on 50 minutes, a Lowry-esque figure swung in a threatening cross and Roma’s Julio Baptista—unmistakable, even in low-definition—rose to guide a perfect header low to the left of the Lazio keeper. It reminded me of Jurgen Klinsmann in his early 90s pomp, whose brilliant headed goals I’d seen so much more clearly on my mum’s clapped-out cathode ray Ferguson. Now, via broadband, I watched a cubist mass of colour pulse in triumph on the curva sud, while the blob warming up for Lazio on the touchline could only have been a kitchen sink, given the desperation with which the biancoceleste pixel-men began to pour forward.

My frustration at having to watch this brilliant sporting spectacle on a post-it note of a screen is only partly explained by my love of Serie A. The annoyance is doubled by the meaningless alternative fixtures offered on Sky and Setanta, clogging the EPG like cholesterol in a furred artery. I could have sampled Lille v St Etienne, or Estudiantes v Argentinos Juniors—but to me, those games didn’t matter.

In the last fortnight we have endured the fourth round of the Carling Cup (is it nearly over yet?) and a midweek of international friendlies. I enjoyed Wales’s performance in Denmark; shame it didn’t count for anything. Why schedule these games for mid-November, four months ahead of the next meaningful qualifier? Plenty of Premier League managers asked the same question. We must pity the poor sports journalist, who not only gets a press pass to the Champions League final, but also has to cover the dross that acts as filler in the cable and satellite schedules.

We are in danger of creating an era of Meaningless Sport. Our summer game, cricket, is practically dead at domestic level. Attendances go unpublished, for the excellent reason that they would be hugely embarrassing. Aside from the handful of teams that find themselves in contention, no-one cares about the myriad county tournaments, which seem to find their raison d’etre as sponsorship opportunities more than sporting contests. It’s widely believed that the only appeal of the IPL is the money, but how about the attraction of playing in front of passionate full houses?

Rugby is going the same way as our domestic cricket, particularly in Wales, where artificial ‘regions’ field weakened sides against unfamiliar opponents while waiting for the Heineken Cup to come round. Even England’s feted Guinness Premiership schedules games to clash with internationals—while England took on the world champions at Twickenham, Leicester were playing Harlequins at Welford Road. As for football, most of its competitions have been fading for years, with the FA Cup, Carling Cup, and UEFA Cup reduced to a status similar to the Pontins Reserve League of seasons past.

How to sustain interest when your channel of choice shows the England U-16s, but not the senior side? What to do when you’ve seen the first leg of a tie live, but the second leg’s on another channel, which you don’t have? How to get worked up about Vitesse-Feyenoord in lieu of the Rome derby? What interest in pitting Arsenal’s youth team against Wigan? Advice is helpfully provided during the commercial break: ‘It matters more when there’s money on it’, Skybet tells us.

Here’s a thought—and let’s hope it occurs to the broadcasters and administrators who schedule our sporting entertainment: perhaps it matters more when we care about it. I’ll take the Rome derby on a laptop ahead of mid-table Eredivisie any day.

Football crunch - MacMillings

Those of you wondering how the global financial crisis is going to affect football might be asking the wrong question. It may not simply be a case of football clubs being affected by the Wall Street collapse. What if they are being run just like failed and failing lending institutions and Wall Street firms – with, at best, scant concern for shareholders and consumers, and sometimes outright incompetence?

The boom years that allowed anybody to get easy credit because lenders couldn’t imagine that the housing market would ever fall again, saw huge overspending and inflated home prices. As businesses with potentially large profits (like housing in a rising market), football clubs shifted their emphasis from means-based spending, to overspending based on projected revenues. But if the market predictions of mortgage lenders, Wall Street firms and the US Federal Reserve could be so far off, why should we think that the projections of the biggest football clubs’ ownership have been any better?

Did it occur to clubs that a shift towards heavy borrowing based on predicted future profits might leave them vulnerable to the same kind of financial difficulties that lenders faced in the US when homeowners saw gas prices go up and their jobs lost, and they could no longer afford to make their payments? That official club shirts and other merchandise are discretionary spending items? That there might be a financial downturn one day, and that, when it comes to choosing between making a mortgage payment and buying a season ticket, a family’s home might just come first?

There is one big club whose buyer funded his purchase by taking out a huge loan, based on high risk debt notes, backed by three US hedge funds. Yes, hedge funds. You may have heard that some of those aren’t doing so well right now. Currently, the debt’s interest payments alone are huge, and the onus for making those payments has, in effect, been passed on to the consumer by large increases in ticket prices.

At least one big English club has a creaking stadium, too small to create the revenue it wants, and is trying to borrow huge amounts of money to finance a new stadium that will make all its dreams come true. Assuming a sufficient loan is secured, is there any guarantee that the money won’t disappear half-way through construction? What if future revenue from success on the pitch, ticket sales, and TV and sponsorship deals don’t match up to projections? Ask Leeds United fans what division their team is currently in – and their club made its mistakes in far less difficult times, economically speaking.

There are clubs run by rich men with little actual interest in football. Sometimes a billionaire drops his toy after he finds a shinier one to play with. Ask Oxford United fans how they like life in the Conference, if you think that won’t happen.

The free market says that a house is worth precisely what a buyer is prepared to pay for it. That’s just as true in a down market. If a club’s having a fire sale, and needs to shift a player and his £5 million/year contract, and all the other clubs in the land are downsizing and economizing in the face of financial difficulties, even if the selling club can find a taker for him, that buyer won’t care how well he’s playing, or how much he was last bought for. If the club needs the money to stay afloat, his value is whatever they can get for him.

Are there any positives? Who, if anyone, will not only survive, but prosper? If you’ve been moaning that your team’s owners lack ambition, don’t buy success in the transfer market, and are thus keeping the club from regaining its “rightful place” among the big boys, stop complaining. Suddenly, running your company with a fiscally conservative business model doesn’t look quite so foolish. Give it a couple of years. If the big boys fall, the meek might be about to inherit the League.

It's a Sin - Sisu

The late Washington Post correspondent Mary McGrory once wrote: Baseball is what we were. Football is what we have become. She could not have known how right she may turn out to be. Today, as the MLB seeks to exorcise the asterisks that will forever stalk its record books, the NFL could be on the verge of its own BALCO moment.

After crossing for a franchise-record 54th career touchdown with a trademark rush against Green Bay on Monday night, New Orleans Saints running back Deuce McAllister slowly walked back towards the sidelines, cradling the ball. While the crowd bellowed the Mississippi native’s name, Sean Payton, the Saints coach, met him with a lingering embrace.

Touching as the moment was, it is hardly in keeping with the way stat-happy Americans generally celebrate their sporting achievements. But then, McAllister was not in the mood for celebration. After eight seasons and a rollercoaster career with his one club, that touchdown is likely to be his closing contribution in front of the Saints faithful. And they might never have known.

The reason? A batch of spiked weight-loss pills.

McAllister is one of a group of players handed a four game suspension after testing positive for bumetanide, a loop diuretic used to relieve fluid retention by those suffering from congestive heart failure. This alone, while ethically questionable, is not enough to bother the testers, but its ability to flush traces of steroids out of an athlete’s system is.

The thing is, nobody believes McAllister intentionally took it. Not because of his reputation – born, raised and educated in Mississippi, a record-breaking college footballer who matured into a Pro Bowl player with the Saints, twice battling back from knee injuries to the starting line up, and founding his own kids’ charity and car dealership along the way – or even his understandable popularity.

McAllister was taking StarCaps a fairly poor excuse for a weight-loss pill. None of its listed ingredients appear on the NFL’s banned list, but it has now emerged that not all of the ingredients were listed – including that pesky bumenatide. Instead, the NFL’s anti-doping administration is in the dock, as it transpires that they had been aware of the supplement’s secret ingredient for two years. Dr. John Lombardo, the long-standing advisor on NFL steroid policy, apparently learnt that StarCaps had been spiked with bumetanide in late 2006.

However, fearing that other players testing positive for bumetanide would claim that they were taking StarCaps, even if they weren’t, he decided to keep it to himself. Which begs the question – has the NFL lost sight of the point of an anti-doping policy? How can they push for the banning substances on the grounds of protecting athletes, while knowingly allowing them to continue taking a banned medication in order to prevent others from finding a loophole to take something else?

The ethics of doping policies cannot be allowed to produce false positives. Once that happens, once you lose faith in the testers, the game is up.

David Cornwell, representing McAllister, told the league’s appeals committee last week, said: “If Dr. Lombardo had notified NFL players that StarCaps contained bumetanide, Deuce would have never used the product to lose weight.”

Despite all of this, McAllister is expected to lose his appeal. He faces four weeks without pay, the Saints – already denied Reggie Bush – are left without a recognised running back, as their hopes of making the play-offs fade. Worse still, McAllister’s contract will most likely be terminated at the end of the season to reduce the Saints’ payroll – his reward for eight years service, such is the nature of NFL salaries.

As a final insult, had the test result not been leaked, McAllister would have left with the indelible mark of drugs cheat against his name. The NFL are adamant that positive tests should remain unreported until the player has had the chance to appeal, in an effort to prevent innocent players facing unjustified suspicion tainting their careers. But the circumstances of a failed test also go unreported, as does the substance, leaving fans to think the worst.

"I'm just going to get ready to play Sunday," was all McAllister, resigned, could say on the matter. "I can't worry about what I can't control."

If this is what they have become, walking off for the last time, you’d keep the ball, too. Everything else, it seems, is there for the taking.

Eight rule changes - Mouth of the Mersey

Like a love affair, if a sport isn’t improving, it’s dying, especially in an age when there has never been more competition for diminishing attention spans. Sports’ rulebooks have always been mutable things, intermittently updated to move the sport forward, but not too far forward – you can leave your core audience behind. The best rule changes should simplify and not complicate – the competitors are perfectly capable of complicating matters themselves. Lastly, rule changes should work at all levels of a sport, not just for the elite.

So what rule changes do sports need today and do they meet the three criteria above?

Football – the distance defenders must retreat from a free-kick to be increased to twelve yards (eleven metres). This change would give full value to free-kicks just outside the box and encourage the return of the free-kick specialist (preferably temperamental and feuding with whoever is available). Prosaically, the extra two yards in the rulebook would guarantee the full ten yards on the pitch, as opposed to the nine or so granted to attacking sides by most referees too reluctant to stop the charging defender or the creeping wall.

Football – No automatic red card for the “professional foul” if a penalty is awarded. This is simply a re-interpretation of the current rule – a defender fouling an attacker in the box does not deny a goal-scoring opportunity, but creates one through the award of the penalty. The punishment would fit the crime and the fans would have the eleven vs eleven match they have the right to expect.

Football – the fourth official to keep time, stopping the clock for all breaks in play (at his sole discretion and not including time when the ball is off the field in the normal course of the game, eg preparing for a goal-kick). The fourth official to blow the whistle at half-time and full-time himself. 90 minutes football should mean exactly that, not 88 minutes football and 2 minutes sorting out substitutions or getting the physio on and off the field. In the often crucial and frenetic closing passages of play, the referee could concentrate fully on the play, not be glancing at two watches every ten seconds. When there is no fourth official, timekeeping reverts to the referee.

Cricket – “Bad light stops play” to be modified to “Dangerous light stops play”. Just one playing condition to apply worldwide. Floodlights must be used if available. The judgement of light to rest solely with the umpires and the deciding criterion to be danger, taking account of the protective equipment worn by batsmen. This is the de facto situation in the recreational game, so the change would apply through all levels of cricket.

Cricket – The match referee to decide on each session’s reasonable number of overs (with 15 the norm adjusted for genuine hold-ups in play) and penalise the fielding side one run for each ball not delivered, updating the extras on the scoreboard before the start of the next session. Everyone would know where they stand, as would spectators, who would get value for money. Outside the professional game, there are often local conditions for failure to bowl the required overs in the stated time – such conditions would remain.

Formula 1 – Pit stops for tyre changes to be allowed only if the tyre is “burst”. No re-fuelling allowed during the race. Managing tyre wear is a driving skill (as is fully accepted in motorcycle racing). Fans want to see overtaking on the track, not in the pits. Pit stops should be exceptional, not the product of computers modelling telemetry data. If a discarded tyre is assessed as functional in the parc ferme after the race, the driver is re-classified as DNF.

Boxing – Judges’ scores to be displayed on a scoreboard updated at the end of each round. The audience and the boxers would know where they stand, making fights more interesting and tactics towards the end of the fight more considered.

Tennis – Allow just one serve. The game would become more varied with the big serve a tactic instead of the norm. The serve earns too many cheap points, especially at junior level.

The Return of Lance Armstrong - mimi

Whatever you think, this is the BIG story of cycling for at least the next seven months. And headlines in the cycling press about Lance will ensure that successes earned by others on the road - eg Mark Cavendish - will be forgotten.

Last week in a feverish state of aaargh! I wrote with all emotions spilling freely about Lance. Thanks to our wonderful editor, Lord Ebren, none of you were subjected to my wroth.

I am now re-thinking my words, but you know what? I still feel the same.

So that there is no doubt here, I’ll lay my beliefs right on the line. I hate Armstrong. I don’t think he is a cheat, but he rode the Tour as a bully and there were team members who have been proved cheats.

I don’t think he would have won seven times if everyone cycled clean. That’s my viewpoint but now we have to face the fact that Mr Armstrong is coming back to the peloton.

He has already had the rules changed so that he can ride in The Tour Down Under – not a race we usually look at for any sort of form guide for the main season, but whoops a daisy – rules bent for Lance next year.

Now here’s the thing – since Monsieur Armstrong rode as a professional cyclist, a lot of rules have changed. Doping is no longer “de rigeur” and some teams, such as Columbia and Garmin, are leading the charge in “clean cycling”. Team CSC is not far behind.

But who has Lance signed with? None of these. No – he’s going to ride for Astana. What a wonderful legacy they have! Say Vinokourov. Vino, Vino, where do you get your speed from?

Apparently Lance is worried about how the fans who line the roads in France will feel about his return. He has said that he has received death threats. Well there are a few steps to travel before he even gets to the Tour.

Is he fit enough for a Grand Tour? Three weeks of hell is a tough challenge and after a few years of chumming with pop stars and politicians isn’t a great way of warming up for a Tour that is so very much not tailor-made for Armstrong.

Why don’t we see how the warm-ups go? I’d like to see Lance barred from the Tour Down Under – why should they change the rules for him? Let him do a couple of Classics to prove his form.

Go head to head with Contador to see who is strongest in Astana. Make it true that Periero, Contador and Sastre have issued a statement: “We are pathetic and weak compared to him [Armstrong]. Our victories [in Le Tour] feel hollow.”

I think these and many others in today’s peloton have the legs on Lance.

There is no doubt that Lance’s putative participation in Le Tour is garnering column inches (in newspapers that don’t even cover cycling!), but it’s wrong. All wrong.

I would never go as far as accusing Armstrong of being dubious, but the last few years of Le Tour have been so much more interesting without him. He ruled the peloton in a way that we have never seen before. Not in the days of Big Mig, or even The Badger.

I really didn’t like how Armstrong did it. Whether he cheated or not, I don’t care about that. I care that he spoilt the race. For years.

Now he’s coming back, and that is already making me like the race less. There’s a piece in the press about Lance using the Large Hadron Collider as a way to win the Tour. A joke, obviously, but I laugh, hollowly, because this man will be there on the start line.

The Tour next year will be all about Lance, and it shouldn’t be. It should be about which sprinter will take over from Robbie (that’ll be Mark then), and who will climb – maybe Robbie Hunter, or a Spaniard or Italian.

There was a wee bitty in the press today about LA. Apparently he is still a wee bitty worried about the “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” – ie the French. Armstrong claimed in the Guardian (an interview with Donald McRae) that the French physically threatened him. Frankly, insisting on having eff off great body guards when he rode to glory in his hay-day is likely to piss anyone off.

So there we go – I admire Lance, and enjoyed the book – It’s Not About the Bike. But never liked how he rode the Tour, never liked that he cared nothing for the Classics, and, you know, if he does ride in 2009, it’ll be the same.

I’d rather follow the Tour for the sprints next year. To see the mantle passed from Robbie to Mark. I am pretty damn sure that the top sprinters are clean, so that’ll be fun.

Overall – for GC – if they allow Lance back, well, crap, and bollocks again. I cannot see for one tiny moment how Armstrong coming back is a good thing for the sport.

Irish eyes aren't smiling - seand

Finally! Another dismal season of League of Ireland football shudders to a merciful halt. The final table may reflect Bohemians' supremacy on the pitch, but as ever in the shambolic League of Ireland the real drama occurred off the pitch.

Eight of the twelve Premier Division clubs hit major financial problems. The most spectacular meltdowns, so far, have been at two of the country's most successful clubs of recent years, 2005 champions Cork City and 2007 champions Drogheda United. Both clubs based their budgets on unrealistic financial projections and fell apart when the cash dried up. Cork's budget was built on an apparent guarantee from erstwhile owners, venture capital company Arkaga. It became apparent that no legally binding agreement was in place when Arkaga pulled out and City hit the rocks. When planning permission for Drogheda's proposed new ground was denied, and with the club's town centre home ground no longer a lucrative development prospect, the businessmen bankrolling the club soon skulked away. Both clubs entered examinership , the Irish equivalent of administration. Cork have emerged, chastened, from the process, while Drogheda's future hangs in the balance.

Things are far from rosy at champions Bohemians too. Pat Fenlon's expensive all-star squad swept to the title but the club's finances are in a parlous state. Fenlon's flamboyant spending and Bohs' ever increasing debt were based on the assumption that many millions were coming Bohs' way from the sale of Dalymount Park. However, Bohemians recently lost a court case over ownership of part of the ground, and will not be able to sell Dalymount as planned. At best Bohs should still be able to sell, build a modest replacement stadium and clear their debts, though the value of the venue has been slashed. At worst the ground will be pretty much unsaleable, the potential purchaser will want his seven-figure deposit back, and Bohs, owing many millions, could soon be homeless and pretty much penniless.

In another league in another season the stories of Galway, Sligo, Finn Harps, Cobh and Bray all failing to pay wages at various stages, St Pats' Gary Dempsey betting on his own team to lose , Drogheda's Stuart Byrne tapping up team mates, the arbitrary decision to reduce the Premier Division to ten teams and Dundalk's extraordinary last-gasp promotion would be headline grabbers in their own right, but in the quagmire of the 2008 League of Ireland season they were mere footnotes.

It is now apparent that the touted professional All Ireland League is dead in the water. Clearly there is not enough interest in Ireland to support a professional football league. It is a pity because some progress has been made in Europe, with good performances from Pats and Drogheda this year, and others recently. It seems unlikely that a semi-pro league will be able to sustain those recent improvements, which is a sad state of affairs, but one which the 'great Irish sporting public' (who are watching rugby this week, I believe) deserve.

When Father Time Whispers - PhilWest

Twenty-three years ago I played football for a staff team in West London. I was a dreadful footballer, but 1500m track training added to 80 miles/week meant I had a fair turn of speed and I was sometimes able to wear down markers by non-stop running. I could at least give the (usually false) impression that I was a danger.

I remember a player on our side who was so old/unfit/useless that no one even bothered to mark him. He traipsed up and down the wing and every so often our centre half would gently float a pass to his feet, resulting in a throw to the opposition. We offered encouragement, but I could see his frustration and sadness, and consoled him with a beer afterwards.

Three years ago I gave up football. I’m still fit for my age, but I realised with horror that no one was marking me………

I heard that voice in my head, whispering the sad truth, and I listened.

I used to believe that the Sporting Gods didn’t have this problem. They know how ruthless sport can be, and when their ankles/knees/hips/backs start to complain, they listen to them sooner rather than later.

Some exceptions to this rule exist and have a special place in our hearts: Steve Davies, Tugay Kerimoglu, and Carlos Lopez to name just three of my personal favourites.

What drives on people like these? Love of the sport? Fear of their life after retirement? Sheer bloody-mindedness?

Does it matter?

Usually not, but when I hear that Evander Holyfield is signing up to face Nikolai Valuev for the WBA boxing title, I shudder.

He has money problems, and is due to receive $750,000 for putting his life at risk so that we can talk about “the changing of the guard”.

Evander is 46. Forty-six! He will be giving away 10 inches in height and around 100lbs in weight. He hasn’t fought for over a year, and is up against an opponent who has a 70% knock-out ratio. If things go badly he’ll need a lot more than a friendly word and a pint.

If he is choosing not to listen to “the voice”, we should try our best to dissuade him.

Unbelievably, today we hear reports (actually, more like taunts) that one of only three World Heavyweight champions to have retired at the zenith is considering a return to the ring.

Lennox Lewis, one of the world’s few lucky people who can look at himself in the mirror each morning and say, “I have nothing to prove”, is reportedly considering a come-back fight.

Depressingly, many people would back him to win should he decide to take up the offer.

Lennox is an avid chess player; that game of logic and strategy, and I respect him enormously for using his intellect and quitting while his body and mental faculties were unharmed.

The next time he is locked in silent contemplation over the 64 squares, I hope he hears a voice.

Mystic blog - MacMillings

Scorpio: There can be no more glamorous time or place, Scorpio, to start your International managerial career than a freezing November night in Glasgow. Sorry, no less glamorous time or place.
Lucky Number: 1986. Unlucky Number: 1990.

Sagittarius: No matter how much you preach the virtue of “good areas”, we all know, Sagittarius, that good areas for your squad do not include: Antigua, India, or Any Cricket Ground in the World.
Lucky Letters: K, P.

Capricorn: You might hate your job, Capricorn, but did it ever occur to you that working for a club called Newcastle United Eff Cee is ideal for your talents? Enjoy! It’ll never get better than this – unless, of course, the job at It Is None Of Your Effing Business. What The Eff Are You Going To Do? You Ain't Got The Balls To Be An Effing Manager Wanderers comes up.

Aquarius: My advice, Aquarius? Go at the opposition on Wednesday night. The England players don’t like it up ‘em. Especially from a Mannschaft.

Pisces: You’re top of your World Cup Qualifying Group, Pisces, and you seem to have a Coach with the vision of DaVinci, the organizational skills of Garibaldi, and the sheer, steel stugots of Tony Soprano. But on Wednesday night, the fun stops, as it so often does, in Berlin.
Lucky Number: Probably not 2010.

Aries: From Soulmates (Northwest): “Suddenly wealthy, but underachieving, club (I’m an Aries!), unsatisfied with current relationship, seeking new man. Prefer preposterous former England managers. Ridiculoush Dutch accshent a bonush.”
Lucky Form of Government: Brutal Dictatorship.

Taurus: Mystic Blog is a teacher, and he’s about to drop some science. If 1 Scot + 1 Wimbledon Title = 1 Brit, then I’m afraid you, Taurus, will always = 1 Scot.
Unlucky Letters: SW. Unlucky Number 19.

Gemini: I can’t believe you’re both Gemini, but it’s true. Nevertheless, you’ll never be compatible in the England midfield. If you really are Twins, the only question remaining is, which one of you is the Schwarzenegger, and which the DeVito?

Cancer: Some go to India to find themselves, but all you’ve found there, Cancer, is 15 useless teammates and a strange yearning for the good old days of the South African Quota System.
Unlucky Numbers: 7-0.

Leo: You may have won the hardest race of all, Leo, but if you want Middle America to take you seriously, you’re going to have to do better than this.

Virgo: So, you beat Wigan with a team of children. Congratulations, Virgo. It isn’t going to stop your Lucky Number being 4th. At best.

Libra: Last night, I dreamt I was fighting a South African. A couple of early jabs rocked him, but soon his inexorable assault had me reeling. Next thing I know, I’m lying in the pouring SW London rain with my pants round my ankles. But don’t worry, Libra, it doesn’t mean anything; it’s just a dream. And I’m just the World’s Greatest Sporting Prognosticator.
Lucky Hemisphere: Not the Southern.