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Like my co-Samizdatista Jonathan Pearce, and like Mark Holland of Blognor Regis, I have also been watching the Winter Olympics. In truth I find the winter Olympics to rather more fun than the summer Olympics, partly because it is genuinely a more lighthearted event with more of a party atmosphere than the summer games, and partly because power in the world is rather turned upside down. (Here is a competitor from Norway - he must be good. Here is someone from the United States of America - he will be mediocre). Mostly though, I think it is the simple insanity of many of the events that I find most enjoyable. Winter sports lead to extremes of human achievement that (a) one is amazed that they are possible, but not so much as (b) one wonders why anyone would actually do this, and how the sport was invented in the first place, for surely the first twelve people to try it must have ended up killing themselves.

Mark wonders just how Britain has a luge team, or as he puts it...

Anyway, I get to wondering how on earth a chap from Pinner decides to take up the sport. I mean, say for instance I'd been so inspired by the top luging at the Calgary Olympics that I'd immediately thought, "That's the event for me!" where am I supposed to go from there? If I'd have gone to my games teacher, Mr "Manly" Stanley, and said, "you know how this football and rugby doesn't interest me at all, well instead I fancy taking up sliding down an icy tube at 130 km/h whilst lying on a glorified tea tray". What's he supposed to do? Phone up the local British Luge Federation affiliated club? That's not going to happen is it.

Actually you are not supposed to land on your head and break your neck. You are supposed to land upright on skis and continue down the mountain. Landing on your head and breaking your neck does appear to happen relatively frequently, however. Again, the question of why anyone would do this does come to mind, and the question of why the Australian taxpayer pays for it comes to mind even more.

And to answer this, we have to go back to the 1976 summer olympics in Montreal. For the first time in a very long time, Australia won no gold medals. This was widely perceived as a national catastrophe. Government ministers descriped it as "disgraceful", and it was generally assumed that the rest of the world was laughing at us with derision. (I am assuming that this is pretty much the first that any of our non-Australian readers have heard of it, but if by any chance you were laughing with derision at Australia in 1976 for this reason, I would like to hear about it). It was decided by the federal government that something had to be done about this, and a state funded organisation named the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) was set up to indentify potential Olympic medal winners and coach them to gold medal winning glory.

And at its stated aim, this seemed to work. Australia won a few gold medals in each of 1980, 1984, and 1988, and we were generally happy.

However, something happened in the world in 1989. The cold war ended. Suddenly, many experienced sports coaches with experience in running state funded success at all costs sports academies were out of work. While the United States and West Germany even did their best to poach the best scientists and engineers from the former communist bloc, Australia poached many fine East German sports coaches, and invited them to do what they had previously done best. Like East Germany and the Soviet Union, Australia was interested mainly in appearing as high up the medal table as possible, and didn't care so much in what sports or events the medals were won. They got down to the old East German trick of identifying sports and events where the competition was weak, an concentrating on those events. (One side effect of this both in East Germany and Australia was a greater concentration on women's events, where there was often less depth in the fields). Plus, they established an incentive scheme in which sports which won Olympic medals received increased (taxpayer) funding and those which did not had their funding cut. (In particular, Australia specialises in weird track cycling events too obscure for anyone capable of winning a stage in the Tour de France from having the slightest interest in. Like most cycling teams, the Australians have had their share of drug scandals as well).

At its stated aim of winning lots of gold medals, this scheme was hugely successful. In the summer games, Australia went from 3 gold medals in 1988 to 7 in 1992 to 9 in 1996 to 16 in 2000 (possibly boosted by home town advantage) to an utterly outrageous 17 in Athens in 2004. (In the last two games, Australia managed to finish higher than all nations other than the United States, Russia, and China). Rather than giving Australians the chance to cheer a few times in a couple of weeks, the AIS had managed to give us an East German like procession of medals. The funding system had grown out of control in terms of total budget, and the incentive sheme had led to a concentration of funding on a smaller number of more successful sports.

And, while Australian does contain mountains with ski resorts, and while substantial numbers of Australians do ski recreationally, winter sports are not something we traditionally devote a great deal of time to. However, the incentive scheme of the AIS applies to winter sports just as it does to summer sports. The same process of identifying sports with weak fields in which we might win medals went on, and one of the events that came up was the women's aerials. This actually requires similar skills to certain gymnastic events, and the required skiing skills are only moderate. As the AIS already had a gymnastic program, retired female gymnasts were encouraged to take up skiing. And it worked, Australia produced a number of fine woman aerial skiers, which culminated in Alisa Camplin winning the gold medal in the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002. (Just as an observation, in her career Camplin has suffered a broken collarbone, broken hand, separated shoulder, torn Achilles tendon and nine concussions). As this was successful under the incentive scheme, funding for women's aerials (and winter sports in general) was of course increased at the AIS, and Australia once again hopes to win medals in the event this year.

Thus a government program expands, even one devoted to encouraging women to do extremely dangerous reverse backflips in freezing conditions. Really.

Update: Someone in the comments has asked me just how much money exactly the Australian government spends on this. Perusal of Treasury documents gives a budget of $111 million Australian dollars (at current exchange rates that is $US82m or £47m - the Australian population is about a third of the British population and about one fifteenth of the US population) for "Excellence in sports performances by Australians" (ie elite athlete development) for the 2005-6 financial year. There is also some money spent by state governments on similar programs, but the federal expenditure makes up the bulk of it. If you (generously) assume that Australia wins 20 Olympic gold medals (winter and summer) every four years, and the budget is $110m a year, then the gold medals are costing the taxpayer $22 million each. To me that seems a lot.

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Thanks to modern safety improvements, motor racing is not quite as dangerous as it used to be - although it probably still takes nerves of steel to hurtle around a circuit in a modern F1 car - but if there is a sport that for me demonstrates sporting bravery at its most extreme, it has to be the downhill skiing and bob-sleigh events I am currently watching at the Winter Olympics near Turin.

Being only a moderately competent skier myself, I bow in awe when I see the pros hurtle down icy slopes at speeds touching 100 mph. Wow.

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One of my very favourite blogger quotes of 2005 was this, just after the July 7th London bombings:

A friend of mine visits a strip pub, once a week, down by the Gray's Inn Road. Despite the bombs, he went along this afternoon, as usual, and was the only guy with four strippers. But, he told me, he had to go - 'otherwise the terrorists would have won'.

In that spirit, I will tell you, not about how I feel about Those Cartoons - no need for any link, see just about everything else here at the moment - but about the Six Nations. Rugby. American Football without the poofy protective clothing. Or: "All those men's bottoms", as my now very elderly but still just about functioning mother put it to me yesterday, explaining why she prefers regular football to rugby football.

Yesterday, Ireland stuttered to victory against Italy in Dublin, and England powered to victory against last year's Grand Slammers Wales, at Twickenham. But what lifted this first weekend of the tournament out of the ordinary was the game today at Murrayfield. It was between Scotland, who have been squabbling with Italy for the Wooden Spoon with the brave but still learning Italians for as long as any of us can remember, and the team that many people are (or were) tipping for the next World Cup, namely the hosts of that tournament, France. France did superbly against the Southern Hemisphere sides they played before Christmas.

So, France to beat Scotland by thirty points, right? Wrong. At one extraordinary moment in this extraordinary game, Scotland were 20-3 up, and although France finally pulled themselves together a bit and got some points, they didn't get enough, and Scotland hung on to win 20-16.

The moment of the match, which Scottish sports TV shows will no doubt be wallowing in during the next few days and weeks, was the try that Scotland got at the beginning of the second half, to go 20-3 up. It was a classic men's bottoms try of the sort my mother would have found very unappealing, but to rugby fans of any proclivity it was a thing of beauty. Scotland got the ball on the French twenty two, and then they did something that usually only England can do. They got together in a great scrum, as you can do in rugby union, with the ball tucked up someone's jumper, metaphorically speaking, and then shoved themselves and the ball for twenty five yards and over the French line. The French are not just elusive and speedy threequarters. They have fearsomely belligerent forwards. But they could not stop that Scottish drive. Amazing. It says a lot for France that they scored all the points that followed, because a thing like that really takes it out of you.

I wrote a bit on my personal blog about the Six Nations last week saying that "animal spirits", as I called it, can make a hell of a difference in this tournament, as they can in almost all sports, and thereby cause huge upsets. I predicted, that is to say, the unpredictable. So I am now feeling very smug.

For the point is, this Scottish team that just beat France was exactly the same bunch of miserable bloody no-hopers that all the other teams – even Italy sometimes - have been rolling over for the last half decade. All that changed is that they swapped their misery-guts All Black coach for a Scotsman. He must have reckoned that he had to try something different, and what he tried was making the Scottish players happy instead of bloody miserable. By not snarling and bitching at them every time they fluffed it in training, presumably, but instead smiling and laughing and making a fuss, nicely, when they were doing it right.

Yesterday the Italians did their best to stop Ireland beating them, which is the only way they know how to win, given that they never have enough pace in their backs to cut loose and really win, as in really winning. The commentators were saying today that this was a very good "technical" performance by the Italians, which means that they have a sneaky foreigner (at the moment it is a French ex scrum half) who teaches them all the sneaky little tricks that the ref cannot see because of all those men's bottoms in the way, and they get to lose by fewer points. But until the Italians start converting star soccer players into star rugger players they are going to go on propping up this tournament.

And then England smashed Wales. Of course I am delighted that England won, and by what eventually became the handsome margin of thirty four points. But I have never seen an England Wales game with so little star quality on show. Remembering as I do the days when Bennett, JJ Williams, JPR Williams, Gerald Davies and the rest of them, above all Bennett's predecessor at fly half, the sublime Barry John, would dazzle their way past England, while England's dancing David Duckham was doing his considerable best to match them, and then having purred with pleasure at the gliding perfection that was Jeremy Guscott and most recently having exulted at the twinkling toes of Jason Robinson, I had to make do yesterday with a bloke called Cueto. Cueto is one of those slightly fat men who is actually faster than he looks, or than even seems possible for somebody that shape and size, and his try, scored quite early on in the first half to get England motoring, was the one moment of true, crowd-on-their-feet, individual class in the entire game. Of the entire weekend, now I come to think of it. He ran right past a little Welsh bloke, probably also called Williams but I really do not remember, who was supposed to be quick himself but who was made to look flat-footed.

Apart from that, it was just a case of the bigger and rougher boys trampling all over the smaller ones. Wales suffered a lot from "turnovers", which is when a bigger boy scrags you and takes the ball away. But there was no poetry in it that I could see.

It did not help that at least half the many England tries seemed to involve infringements of various kinds (Guscott called one of the offending passes "not all that forward", which got a laugh) of the sort that only commentators can see but which referees cannot seem to, despite all their cameras and communications devices.

The other memorable moment of the England Wales game was when the England scrum did another of those twenty five yard shoves. This time it did not result in a try, but you could tell at that point that Wales were going to lose. After you have been on the receiving end of some of that, your animal spirits evaporate. It is as if you are playing twenty people instead of fifteen, an effect no doubt strengthened in Welsh minds when, after an hour of a couple of other blokes playing, England brought on Lawrence Dallaglio and Matt Dawson as substitutes. They both played for England in the last World Cup final, but then took a bit of a breather. And they both celebrated coming on by scoring tries. Dallaglio, who looks good enough to play in the next World Cup as well, was helped by the ref getting in the way of the poor wretch of a Welshman who trying to stop him. Dawson was helped by knocking it on just before gathering it and running over to score.

Tonight, live in its entirety, on ITV regular non-digital telly if that is all you have, Super Bowl XL, the one with the poofy protective costumes. The Pittsburg Prettyboys against the Seattle Café Lattes. Just kidding, I love the Super Bowl. (Didn't mean to upset your feelings. Oops, linked to them after all.) And personally I love the fact that the Rolling Stones are doing the half time entertainment, although what with it being in Detroit, home of Motown, not everyone was at first quite so happy.

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If, like me, you were vaguely annoyed that Livingstone acquired the Olympics, then you must hope that you are either away during the hell that will be the summer of 2012 (my holidays are accumulating now!), or you must campaign for new sports to appear in the Olympiad. The more violent, the faster, the more dangerous, the better. And free drugtaking, of course. Why not allow genetic modification for athletes. "It's at their own risk".

One candidate is the decidedly cool Rocket Racing League. This flying Formula One has not acquired lift as yet, but races are looked for in a year's time. The origins of this competition lie in the Ansari X Prize, with a nod to their barnstorming ancestors back in the early days of aircraft.

A debut exhibition race is planned for the X Prize Cup in September 2006. In the six months after that, the league expects to see races at an additional two air shows and two car racing events, with a championship event in New Mexico at the 2007 edition of the X Prize Cup.

The events will take a leaf from motor racing's book.

Rocket planes called X-Racers will compete on a sky 'track' in the design of a Grand Prix race, with long straights and the added dimenson of vertical ascents and deep banks. The race will run perpendicular to spectators and be about two miles long, one mile wide and 1,500m in the air. The X-Racers will be staggered upon take-off and fly their own 'tunnel' of space, each separated by a hundred metres or so.

Pilots will be guided by differential GPS (Global Positioning System) technology to help them avoid collisions.

Necessity may be the mother but thrillseeking is the father of invention: on second thoughts, the Olympics would ruin it. But I would still welcome a 'skytrack' in London, and you can submit your own idea for a rocker racer name on the website...

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The question has recently arisen as to whether it is ever right for a journalist to hoax a person into divulging certain facts or opinions that said person might not otherwise divulge. This week, the English Football Association told England soccer coach Sven Goran Eriksson that his contract would end immediately after the World Cup tournament in July, following comments Eriksson made to a News of the World journalist posing as someone else, the "fake Sheikh".

Now, in the increasingly trivial world of British public life, all this might be of interest only to those who follow team sports. I know that a good many readers of this site probably do not give a damn about sporting contests but who might be troubled about the News of the World's antics in this case. That newspaper conned a man into giving an interview. It deliberately misled Eriksson, who divulged some not-terribly-interesting facts about members of the England team and about his ambitions in the future. (Try to suppress your yawns, Ed).

Even so, some might argue that if the News of the World was trying to nail a terrorist suspect, say, that such subterfuge might be okay. Well, maybe. But what this latest episode has done is to further reduce the already-low reputation of the press, sow further paranoia about the media's activities and hence give further ammunition to those in power who want to shackle the media. And all for a pathetic story about a venal Swede with an eye for the main chance and the ladies. How terribly British.

This writer seems to agree that there has not been nearly enough anger about what the NotW did. I hope that newspaper is made to suffer for its actions, although I suspect nothing much will be done. Had that paper been a business conning trade secrets from a rival, criminal charges might now be on the cards.

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The recent death of the footballer George Best has seen an outpouring of sentimental remembrance about the skill and talent of one of Britain's greatest ever footballers. It has also seen a sober reflection of the darker side of Best's life. As Sue Mott pointed out:

As a sportsman, he was ruinously worshipped as a god. As society's golden boy, gloriously handsome, funny and highly intelligent, he enjoyed all life's little luxuries in conveyor-belt quantities. He was a Hollywood film star from Belfast and while we may now lament the wine, women and song, if you had been there at the time, could you have been the one to say: 'Shall we put the cork back in the champagne, George, I think we've had enough?"

It is a common theme of society that those who are blessed with extraordinary talents at one discipline are allowed special leeway in manners, morals and behaviour that are not bestowed upon lesser mortals. Had Best not been such a great footballer he would undoubtedly have been shunned by society as a drunk and a lecher. But because he was once a truly great footballer, he was treated as something different. People tolerated his drunkenness and women gave themselves to him sexually because he was genuinely seen as being cut from a higher cloth then other men. This may seem unfair, and in a way it is, but it was also the root of his downfall.

George Best, and footballers in general, though, are hardly the only sort of celebrity to take advantage of the special rules of society that are afforded to those touched by genius. And it has been going on for a long time.

Nearly 200 years ago, the poet Lord Byron made use of his fame as a poet to indulge himself in all manner of peccadillos, most of them sexual. That was perhaps not so uncommon for a Peer of the Realm back then, but it was mirrored by the behaviour of Percy Bysshe Shelley. A more dramatic example is in the personal life of Ludwig van Beethoven. Poor health, deafness, depression, loneliness and financial troubles made him a very difficult man to deal with, but he was indulged by many people precisely because he was obviously the greatest musical talent of his day.

Poets and classical composers do not have the influence on society in this day and age as they used to. The place of Byron and Beethoven has been taken by sports stars and actors and television celebrities. Some of these people, like Shane Warne are as gifted in his field as Byron was as a poet; and Warne has been noted for womanising on a considerable scale as well. Some are, in sober fact, non-entities, but we live in a vacuous time where everyone gets their 'fifteen minutes of fame'.

Many not so talented people have also exploited their celebrity to get away with actions that would not be tolerated in others; Hollywood is of course notorious for this sort of thing, where actors and actresses have their notions of their own worth and talent over-inflated by agents, publicists, and the media. A similar fate has befallen many popular musicians over the last forty years. This sort of bad behaviour takes many forms, not just in terms of sexual self-indulgence, but substance abuse, or simply by being a difficult and unpleasant person to be around. The life and times of John Lennon reflect this- he confused his musical talent with wisdom, and spent his latter years pontificating about a society of which his understanding of seems have been very limited indeed. However, because he was such a fine musical talent, no one was willing to stand up to Lennon and tell him that he was talking nonsense.

Why? Why do we allow this select group of people, not all of whom are that talented, to get away with this sort of thing. Why can't we "put the cork back in the champagne" as it were? There seems to be something innate to many people who must feel that they can reflect the glory of the star's achievements by indulging them in their foibles. This can not be healthy for us any more then it is healthy for the stars. Just look at George Best now.

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Those smart fellows at the Marginal Revolution economics blog like to track all manner of strange and innovative ways in which Man engages in the age-old routine of truck and barter. Sport has spawned all manner of new business enterprises in recent years and now it is possible for investors to build assets by investing in the future market value of footballers.

Makes sense, really. These days football players, even quite mediocre ones - never mind great talents like Pele or George Best (RIP) - are paid enormous amounts of money in their careers. Rather like the bloodstock trade, I think. The idea of getting a financial stake in a player is also likely to bring investor pressure on players to be monitored off the field as well as on it (do we really want a potentially lucrative asset to be carousing down the pub?)

Personally, I am sticking to equities, bonds, cash and a bit of brick and mortar.

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How quickly this (click on this picture to make the triumph even bigger!) . . .

. . . has turned into this:

After England sneaked the Ashes 2-1, they have now been soundly beaten 2-0 by Pakistan. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. If Warne don't get you then Shoaib Akhtar and Danish Kaneria must. I wonder what Al Qaeda will make of that.

All very catastrophic. Until you turn your mind to a real catastrophe. To put all of the above in perspective, spare a thought for cricket in Zimbabwe, a grain of sand through which to see the chaos of the world out there.

A year or two ago, there was a great exodus of international cricketers from Zimbabwe, but they were mostly white guys, with only the occasional black man involved. The Mugabe regime had no problem calling them a bunch of racists and Uncle Toms.

But just over a week ago, the new Zimbabwe captain, the impeccably black Tatenda Taibu, and a thoroughly gutsy cricketer by the way, having already expressed his extreme displeasure at what was happening to Zimbabwean cricket, and having lead another huge player rebellion, by the new multi-coloured lot, remember, resigned:

"I've resigned from Zimbabwe cricket as a whole," Taibu said from Harare on Thursday.

"I've had problems with the way Zimbabwe cricket is being run for the past few years," said the 22-year-old, the youngest captain in Test cricket history when he took over in May 2004.

Maybe that was what decided that Mugabe regime that something had to be done. Basically, a couple of Mugabe-ites had been given Zimbabwe cricket to "run", i.e. ruin, loot, etc., and the Mugabe regime (i.e. Robert bloody Mugabe) decided that they had to stop, or would at any rate make good scapegoats for what even they (Mugabe) now saw as a problem. So, the Zimbabwe equivalent of the men in big raincoats went round at 4 am to arrest the two miscreants. But, they had been tipped off and had fled.

Cricket people are complaining about the uselessness of cricket's global governing body, the ICC, in this matter. But you cannot really expect the ICC to sort out Zimbabwe cricket. The problem is not cricket in Zimbabwe, the problem is Zimbabwe.

Nevertheless, cricket, by dramatising so publicly the horror story that is Zimbabwe now, may actually be contributing something:

John Stremlau, professor of international affairs at South Africa's Witwatersrand University, said the Zimbabwe Cricket meltdown could become the catalyst for a much broader internal revolt.

"Inflation is more than 400 per cent, the US dollar to the Zim [Zimbabwe dollar] is running at 1 to 100,000 [on the black market] and everything's been criminalised and linked to the survival of the Zimbabwe cabal," he said.

"The mystery is when the tipping point will come and it'd be an interesting footnote to history if it was the flap over the cricket team."

Yes it would. The sooner Mugabe is tipped, alive or dead, into the bucket of history the better, and nobody is going to be particularly choosy about what tipped him. If cricket can help to see off this monster, good for cricket.

If that happens, then maybe the apparently myopic policy of other cricketing countries just carrying on playing with whatever cricketers Zimbabwe put into the field against them will have been justified, sort of. Results are what matter when you are dealing with something like Mugabe, not your mere conscience. Had cricket quarantined itself from Zimbabwe, this latest fiasco could not have happened, because any cricket problems in Zimbabwe would (a) not have attracted nearly so much outside attention, and (b) would have been blameable by Mugabe on outside interference.

Had Taibu not had the chance to prove himself to be the formidable cricketer and personality that he is, his resignation would not have counted for much. As it is, it just might count, as Professor Stremlau says, for rather a lot.

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It has been a sad few days in British sport, which has lost arguably the most talented football player these islands have produced in George Best. He died, as many people will know, a few years after having a liver transplant necessitated by a long history of alcohol abuse. For those unfamiliar with his story, he was born in Belfast and played at Manchester United in one of its most successful periods in the mid- to late 60s but left top-class football aged only 27.

I am glad that in most of the coverage about him, the focus has been on the football rather than the messy personal life. And what a fantastic player he was! If even Brazilian maestro Pele called him the greatest player in the world, then who are we to demur? I was born in the year - 1966 - that Best gave what aficionados and team-mates reckon was Best's finest display, demolishing Portugese side Benfica with two goals, the second involving a mazy run past several defenders before sticking the ball into the back of the net.

Best was an alcoholic, which some people regard as a disease that one is born with rather than a condition over which people, possessed of free will, have control. Interestingly, I get the impression, by reading some of Best's own remarks, that he was a man in control of his own destiny and did not, as far as I am aware, choose to play the victim card. There is no doubt, though, that some people have found it hard to conquer the bottle, although others, such as Tottenham soccer ace Jimmy Greaves, managed to give up on booze and preserve their health and live into a ripe old age.

Anyway, I expect DVDs of Best's football brilliance to be hot sellers this Christmas. May he rest in peace.

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In Spain, when Barcelona play Real Madrid, there is more then just three points at stake. And when Barcelona go to the Bernabeu and win, there is a lot of significance attached to it.

That is what they did on the weekend; Phil Ball looks at the history and the implications.

The most startling fact about Saturday's game was not so much the two wonderful goals scored by Ronaldinho but rather the fact that after the Brazilian's second and Barça's third, several sections of the Bernabéu began to applaud him, and by implication, the whole team. Florentino Pérez looked on from the Director's box in stony silence.

Madrid experts have been speculating all Sunday on this one, but the last living memory that any journalist has of the Madrid supporters applauding the eternal enemy was back in 1983 when Maradona ran Real's defence dizzy in the clásico of that year. Was this a sign of Madrid's sporting supporters, or was it just their way of protecting themselves psychologically?

Read the whole thing, as they say.

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I have always had a soft spot for Wigan Athletic. Ever since they entered the former Fourth Division in 1978, they have struck me as plucky underdogs in football and in their home town. Association football in Wigan holds the same status as rugby union in Australia, I suspect.

Now, the Latics, under the inspired leadership of their manager, Paul Jewell, sit just under the superstars of the English Premiership. If they maintain the successful record that recently gained Jewell Manager of the Month for September, this team might be in the running for a spot in the Champions League. Such a success would confirm that the pyramid structure of the English leagues, helped by financial patronage, is not entirely dead.

However, Wigan tended to fade in the latter part of the season when they played in the First Division and, odds on, this will happen in the next few months. Still, let their fans dream of UEFA for this year, if nothing else.

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Though I am without a car, and without a prospect of a car, I love Jeremy Clarkson. The motoring information is not useful, but the snide asides are glorious. And usually spot-on (if exaggerated for effect).

But here the striving for effect goes horribly wrong:

The Olympics are a test designed to quantify and celebrate human physical achievement. They are not an opportunity for a bunch of stupid, left-wing, weird-beard failures to make political points.

Jeremy, Jeremy, Jeremy. For once, you have missed the point entirely. The Olympics are only the grand jamboree they are because they provide an opportunity to make stupid political points for collectivist monsters with funny macho facial hair. (Moustaches mostly — you should recall cuddly Ken is a recovering moustache-wearer — though the beards do get a look in.) Any human physical achievement is the incidental means not the end.

For anyone who doubts me on this, imagine an alternative Olympic movement. There are no anthems; no national teams; no equipment the competitors cannot personally carry; sponsorship, fine, but of individual achievers not collectives. The venue is chosen by lot, 18 months in advance only, among those places that already have facilities adequate for staging the narrower set of events, so there's no auction using other people's money.

Would such an event still constitute a celebration of human physical achievement? Would there still be sporting heroes and heroines? You bet.

Would it be beamed 20 hours a day to the state television channels of all the world's nationalist socialist régimes (i.e. almost all the world's ré:gimes)? No. It would be relegated to the status (too high for my taste, but that's the market) of ordinary sports programming, with each sport taking its usual audience share. The main news would turn back to "Prime Minister greets Chinese Foreign Minister and signs Human Rights Treaty" news, where a quota of flags, anthems, parades, and national self-importance could be assured.

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Last Monday, England won the Ashes. (If I tell myself this often enough, I will eventually believe it.) And when I mentioned this fact (for fact it is) here, I mentioned also the rather fine new stand that they have just built at the Oval, where that final clinching game of the series was played.

Today I walked across the river to the Oval and took some photos of this new stand. And I have done a posting about how it looks at my personal blog, together with some pictures snapped from the TV coverage. And then I found this really great picture of it that someone else took:

Last Tuesday, London celebrated England winning the Ashes, and I also went along and took photos of that. They are not perfect photos, if only because I had such a lousy view of the proceedings. I ended up taking a lot of snaps of the giant TV screen they had behind everything, just as if I had been at home. But, this giant screen yielded some fine imagery, with no interference patterns or surprise black horizontal splodges of the kind that I get when I photo my TV at home, and I am very happy with the photos I did manage to take. You can see my favourites ones here.

Some of favourite pictures were of the words they stuck up for us all to sing:

So there you have it. England won the Ashes because God was on our side.

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In circumstances which for an hour or two were excruciatingly tense, but which in the end bordered on farce, England today regained the Ashes, by not losing the final test at the Oval to Australia. Champion Aussie bowlers Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne gave England a fright by having them five down by lunch, and it looked as if Australia could soon be in and knocking off the runs. But a first test match century by Kevin Pietersen – what a day to pick! – soothed England nerves. Once it became impossible for either side to win, everyone wanted to end it – England and their fans to celebrate, the Aussies to say their goodbyes and get out of there. But the idiot laws of cricket, or lack of the right law of cricket to cover the situation, caused an absurdly anti-climactic period during which the umpires first said that the light had got too bad, and then faffed about while everyone else just stood about, before they eventually declared the game over.

Channel Four had no intention of just switching off their television coverage, but after all the foolishness, things got back on track, with the celebrations duly being drowned with red, white and blue confetti, jetting out of confetti machines.

It had looked, after more seriously farcical proceedings yesterday when not very bad light had stopped play for the second half of the day, as if the final day might, as a result, not be very tense, but McGrath and Warne soon saw off that idea.

Warne also got two more wickets at the end when it no longer mattered, bringing his tally in the match to twelve, and his tally for the series to forty, if my calculations do not deceive me. Despite ending up on the losing side, Warne has been the Man of the Series for me. Without him, England would have been out of sight in this game by the end of the first day. But Warne beat England back from 82-0 to 131-4, and it was game on from then on.

The turning point of the series, it is pretty generally agreed, was when Glenn McGrath, who dominated in the first test at Lords, trod on a ball and hurt himself just before the start of the second game. He missed that game, and was never the same deadly accurate bowler again, despite manful efforts. In that one moment, the series went from being Australia's for sure to anybody's, and it stayed anybody's until late this afternoon, when England finally got their noses properly in front.

Duncan Fletcher, the Zimbabwean who has been coaching England for the last few years, had to be told to smile at the end, and he fleetingly obliged. He must have been doing a lot right. He is good at avoiding the limelight.

But most of all, I think the difference was sheer luck. England played very well indeed, but they also had just that tiny bit more luck of the good sort, and just a tiny bit less luck of the bad sort. The commentators talk about how England "dominated more". But England damn near lost that second game, and coming back from 2-0 down would surely have been beyond them. England won four tosses out of five, which made a big difference. And just to take today, Pietersen was nearly run out, and was also dropped three times before he got seriously going – although you could say that this is only fair considering that Pietersen dropped every catching chance that came anywhere near him all summer.

I want to believe that Shane Warne is one of the very greatest players there has ever been, what with England having finally got him to be in a losing Aussie team. But Flintoff got the "Man of the Series" award. But I suppose they have to pick someone from among the winners. (Maybe Warne lost it by fluffing the easiest chance Australia had today to get Pietersen out, and with it, as it turned out, Australia's best chance of winning the match and keeping the Ashes.)

Read more here, a lot of it by our very own Aussie, Michael Jennings. Scott Wickstein reckons the Aussies did not show England sufficient respect. Maybe.

Finally, a word of praise for all the people associated with Surrey Cricket Club who were responsible for the vast, flat arch of a new stand that now graces the Oval. It has turned a great ground into a ground that is less great in size, but even greater as a place to go and to see.

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Yesterday I expressed the hope that England would beat Australia at Trent Bridge, and today they did.

But England fans like me were once more put through the ringer. England should have had no difficulty knocking off the 129 runs they needed in their final innings. But the Australians fought like hell to claw their way back into the contest at exactly the moment when they should have been accepting the inevitable, and once again they nearly succeeded, England scrambling home by a mere three wickets. Warne and Lee are such ignorant fellows. They never seem to know when they are beaten.

The general opinion is that this is one of the greatest Ashes series ever. And this England win is good for that series in the sense that if England had lost this game, Australia would have retained the Ashes, no matter what happened at the Oval. As it is, the Oval game is winner take all.

The closeness of this Trent Bridge game makes it all the more regrettable that this otherwise fabulous contest was disfigured by yet another important and hideously mistaken umpiring decision. Australian batsmen Simon Katich was given out leg before wicket, at a time when he was batting very well and might have gone on to help set England a lot more than 129 to win. We all make mistakes. Umpires cannot be infallible. But on this occasion, technologically generated evidence made it clear to everyone before the unfortunate Katich had even walked off the pitch that the ball (a) pitched outside the leg stump, and (b) would have gone over the top of the stumps, and that the umpire was accordingly wrong on both counts to give him out.

Some erroneous decisions by cricket umpires take many minutes to deconstruct fully, but this Katich decision was immediately revealed to be wrong. So, if the umpires had had the same technology in their hands as the commentators now have, not only would a correct decision have been given at a crucial juncture in this very close match; it would have been given with almost no delay.

The current circumstances, in which umpires are made public fools of within seconds of giving their verdicts, cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely.

The LBW decision that did for Gilchrist also looked dodgy, but, assuming that I understand the finer points of the LBW law, the technology was able to show that this decision was almost certainly right. But that just means that the umpire guessed right, this time. He should not have had to guess. He should have known.

Cameras are already used to settle run outs, to the general satisfaction of all involved. Today, cameras were used to show that a possible run out was not, because England's wicketkeeper had knocked the bails off before the ball arrived, and again to establish that the catch which later on dismissed Andrew Strauss was properly held and had not hit the ground first. There was a bit of a delay, but not an excessive one given the importance of such decisions.

I understand how this situation has arisen. This clever LBW technology could not immediately be given to the umpires. It had to be refined and proved to be satisfactory. But now it has proved itself. We all – fans and players alike – now trust its verdicts more than we trust the umpires. Had the umpires had it in their hands today, who knows how the result might have gone? Who knows how many runs England might have had to chase in their final innings?

All of which made the characteristically sporting manner in which the Aussies took their defeat today all the more impressive. Considering how little practice they have had at it during the last fifteen years, they are good losers.

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I like to interrupt TV coverage of test cricket with CEEFAX news of about other cricket matches, and this afternoon the news trickled through that England were (probably) winning – and then that they had finally won – the Ashes!

The ladies of Australia have had the same armlock on the Female Ashes as their menfolk have had on the Male Ashes in recent years, only more so. But today the English ladies beat the Australian ladies by 6 wickets to clinch a series win. With luck, England will get the Male Ashes back this summer as well. The men of Australia followed on today at Trent Bridge, and the men of England are well placed to get a win tomorrow and go one up with one to play in their series. Here's to us limeys making it a double.

I wonder if a lady will ever play international cricket for her men's team, so to speak. Cricket is not a game that is wholly conditional on brawn, although you do have to be fit, of course. Some of the greatest ever batsmen, like Bradman, Gavaskar and Tendulkar to name but three, have been quite small men. And bowlers, even quick ones, do not have to be giants either. And great slow bowlers can be quite small, and even physically handicapped. So, even if a female physique may be a handicap, it may one day be overcome.

Meanwhile the usual low-level politico-sporting storm rumbles and bumbles along about whether Civilisation ought, still, to be playing cricket games against Zimbabwe. At one time I was in the habit of making a bit of a fuss about such games here, because it was a way to make a fuss about Zimbabwe. But all the world that cares now knows that Robert Mugabe is ruining that unhappy country and the only question is whether someone can end his life and/or despotic reign before natural causes finally oblige. Other African rulers do not want anything done, because this might set a dangerous precedent. I mean, what kind of place would Africa become if merely being a thieving and destructive monster meant that you lost your job as tyrant? Very different, that is for damn sure. And since the rest of the world is disinclined to revive White Imperialism and barge in and rearrange matters without lots of local consent – the only new imperialists in Africa these days are the Chinese, and they are there for the minerals, not to take up the Yellow Man's Burden – it really does not matter what the cricketers do about Zimbabwe. Playing against the current politically deranged Zimbabwe team and thrashing it probably does just as much good (and just as little) as refusing to play against it.

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I am watching that supreme embodiment of the Anglosphere culture at the moment - cricket, surely the finest game invented by Man. England are building on their first-innings batting performance against a rather shaky-looking Australia, although the Aussies have a chance to draw the match I think thanks to a superb batting effort by Shane Warne. Warne is normally and rightly famed for his leg spin, able to make the ball move in a bewitching fashion.

The Ashes series, as the England vs Australia Test matches are known, are currently shown on the Channel 4 terrestrial tv channel. The channel has made a huge success of its cricket coverage, I think. Its commenators are excellent, intelligent and don't interrupt the flow of play. Even the adverts shown during a brief pause in play don't irritate me like I thought they would. Simon Hughes, a true cricket geek, does a fine job of explaining key terms and tactics to novices. Cricket is a complex game and yet the presenters seem to make it accessible without dumbing it down.

Four of us Samizdata scribblers are split down the middle on this Ashes series, I guess. Two Aussies - Scott Wickstein and Michael Jennings - pitted against Brian Micklethwait and yours truly.

Update, despite the so-far snarky remarks in the comments sections, my joy continues to rise thanks to today's batting performance. Summary of the game here.

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That is a variation on what Sir Alex Ferguson said after Manchester United sneaked a 2-1 win over Bayern Munich in the 1999 final, I think it was, of the European Champions Cup/League/whatever they call it nowadays, with two late late goals in time added on for injuries.

This morning, England were overwhelming favourites to wrap this up by a hundred odd runs, with only two tail end wickets to get. But nobody had told the Assie batsmen that they were tail enders. They batted like batsmen, in conditions which, unlike yesterday when seventeen wickets fell, suddenly looked perfect for batting again. Shane Warne, having got himself out like a pub amateur in the first innings, batted beautifully, until, unbelievably, he was out hit wicket. He kicked his stumps over! And with sixty more runs needed that looked to be it. England were about to win a meaningful test match against Australia by fifty odd runs. Hurrah! When was the last time that happened?

But Lee and Kasparowicz carried right on. There was a close LBW that might have been given. A dropped catch at third man. And suddenly Australia were only one edged four from a win that would have given them a 2-0 lead in the Ashes series and England the biggest kick in the stomach in many a year. But then, Kaspar fended off yet another short ball from Harmison, Jones the Gloves held onto it, show-off umpire Billy Bowden raised his finger, and it was suddenly 1-1 when 2-0 to the Aussies looked a certainty. Two runs. Two runs!! Second narrowest test match win ever, apparently.

This has been a terrific game, which quite blotted me off the Samizdata screen for the duration. The commentators have a concept which they sometimes wheel out called the "champagne moment" of the match. Well this match had two champagne moments at least that will live long in the cricketing memory. There was Warne's ball that bowled Strauss round his legs on Friday just before the close (Warne's bowling throughout was a wonder), leaving England jittery instead of confident coming into Saturday. And then there was the perfect slower ball that Harmison bowled Clarke with, with the last ball of yesterday, which seemed to make England's task this morning easy. There was the great game-turning over by Flintoff, which took Australia from 47-0 to 48-2 (Langer and Ponting) yesterday afternoon. There were eighteen sixes in this game, which is almost two per session, i.e. two more than you usually get.

And just to put the cherry on the cake, that geek-maniac Hughes who works for Channel 4 reckons that the final Jones catch was not out, because Kasparowicz's hand was not touching the bat when the ball hit it. That LBW, on the other hand... There have been the usual crop of umpiring disagreements with the technologically better informed commentators, and they really must give the umpires the same toys as the commentators have.

You do not have to know what hit wicket or LBW or third man means to get the idea. Just translate all of the above into your preferred sport, and slap a hellishly tight finish on the end.

It really is humiliating how much this nonsense still matters to me. I keep telling myself that it – test match cricket between Australia and England – is only a game. Which is true. And King Lear is only a play, and Asia is only a continent.

And because of this particular only-a-game game, the rest of this Ashes series is going to twist my guts around for many more weeks yet.

Plenty more on this game here.

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Yes, yes, I know, his girlfriend is Sheryl Crowe, he is supported by John "doh" Kerry, which may suggest he is in need of ideological help, but can anyone doubt, after winning the Tour de France for 7 times in a row, that Lance Armstrong is one of the greatest athletes to have ever lived?

And he comes from Texas. If I was a Frenchman, that has to hurt.

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I enjoy watching and playing a bit of golf - despite my rather large playing handicap (gulp) but a question that comes to me as I watch the British Open up in blustery St. Andrews, Scotland is this: why, for the sake of reason, why, do so many golfers were such daft clothes? One guy is sporting a pink shirt, pink eye shade and the sort of trousers that constitute arrestable offences in some parts of the world.

Why?

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Some of the commenters here are upset that so many Samizdata contributors object to the Olympic Games being staged in London, as if we are all anti-sports or just plain miserable old farts. Not so. Writers David Carr and Michael Jennings of this parish, for example, both like sports like football and cricket. As do I (I play a bit of cricket and golf, besides other sports). The root cause of our hostility is simply that barring a miracle, the Games will end up costing the taxpayer a lot of money, and as believers in capitalism and limited government, we don't think sport is a legitimate government spending item in the way that say, defence is. In fact, if we cannot cut sports or the arts, say, from public spending, how can we honestly hope to roll back the state to the extent that we would like?

But to be more positive about all this, it is surprising that more has not been written about how the Games, and similar events typically paid for out of taxes, could not be made entirely reliant on the private sector. The Games will create a new set of facilities in East London, which hopefully can be used for decades. Great. Then let the expected future streams of revenues generated by said facilities be used as collateral for things like bonds to pay for the project.

Asset-backed securities are an increasingly common source of funding in our capital markets. Even pop star David Bowie, demonstrating the sort of business savvy common in the pop world, has issued bonds using his record sales as collateral. Why not issue "Olympic Bonds" with 20 or 30-year maturities to pay for the Games? Pension funds, which are hungry for long-dated, reliable income, would jump at them.

But of course the rub is that the backers of the Games may lack the confidence that the event will generate the kind of economic returns used in the sales pitch in the run up the vote on Wednesday, which is why there is a high chance that the taxpayer will have to fork out for the Games.

If any budding Olympic entrepreneurs out there want to prove me wrong and show how the Games can be entirely self-supporting, then comment away.

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Three cheers and hip, hip, hooray for London will indeed host the 2012 Olympics.

Sing halleluiahs and hosannas for mere, prosaic words alone cannot even begin to express the happiness that courses through my heart like a swollen river. My cup runneth over and my soul doth soar like a lark ascending the azure, cloudless, sunlit summer sky.

If only another miracle would open up a hole in space-time through the next seven pointless, dreary years so that I could, this very day, cast my eyes upon the blazing, towering Olympic torch as it shines like a beacon of hope over my home town while I fervently pray from below that I may be touched by just a few humble rays of that glory. Then my life would surely be complete.

I want to jump for joy. I want to dance till dawn. I want to reach out my hands to every single one of my fellow human beings, gather them all into my arms and hug them like long-lost children. I want to capture the stars, leap over the moon and fly along the milky-way.

But before I do any of those things, I must quickly dash into the toilet and vomit my guts up. Excuse me.

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Thanks to this Instapundit posting linking to this, and then following one of the links there, I have found my way to tifoc, sports blogger extraordinary, and well worth a read if you like cricket, soccer, F1, or just a different angle on things.

His posting of last Thursday refers to an extraordinary coincidence:

In 1981, the Pope died, Prince Charles got married and Liverpool were crowned Champions of Europe.

This year (2005), the Pope died, Prince Charles got married and Liverpool were crowned Champions of Europe.

However, tifoc did not spot this himself, and nor did the emailer who told him about it. (Unless the BBC reporting the same coincidence in April was itself a coincidence.)

Ashes anyone? This bizarre game last Saturday suggests that England are at least in with a chance of doing what they also did in . . . 1981.

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Still buzzing with pleasure after a terrific day with pals at the Goodwood Festival of Speed on Saturday, it struck me as I walked around the ground and past the huge car park as to how fantastic is the level of motoring engineering, aesthetics and of course safety these days. But we are hemmed in as never before by rules and regulations, speed cameras and road humps, the combined effect of which is to make driving in most of Britain a frustrating experience. The joys of flooring the accelerator on the open road, with the roar of wind in the hair, are over.

Such a shame. As my dad said, it is a bit like being surrounded by the world's most beautiful women and then to be told by the State that you are not allowed to ask any of them for a date.

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Well, it was a nice idea. But today I have to say oh dear, and Michael Jennings can say heh. Australia smashed England at one-day cricket today, and the man who made the biggest impact was the still great Glenn McGrath, who took two of the three wickets that fell at the very start of the England innings. England tried hard after that but never recovered.

In other sporting news, the rule in England is that if you are Scottish and you lose you are Scottish, but if you win you are British. I did not know that Tim Henman had Scottish ancestors, but it would seem that he does. On the other hand, someone called Andrew Murray is, for the duration of his Wimbledon run, British.

In other cricket news, the Zimbabwean cricket team is not welcome. That is history, of the horrible sort, and a rather ineffectual attempt to make it less horrible. Plus, the cricketers of the USA are at each others' throats. That is more like farce, although having been caught up in one of these irreversible faction fight things myself, I sympathise more deeply than most would.

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I had all kinds of plans of Things To Do over the weekend, but instead I spent my time following the news, with growing disbelief, of Australia losing two cricket matches, yesterday against England which was a bit of a surprise, and on Saturday against Bangladesh which was a cricket earthquake. The Aussies will probably pull themselves together by the time the test matches come around, because they are, after all, the Aussies, the best cricket team in the world. But they have now lost four games in a row, which is quite a hiccup by their standards. They lost the twenty over thrash against England last Monday, heavily, and then they lost to Somerset in a fifty-over warm-up game. And now they have lost these two games. As you can imagine, the British media are having a fine old wallow.

The general opinion is that Assie captain Ricky Ponting, who won both the tosses of the weekend, made a mistake in batting first against Bangladesh. Yesterday, he did it again against England, in a game where England would have put Australia in first. On days like these, the bowlers get whatever help they will from the conditions right at the start, while it is still a bit muggy. Later, bright sunshine makes it much better for the batters. There was a touch here of "we are going to get this right if it kills us", instead of "let us do what will get us the win", a win they are starting to need rather badly. Worse, this decision suggested that most insidious form of sporting arrogance, which goes: "you fellows have to do everything right to win, but we are so great that we do not have to do everything right to win. The regular rules do not apply to us. We can bat first when we should bat second. We can hook bouncers just over long leg. We can go out the night before and get pissed. We do not have to get our feat to the pitch of the ball. We do not have to warm up when we bowl. We just have to show up. And still win." Wrong. Great sportsman must have that vital dose of humility, which says that they only got great by doing everything right, and that to stay great they must continue to do everything right. But then again, maybe Ponting just wanted to practice batting first, and then defending dodgy totals.

Supporters of Australia will of course say that without Kevin Pietersen, England's new South-Africa-born wonder batsman, England would have lost, and that is true. Pietersen scored 91 not out in 65 balls to wrap it up with 3 wickets (too close for comfort) and 15 balls (an eternity in one day cricket) to spare, and was the Man of the Match despite Steve Harmison earlier taking 5 or 33. But that brings me to my second feeling about this summer's proceedings, which is for the first time in a long time, England may just have the edge in star quality over the Aussies. If the likes of Harmison, Andrew Flintoff, and now this extraordinary Pietersen character ("genius" was the word Vaughan used to describe his innings today), give of their very best during the forthcoming Ashes games, but if Australia's star bowlers Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath turn out to be a bit past their admittedly stellar best, then England have a real chance. Mike Atherton, in yesterday's Sunday Times, says that the Aussies are not what they were. He of all people knows all about what the Aussies were when they were what they were.

But, there is still Shane Warne. Glenn McGrath is very, very good, the best quick bowler of his time. Warne has been – still is? – something else again. Warne makes any bowling attack he is in twice as good. He bowls lots and lots of really good balls, including a few that are devastatingly good, and yet combines that with bowling hardly any bad balls, and certainly not the one bad ball every two overs or so that your average leg spinner will serve up. Against a Warneless bowling attack, the batsmen can reckon on times when they can cruise along and make some relatively easy runs without too much pressure, and prepare themselves for when the pressure resumes, with the next new ball say. But against a side with Warne in it, the pressure on batsmen is continuous. The quick bowlers can exhaust themselves in turn at the other end, while Warne just bowls and bowls. The only other bowling attack like this in cricket history was when the West Indians had about five ultra-fast bowlers taking it in turns. Recently Warne was voted, I think by some Australians, the greatest bowler of all time. (It may even have been the greatest cricketer.) This shocked me at the time, but thinking about it some more, I realised that this was right. If you were picking your all-time team, taking turns against another bloke picking his, school playground style, which bowler would you pick first, both to have him in your side and to deny him to the other side? Warne. Whenever, during the last few years, Warne did not play against England for some reason, England tended to do quite well. When Warne played, they crumpled, again and again.

Warne recently gave up playing one-day international cricket, and from now on will only play in five day test matches. He is now turning his arm over for Hampshire, and he took no part in this recent string of Aussie defeats. When he joins the Aussie party, he will undoubtedly try to raise his game and if he does he will duly transform the Aussie bowling. If that happens, Australia will go right back to being solid favourites, with all the other players suddenly playing better than before.

England's unknown quantity is Steve Harmison. Harmison has it in him to win the series on his own, the way Frank Tyson once did in Australia half a century ago. Today, for example, Harmison took three wickets in one over, and they were not any old three wickets. They were: the extremely dangerous Gilchrist, then Ponting (first ball) and Martyn (second ball). The next over he bagged Hayden (a phenomenal catch by Collingwood), and towards the end he bowled Mike Hussey with a slower ball, thus putting a damper on the final few overs of the Australian innings. Only the exceptional batting of Pietersen at the end denied Harmison the Man of the Match award. Perhaps more significantly, the radio commentators were saying that when Harmison was bowling, with slips and gullies, it was more like a test match than a limited overs game. This was his first game against Australia this summer. He did nothing during the recent tour of South Africa. But he apparently suffers from homesickness, and now he is at home. He has, incidentally, been taking lots of county wickets.

On day one of the test series, it could be Australia 350 for 2 and all this will be forgotten. Or not, in the sense that I – or perhaps Michael Jennings – will be linking back to this posting and saying either oh dear or heh.

In other sporting news, Sir Clive Woodward's Lions finally look like they might beat the All Blacks, but I still tip the locals to win. Why? Because this is not the World Cup.

Tim Henman is ever less likely to win Wimbledon the older he gets. That starts today. We will probably all be rooting for her.

And how about this for a F1 asco?

Football, meanwhile, is a game of two halves, and at the end Germany wins.

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The competition to host the 2012 Olympic Games is now approaching its climax and two front runners are clearly emerging:

London and Paris have earned praise for their "very high-quality" bids to stage the 2012 Olympic Games in a crucial inspection report published on Monday.

There is clearly everything to play for in a contest which is far from over and, despite all the predictions to the contrary, London is still in with an excellent chance of winning the right to stage the Games. It is for this reason that I feel compelled to impose upon my fellow contributors and our readers and ask them to join with me in grand effort to get behind the Olympic bid. The Paris Olympic bid, that is.

You can start right away by sending messages of support for the Paris bid direct to the IOC by means of this feedback form. You can also send letters to the IOC at Chateau de Vidy 1007 Lausanne Switzerland. Or you can send your support by fax to: 41.21 621 62 16.

You can also contact your local political representatives and tell them how much you would love to see Paris get the 2012 Games and send similar messages to you own national Olympic Committee. Also, don't underestimate the drip-drip propoganda effect of letters to your local and national newspapers, calls to appropriate radio phone-in shows and messages on internet fora and, of course, blog comment sections.

Lastly, I want you all to join me in mass harnessing of psychic suggestive power by concentrating your mind on a mental image of the leafy, sun-dappled boulevards of Paris lined end-to-end with a throng of excited spectators waving and cheering on a procession of spandex-clad Olympians and then chant along with me:

"The Games must go to Paris. The Games must go to Paris. The Games must go to Paris. The Games must go to Paris."

Repeat this mantra over and over again until your positive energy has been imprinted on the ether.

Any other ideas and suggestions for bolstering the Paris bid are warmly welcomed. Remember, that every bit of effort helps and that you can make a difference. You can help spare my home town from having to endure the burden of this costly 20th century anachronism.

In anticipation of your kind assistance, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

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Sport is going through an awkward transition phase just now, caused by the onward march of technology. During this phase, the problem is that the commentators often have technology to scrutinise and generally second-guess umpiring or refereeing decisions that are not available to the umpires or referees themselves.

This is quite natural. The commentators can afford to muck about with wild technological experiments. They can stick with them if they seem to add something to their descriptive and analytical efforts, and quietly discontinue them if they only confuse. And even if it takes them twenty minutes to come up with their techno-analysis, it is still worth them showing it to their viewers. But including technology into actual game officiating is a necessarily more cautious and cumbersome process. So there is bound, at any given moment, to be this mismatch between the techno-toys the commentators have, and what the umpires and referees have.

Trouble is, again and again, this technology makes fools out of the game officials. It makes chumps of the umps.

The other day, Liverpool won the European Cup. But would they have won it if the referees of the Liverpool Chelsea semi-final had

Maybe the goal would still have stood if the officials had been able to look at all that subsequent computerisation. But at least disgruntled Chelsea players and supporters would have known that the decision was based on a different interpretation of that information rather than on the opinion of people who were standing in entirely the wrong place to have a valid opinion on the subject.

Rugby, both league and union, already uses slow motion cameras to help them decide about contentious tries. Did his foot go over the side line before he touched down? Did he touch down properly? That kind of thing. (In rugby, unlike in American football, they do not call it a touch down, but you do actually have to touch it down.)

Cricket is the sport I know most about, when it comes to adjudication technology. And cricket is, and always has been, full of tricky decisions that the umpires have to make. Technology is slowly being introduced to help the umpires make fewer errors.

Cricket umpires already use slow motion cameras to decide about run out decisions. This is when a batsman fails (or does he?) to complete a run by reaching the line that matters before the fielders hit the stumps with the ball. And this has greatly improved these decisions. With their being less doubt, batsmen now get less benefit from it, but so what? These decisions are now clearly better.

A big problem remains, however, with LBW decisions. That's "leg before wicket" – when the ball strikes the batsman's leg and would have hit the wicket. Or would it, question mark question mark, argument argument. There was a series not so long ago between England and South Africa which was settled in England's favour with a series of highly dubious LBWs in the deciding match, and that kind of nasty-taste-in-the-mouth we-was-robbed stuff happens quite often. But at least that happened, as I recall, before the age of Hawk-eye.

Hawk-eye is the machine that tells us, as well as anyone or anything can, whether a batsman was out LBW or not. And although the ultimate truth of the matter is still hard to be sure about – because, after all, the machine is still only guessing where the ball would have gone, rather than measuring anything it actually did do – Hawk-eye looks pretty convincing to me. Put it this way. If I were a batsman being given out, or a bowler begging in vain for the verdict, I would rather that Hawk-eye was supplying the verdict rather than some one-eyed umpire.

The cricket commentators also have their "snickometer" to determine whether the ball has touched the bat while passing it or not, and in some cases to work out whether the ball touched the bat before hitting the pad, and therefore whether or not a batsman can be given out LBW. (If he hits it first, however gently, it is not out.) The Snickometer produces an output that looks like a voice analyser, and expert interpreters to tell what kind of noise that spike is, and exactly when it happened. So the Snickometer can really help, with things like snicked catches to the wicketkeeper.

But, although the commentators, and hence also all the TV viewers like me, have Hawk-eye and the Snickometer, the umpires, as yet, do not. Time and again, they give their instant verdicts, based only on what they just saw, at full speed, and then moments later (fewer and fewer moments as time has gone by) Hawk-eye and/or the Snickometer have given their verdicts. Often they differ. Invariably, the technologically aided decisions are more convincing, and often embarrassingly so.

In the most recent televised cricket match, during the various excerpts and live periods that I watched, there were three dodgy LBW decisions.

I only realised at seven o'clock on Thursday evening that an international cricket match between England and Bangladesh had begun that day, such was the excitement that this contest had not generated among England cricket followers such as myself. And what a horrible mismatch it was. England won by an innings and a lot, with almost the entire Bank Holiday long weekend to spare.

Accordingly, it really didn't matter very much that on day one, one of the Bangladeshi batsmen was given out LBW, to a ball which Hawk-eye immediately decided would have missed the stumps by several inches, sideways and upwards, or that the following morning, England captain Michael Vaughan was given not out LBW when the commentators, and I for what that may be worth, and then a few seconds later Hawk-eye himself, all reckoned he was as bang in front as bang in front can be. Vaughan was then on 24, and went on to make 120, and the Bangladesh batsman wrongly given out in the Bangladesh first innings was their top scorer in the second innings, so these decisions did make a difference, and especially to the progress of the careers of the individual cricketers concerned. But not enough of a difference for anyone to care very much, so huge was the disparity between the two sides.

However, it is a good bet that at some stage during the serious cricket business of this summer – the small matter of a five match series between England and the mighty Australians, no less – there will be similar umpiring errors, which will be similarly revealed instantaneously to be errors, but which may have a more serious bearing on the outcome of the contest. The likelihood is that Australia will win this series handsomely. But if England play at their very best and if Australia fluff some of their lines, it may be closer than that – close enough for umpiring errors to matter quite a lot.

In the days when the only equipment that cricket had to help it decide about run outs and catches and LBWs was the eyes and the ears of the umpires, with no one else having any play-backs or slow motion cameras or computer analysis, and when any commentator who disagreed with the umpire was just backing his eyes and ears (from a hundred yards further away) against the umpire's, this was no problem. Umpires were, then as now, human, but you just had to accept their verdicts, because how else could things be decided? Mistakes got made, but were accepted as inevitable.

Now, however, it has become technologically possible, and hence humanly necessary, to do better.

It is sometimes said that all this technology undermines the authority of umpires. That is true. But only insofar as the cricket authorities do not allow the umpires to use it.

I am not really complaining about all this. As I say, this mismatch between what is good enough for commentators and what is good enough for umpires is inevitable, and there is bound to be a lag. All I am saying is that cricket is now wading through the treacle of this lag, and that it should be the concern of the cricket authorities to make as much use of technology as they conveniently can, as soon as they can, and to do away with as many obvious injustices as they can.

I am not saying that this will be easy to organise. Should the umpires have hand held kit and make their decisions on the pitch, or should all the decisions be referred to an off-pitch umpire, as run outs are now? Should as much weight be given to what the technology says would have happened (whether the ball would have hit the wicket, if it had not struck the batsman's pads), as to what it says did happen (snicks, balls pitching were they have to for an LBW to be given, and so on)? Should the verdict of Hawk-eye, in other words, be regarded as final? How long should everyone be made to wait for these verdicts? All very complicated. But these questions cannot be dodged, and must be dealt with.

Personally I would favour Hawk-eye's verdict being accepted as final, and I bet a lot of the players would prefer that also, even if Hawk-eye presumably does make the occasional mistake.

In the meantime, while the lag lasts, the argument will rumble on. Some say that the answer is not to give the technology to the umpires, but to snatch it away from the commentators, but that rabbit is already out of the bag, and will be very hard to stuff back in again without accusations of Luddism. (Personally, I find Hawk-eye's opinions fascinating, and would greatly miss them.) But more to the point, the fact that the technology is now a fact means that even if we all stop consulting it when something controversial happens, we still could have. So the arguments will not go away until the technology is accepted and made maximum use of.

In short, bring it on, and the sooner they can get it working, the better.

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I am definitely not a real football fan. If the team I want to win is winning, well jolly ho. If it is losing, then it is only a game and nothing to get fussed about it.

So when I came home from a walk along the river in the evening sunshine, to find that Liverpool were already 3-0 down in the European Cup Final against AC Milan, it was no great source of sadness to me. Only a game. I switched to CSI Miami.

But every so often I flipped back to see how Liverpool were doing, and quite by chance, I caught the first Liverpool goal, scored by captain Steven Gerrard. Hullo, said the commentator. Expectantly. And prophetically.

When I next flipped back from the gruesomenesses of CSI, Liverpool were already celebrating goal number two, scored by substitute Smicer (pronounced Smeetzer), and on my next visit I saw Liverpool get awarded a penalty.

At this point, I did not want to watch it, not because it did not matter, but because it did. It had gone from Only A Game to: God On A Bike!!! in the space of about five minutes. If I allowed myself to get all excited, Liverpool would then lose, and I would suffer idiotic agonies. So, back to CSI, where the news was that more people were being murdered gruesomely, by really nasty people. Lucky thing the forensic scientists all look like actors. Back to find that Liverpool have converted the penalty. (I spare myself the agony of actually witnessing what they show me later: the Milan goalie saving it and then the Liverpool guy knocking it in at the second try. This is rare.)

From then on it was a visit back every five minutes or so. 3-3. 3-3. 3-3. 3-3. Extra time looms. 3-3. 3-3. Extra time. 3-3. 3-3. 3-3. Penalty shoot out looms. 3-3. 3-3. Penalty shoot out.

Can not bear that. If I watched that I would get even more wound up, and additionally wound up by the sense of shame at getting so additionally wound up. It is only a game!!! (God on a bike!!!!)

Ten more minutes of something, else. Ooh, I wonder how the shoot out is going. Milan have missed their first two! Amazing. Liverpool are actually likely winners. So I watch their next one, and of course the Milan goalie saves it. Liverpool are still one ahead, and still probably winners, but again, over to Celebrity Home Makeover Love Island on Ice Meets Eastenders Uncovered Confidential. (Actually I think that by then it was Blackadder.) And when I go back again, Liverpool are celebrating. Bloke in specs: "Jamie, tell me honestly, did you think at half time that you had any chance?" Jamie: "No." Bloke in specs: "Rafael, that was fantastic, fantastic." Rafael: "Yes, bloke in specs, that was fantastic fantastic", etc.

As Alex Ferguson said after his Manchester United won the 1999 final of the same tournament against Bayern Munich in equally improbable style, with two extra time goals from Sheringham and Solskjaer: "Football. Bloody hell."

At half past one a.m. tomorrow morning they will be showing it again. And that I will video, and then watch it properly later, and then again in the months and years to come. That is how to enjoy sport, if you are a not-proper sports fan like me. Watch and rewatch the games your guys win in style, and forget the rest. Do not waste your one life obsessing over games that got away, or which were won by your team but unmemorably, without any amazing magic moments to savour. Take all that spiritual energy, and apply it to doing real life better, I say. My method wastes far less time on all this nonsense.

But when games go right, enjoy.

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Last week, my friend Jonathan Pearce made some observations on the impending takeover of the Manchester United football club by Malcolm Glazer. This led to a lengthy comments thread that I was going to add to, but the comment in question got a little long, so I thought I would turn it into a post. In particular, I wanted to address the key question, which is simply is there any way Mr Glazer can get enough revenue from the club to pay of the large debt that has been accrued, and if so, how.

As I see it there are two sources of value in the club that the present management is not presently allowed to exploit, and to make a success of his bid Glazer needs to gain control of at least one of them. One is that television rights are sold collectively, and as a consequence the share of television money that is going to Manchester United as not comensurate with their popularity and fan base. The other is that Asian and particularly Chinese television markets are not presently competitive and as a consequence Asian television companies are paying far less for the right to show football than the matches are actually worth. I will address these two issues in turn.

Manchester United gets a far smaller percentage of total TV rights money than it would be entitled to merely by the level of its popularity. Of the various competitions that Manchester United play in, the governing bodies of the two that matter (The Premier League and the UEFA Champions League) sell the television rights of the competitions collectively. The Premier League sells the rights to all its matches in bulk and then shares the money amongst its clubs. So does UEFA. If Manchester United were able to sell the television rights to its own home matches directly to television companies, the club would receive a lot more money than it does now. There have been some mentions in the press that Glazer might try to have this happen, but I chances of this happening strikes me as relatively low.

There have been lots of suggestions over the years that the biggest clubs in Europe might break away from their national leagues and form a super league where they control their own TV rights (and there have been more in recent weeks as the bid for Man U has gone on), but this is always a non-starter. National leagues have too much history and are too important to fans. It might be possible to argue that collective selling of TV rights is anti-competitive, but I don't think the courts would agree. (Membership of the Premier League is voluntary). And I think a court would probably be susceptible to the argument that the three or four top clubs in England are dominant enough already (whether or not this would have much to do with what the actual law says) . If clubs in the Premier League could sell their own rights, then I believe that about 75% of the total television money would go to the top four clubs, and I tend to think there would be legal and political objections to that, regardless of their merit. (Seriously, think about it. You are a television company. Once you have the rights to the home matches of Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, and Liverpool, what else do you need?)

One might be able to make this argument more strongly in the case of the Champions League, but it wouldn't help quite as much, mainly because Manchester United aren't dominant in that competition, having only won it twice and only once in recent years, and not having looked like winning it in any other recent year. Of the 32 teams that play in that competition every year, probably ten have claims to be as big or nearly as big as Manchester United, and another ten are good enough to win it if things go their way. (And Manchester United's recent record of making the later stages of the tournament isn't that great). Inevitably, the television money of this competition would have to be divided up in more ways than for domestic football, even in a situation where clubs were permitted to sell their own television rights. (And in any event, bigger and more successful clubs get more money than smaller and less successful ones do now, although the means for dividing the money is perhaps a little eccentric, depending as it does on performance in national leagues).

Which is not to say that Manchester United's share would not increase considerably if they could sell their own television rights. It would, but not as much as it would if they could sell the rights to their own home matches in the Premier League. But in any event, once again I think the political and legal objections are likely to be too great for there to really be much chance of that happening. UEFA gains its power in the labyrinthine world of football politics largely through the television revenues of the Champions League,and saying it wouldn't give this up without a fight is a vast understatement. Of course, one possibility would be for the top European clubs to break away from the Champions League and instead form their own international competition, but if they did that UEFA would try very hard to prevent them from playing in national leagues as well. While I think if UEFA tried to do this and the clubs challenged it in court the clubs would win, it would be a dreadful fight, and at least ten of the top European clubs would have to act in concert in the first place for this to happen. And I think many of them would shy away from trying it because of the size of the fight that would be involved.

So, while I do see hidden value in England and Europe for Manchester United, I can't see any great way for Malcolm Glazer to extract it. My Samizdata and ubersportingpundit colleague Scott Wickstein commented on the Glazer takeover of Manchester United a week or so ago, and he observed that he thought that the takeover would have worked a decade ago, but that now is too late. His argument there was essentially that European television changed in the 1980s and 1990s with the rise of private television companies (particularly pay television companies) in competition with the traditional cozy state owned and state regulated television stations, which meant suddenly that football leagues and clubs could extract something like the fair value of their television rights, whereas previously they had been in markets where little money was paid for television rights due to a lack of competition due to state ownership and state regulation. (At the same time, football clubs and teams got a lot of media and marketing related expertise from the television companies in general, and this led to them marketing themselves better in other ways, such as getting more money from merchandising replica shirts and the like).

Scott's point is that there was lots of hidden value in Europe in 1985, and that there was money to be made by people who noticed this, but that this is now being extracted and this is priced in. And after considering the sort of stuff above, I tend to think that he is pretty much right.

But Europe isn't the whole world. The question is whether there is value outside Europe that can also be extracted. And that is the second point that I want to discuss. The popularity of football in East Asia (especially Japan and China) is often commented on, and it is certainly true that diehard fans in Manchester often do not realise this. As someone who is (a) a Manchester United supporter, although not a very avid one and (b) an Australian, I found myself discussing this with a few locals in a pub in Manchester last year. In particular they had no idea that a major reason why Manchester United games often kick off
around midday is that this is peak television viewing time in east Asia. (In the case of Saturdays, this also has to do with the FAs rules about what time live television broadcasts of matches are allowed in Britain).

So the Asian following is real, but the question that needs to be asked is whether clubs are actually making any or much money from fans in these markets. And the truthful answer to this, perhaps surprising given the level of exposure of the clubs in this markets, is actually "Not much". In terms of merchandising, the Asian market is far smaller than that of Europe, at least partly due to tremendous amount of counterfeit goods being in circulation. (This will change as certain markets get richer, but this will be over a longer timescale than Mr Glazer’s). In terms of media rights, things may happen faster. lack of competition in the Chinese TV market means that although lots of people watch Premier League football there, the rights are bought by state controlled television networks that do not face competition in bidding for the rights, and so which get them for close to nothing. The rights are probably worth quite a lot in terms of advertising that they generate - the Chinese middle class is at this point in the hundreds of millions, depending on how you measure it - but little of this is flowing through to the clubs. The question is whether it is possible to make some of it do so within a relatively small number of years. That means competitive auctions for rights in China.

This doesn't strike me as impossible. In India, multiple bidders now bid huge amounts of money for the rights to cricket matches. India is still a lot poorer than China. (Of course, India is also a lot freer than China, which means that the Chinese government is rather more concerned with controlling the media than is the Indian government). But in financial terms, if it can happen in India, then it can surely happen in China. And if it does, the money is potentially a lot more. But "a lot more" is still relative. The Chinese middle class is still a lot poorer on average than the population of Europe. The total amount of television money that could come from China in the immediate future, even in a free market, is a lot less than can come from Europe. Probably if the television rights were sold collectively in China and Asia, Manchester United's share would still not be enough to pay for Mr Glazer's debts, even if the rights were sold in a free auction.

But there is still another side to this. If we had a free market in television rights in China and Asia, and Manchester United and other British clubs were allowed to sell their television rights individually rather than collectively, then the total amount of money that Manchester United could gain might just compare favourably with their television income in Britain. There are quite a few big ifs in there, but if all this were to happen then I could see Manchester United's income increasing dramatically and the club being worth what Mr Glazer has paid and more. This does strike me as more feasible than the various other possibilities. The Premiership is more likely to be willing to give up collective selling of TV rights for Asian markets, because firstly it doesn't make much money now and it doesn't really know how much they are worth. Secondly, there is scope for competition between European Leagues here. If Real Madrid are free to sell their TV rights individually in China, then Manchester United can plead disadvantages against its European rivals as an argument as to why it should have similar freedom. There are relatively few short term losers in making such a change, which is why it is more possible.

But the question is whether this can all happen in a short period, that is within five years. If it can, Mr Glazer might make money - conceivably even a lot of money. He needs help from someone to free up the Chinese television market. The obvious person is actually Rupert Murdoch, who has extensive Hong Kong based Asian satellite television interests, and who has been sucking up to the butchers of Beijing for years now. Murdoch himself attempted to buy Manchester United a few years back but was foiled by British competition authorities. It may not be that Glazer and Murdoch like or even know each other, but now that Glazer owns the most valuable football club in the world, they certainly do have common interests.

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Britons, even those uninterested in sport, would have to have been ignoring the news for the past few weeks not have seen reports about the audacious purchase of English football team Manchester United by American tycoon Malcolm Glazer. His bid, which looks likely to succeed and will take the club off the stock exchange, has enraged fans, concerned that a man with no knowledge of football or the club's history will wreck the club.

I hope the fans' worst fears do not come to pass. The deal is, however, troubling. Glazer has taken on a vast amount of debt to finance the deal, presumably calculating that he can earn enough profits to service his debt to make the deal - known in the jargon as a leveraged buyout - viable. With concerns rising that the economy could slow down and dent the firm's profitability, such a deal could easily end badly for the club. A number of teams, most notably Leeds United, have fallen on hard times, nearly going under due to mountains of debt.

As a gung-ho defender of free enterprise, I can hardly claim that Glazer was not entitled to bid for this team under the rules of the stock market. He has taken his gamble and who knows, it may pay off, although the financial details don't appear very reassuring. I have noticed more than just a whiff of unpleasant anti-Americanism in some of the reporting on this deal in some quarters of the media.

I follow another team - Ipswich Town FC - but have always had a bit of a soft spot for the team that has given us the likes of Duncan Edwards, George Best and Bryan Robson. I hope that this rather oddball entrepreneur from Florida understands what he is doing and does not wreck one of the most famous, if the most famous, sporting institutions in the world.

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What's on your mind tonight? Global warming? Economic collapse? African poverty? Islamic terrorism? Demographic decline? Mass immigration? The rise of China? The fall of Europe? Avian flu? AIDS?

Well, none of that matters to me right now. I am content to float aimlessly in the warm bath of deep, spiritual joy that I have been immersed in since Saturday afternoon when I finally got to see my beloved Chelsea clinch the Premier League Title.

I have never been here before. The last time Chelsea lifted the crown was in 1955, several years before I was born. In my 37 years of devotion to this club I have known pain, disappointment, frustration, humiliation, exasperation and occasional (and infuriatingly short-lived) elation. The term 'emotional rollercoaster' does not even come close.

Yet, on Saturday afternoon, all those years of hurt just seemed to melt away like April snow. My 'ugly duckling' team has grown into a beautiful swan and (for the moment at least) nothing else matters.

Colour me happy. Very happy.

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The campaign to impose the Olympic Games upon Paris and the French taxpayer, rather than upon London and the British (and London – i.e. me) taxpayer, is lunging strongly towards the finishing tape:

. . . Mauritanian head of CONFEJES Youssouf Fall explained support for Paris's candidacy by stressing "France's important experience in organizing sports competitions, as well as Paris's excellent quality infrastructure." Paris's official commission said in a press release, "This decision is a major international push for Paris's candidacy, which is now guaranteed of strong support in the final vote on July 6 in Singapore." The choice of the site of the Games is not voted on by the countries as such, but rather by the members of the IOC, who can vote as they wish. Nevertheless, . . .

That is the most eloquent "nevertheless" I have read recently.

. . . among the 39 countries that support Paris, there are many whose representatives have a vote, including Morocco, Canada, Egypt, Cameroon, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Guinea, and Tunisia, and the Paris 2012 committee stresses that "the Francophone community of Belgium and the Canadian provinces of Quebec and new Brunswich have also given their support." Among other countries at the CONFEJES meeting were Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Comoros, Congo, Ivory Coast, Djibouti, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Greece, Haiti, Lebanon, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Mauritania, Níger, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rumania, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Chad, Togo, and Vietnam. In addition, French sports minister Jean-Francois Lamour stated yesterday that this vote shows "one additional proof of the support and determination Paris's candidacy can count on. . . .

Allez France! Allez neo-colonialism!

And an interesting reminder, I think, of how different the world can look when viewed from somewhere . . . different.

My guess would be that all this talk of democracy that has been bubbling up in the world lately must be quite a nuisance to a number of the regimes listed there. Which might explain why France, despite being democratic itself, is not that keen on the idea spreading.

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This BBC story tells us that the recent visit by Olympic Game officials to inspect London about its chances of winning the bid to stage games in 2012 cost 680,000 pounds.

Come on ladies and gentlemen, surely you can do better than that. What is the point of being on the Olympic committee if you cannot itemise your bills in the millions? They are not even trying.

It goes without saying that I fervently hope that Britain does not host the event.

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While many aspects of intellectual property rights are clearly defined legally by such devices as patents and trademarks, the situation is not quite so clear with other things that may be defined as intellectual property. Take titles of merit, such as 'World Champion'.

In team sports, this is not really an issue. For team disciplines can only take place in a regulated environment. For example, in football, the question of which is the strongest club in Europe is one which there is a tournament called the "Champions League" and that is designed to allow such questions to be decided. And it is generally agreed by all and sundry that UEFA are the "fit and proper" people to run this tournament (except perhaps by FIFA, but that is by the by).

For individual sporting disciplines, it is not so easy to regulate these things. Golf, for example, has rarely if ever had any reference to a 'World Champion'; only recently has it even agreed on a ranking system to determine who is the best player in the world. Indeed, although I do not know much about golf, it seems to me that golf is a sport that seems to discourage this question altogether.

Chess, another individual player sport, is a different kettle of fish. It is also an illuminating example of how sporting titles can gather prestige enough to have a real financial worth to them, in the same way that intellectual property does. Indeed, it can be seen from the example of chess that to be a 'world champion' is to have an asset of considerable value.

The notion of being a 'world champion' of a sport seems to have come into vogue in the mid to late 19th century, and, indeed, chess is a sport which was one of the first to embrace the concept. In chess, it evolved around the person of one Wilhelm Steinitz, whose claim to be the best player in the world was accepted, and the concept of a 'World Championship' match as a mechanisim to formalise this claim was introduced.

At this stage, there was no international body - the champion was free to accept or decline challenges and was free to make the rules as he went along. Eventually Steinitz was defeated by Emanuel Lasker, who became champion in 1894. Lasker was the greatest player of his day, but as he grew old a new generation of challengers emerged. Lasker was not keen to meet them. After the First World War, Lasker's heart was not really in chess and he resigned the title until financial circumstances induced him to play against his strongest challenger, Jose Raul Capablanca. By this stage, Lasker was past his prime, and Capablanca, one of the strongest players in history, won the title with some ease.

There were efforts after this to regulate the World Championship, but they came to naught- the establishment of a global Chess federation (FIDE) in 1924, similarly, made no difference. Champions continued to enjoy the title as their personal property.

However, when Capablanca's successor, Alexander Alekhine, died undefeated in 1946, FIDE seized its chance, organising a tournament of the leading players of the day to determine who would be the World Championship. This tournament was won by Mikhail Botvinnik, the leading player of the USSR.

Chess, by this time, had become a very big sport in the USSR. By this time, the leading Soviet players were regarded as professionals in the service of the Soviet state, and the leading players of that country were given state salaries. This had two important functions. First, it enabled the leading Soviet players to concentrate on the game on a full-time basis, and secondly, it enabled the state to control directly the incomes of people it considered important to it.

In a subtle, indirect way, the USSR also came to dominate the international Chess federation, FIDE. This was perhaps bound to happen, as the USSR took chess quite a great deal more seriously then any other nation, but it had more sinister overtones because of the high amount of interest that the Soviet Government took in the game.

(As another aside, this is by no means uncommon. In cricket, Pakistan's government has always had a role in the national cricket board, also this happens in Africa. Zimbabwe's government controls the game there directly; in South Africa, the cricket authorities are extremely sensitive, and servile, to the government's wishes. However it is rare that a government will end up controlling an international sporting body. This is because usually there will be other nations of similar size taking an interest in that sport to counteract this. However, in chess, the US government only took an interest when Bobby Fischer seemed likely to give the USSR establishment a bloody nose).

But the authority of FIDE to be the governing body of the sport, and to determine the rules of engagement of the World Championship, became unquestioned. Every three years, the champion would play a match of 24 games against a challenger who had come through a rigorous qualifying system. And if the Champion lost, he had the right to a rematch the next year (although this rule was abolished in 1962.) This cycle became so ingrained into the conciousness of the international chess fraternity that when the eccentric (to say the very least) American Bobby Fischer tried to insist on changing the format of the World Championship match, as champion, in 1975, FIDE stripped him of his title, and awarded it to his challenger, Anatoly Karpov, with general approval of the international chess community, not just in the Eastern bloc, either.

Karpov, by reclaiming the World Championship from the hated American, was the instant 'golden boy' of the USSR; he was decorated by Breznev, and enjoyed a high position in Soviet society. So when another Soviet grandmaster qualified to challenge him, Victor Korchnoi, the Soviet government used subtle measures to help Karpov in the 1978 match. The enraged Korchnoi defected to the West, and then qualified once again to challenge in the 1981 World Championship match. Here, the USSR's influence in FIDE was again shown, and Karpov won in controversial circumstances.

In due course, Karpov lost his title to Garry Kasparov. But when the USSR expired, many of its assets became loose items, like assets to be disposed of with the receiver of a bankrupt estate. And, free from the hand of the Soviet state, Russian grandmasters realised that they no longer had to accept the dictate of FIDE as to where, when, and how they played chess. So in 1993, dissatisfied with the terms of their slated 1993 match, Kasparov and his challenger, Nigel Short, announced a breakaway organisation, and played their match under that banner.

FIDE retaliated by stripping Kasparov of his title, and holding a new match, but the 'official' champion did not have real credibility. In the 1990s, FIDE fell into the hands of a Russian provincial politician, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who has continued to operate FIDE to this day. FIDE continues to be recognised as the governing body for the sport, except for the World Championship. FIDE continues to hold "World Championship" tournaments, but is having increasing difficulty in doing so, because the dimished prestige of the 'official' title makes it hard to generate prize money and the like.

In practice, the 'World Championship' has reverted to being the personal property of the holder. Gary Kasparov treated it as such, refusing or accepting challenges on his own (financial) whim, until he was defeated in 2000 by Vladimir Kramnik. Kramnik, in turn, accepted a challenge in 2004 by Peter Leko, and only with difficulty held on; the match was agreed on and conducted privately, with sponsorship by a Swiss tobacco company.

Efforts to 're-unify' the 'World Championship' have been intense, but have come to naught. Kramnik is generally recognised as the World Champion, even though he is by no other measure the best player in the world. However, the title has such prestige and aura in the international chess community that his claim is generally recongised, as long as he is willing to defend it. Such efforts to 're-unify' the title under the auspicies of FIDE are bound to fail, at the very least, until FIDE is willing to concede that the title has intangible value, rather like goodwill in an accounting sense, and is willing to compensate the holder accordingly.

What does this long case study say about intellectual property? Well, there is some intellectual property that is really hard to value properly. What is the value of having the control over who challenges you for your title and when, and where, and for how much? We do not know yet, as no one has paid for it, but it is surely a considerable sum.

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The line here, which I pretty much toe, is that the Olympic Games are an orgy of drug-sodden, politicised insanity, which Britain, London in particular, will spend the next century or more paying for, in the unfortunate event that Britain, London in particular, get the damn things, in 2012. That the politicians all seem to love the Olympics is enough to make me hostile, even though I do have a serious weakness for modernistical structures of the sort that they build nowadays to accommodate sporting events.

Luckily, Paris is now said to be the front runner. But, the news from Paris is deteriorating. On March 10th, that gang of bribe guzzlers known as the IOC (International Olympic Committee) will be visiting Paris, and the local unions, purely by coincidence I feel sure, happen to be agitating at that time against … the future basically:

French unions have rejected calls to shelve strikes planned for the day the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is due in Paris to assess its bid.

Seven unions are to take part in marches and stoppages on 10 March, to protest against government moves to relax France's 35-hour working week.

Meanwhile, Mayor of London Ken Livingstone is up to his neck in a row about some insulting and borderline anti-semitic remarks he made to a Jewish journalist, in the course of his ongoing feud with a newspaper group.

The pressure on London Mayor Ken Livingstone intensified today as Tony Blair joined calls for him apologise for his Nazi jibe to a Jewish journalist.

In the capital, there were fears that the continuing row over Mr Livingstone’s outburst – in which he likened the journalist to a concentration camp guard – could damage the city’s chances of hosting the 2012 Olympics.

Well, it certainly could, and the French press is presumably spinning this story like a nuclear powered top. But, a possibility that does not seem to have been much discussed is that Ken Livingstone's attitude during this ruckus might be what it is not despite the attempt to get the Olympics for London, but because of it. The initial insults sound less than calculated, but politicians like Ken Livingstone are nothing if not good actors. What if Ken picked this particular fight deliberately? Okay, that may be somewhat farfetched. But the aftermath? After Ken had had time to think things through?

Israel has called on Ken to apologise. "International" people, like the people in the International Olympic Committee, are just going to fall over themselves to obey Israel. Not.

Tony Blair wants Ken to apologise. And he is another focus of adoration throughout International land. Again, not.

I do not know the political attitudes of the IOC people, but I bet Ken Livingstone does. And what if he calculates that hanging tough, in the face of all this pressure, adding further insults to the original insults, will actually get him more points with these people than backing down?

(4) (16)

Relieved as I am temporarily am of my Cultural and Educational obligations, I have resumed contributing to Ubersportingpundit, which is bossed by Scott Wickstein. Yesterday I did a somewhat belated piece about the first weekend of the Six Nations rugby tournament, on the Saturday of which Wales beat England 11-9. Wales had not beaten England in Wales in this fixture since nineteen ninety something, and the Welsh were very eager for their side to win, and more to the point, they rightly sensed that this year, they had their best chance for years.

Just how eager they were for a victory I had not realised, until I followed up this link, from a commenter at UbSpPu:

A Welsh rugby fan cut off his own testicles after his team beat England, police confirmed today.

Why did he do that?

It was reported that the man told his friends: "If Wales win I'll cut my own balls off."

Perhaps his idea was that when England duly won, again, he would be able to console himself by saying: "Well, if Wales had won I would have had to cut off my balls, so thank goodness they did not win." If so, the plan went badly wrong.

After the 11-9 victory in the Six Nations clash, the man is reported to have gone outside and severed his testicles before bringing them back into the club to show fellow drinkers.

So much for the Welsh desire to win rugby matches. The story ends with the voice of typical killjoy Welsh puritanism:

A local was reported as saying that the man was on medication and should not have been drinking.

As Dave Barry would say, under a headline about creeping fascism: "What, suddenly you're not allowed to chop you own balls off?" Amazingly, Samizdata now has a link to this severed testicles report, and, as yet, Dave Barry seems not to.

If England beat France next Sunday, I intend to celebrate by cutting my toe nails.

(0) (18)

The England cricket team is doing really rather well just now. They are not the best. Australia are the best. But England are well on the way to establishing themselves as the best of the rest. Yesterday they completed a fine victory against South Africa, in the first of the series of five test matches they are playing down there, having earlier in the year, in England, beaten New Zealand in 3 games out of 3 and the West Indies in 4 games out of 4. Before that they toured the West Indies and beat them 3 games out of 4, with the last game drawn. In other words, England have won 8 out of their last 8 test matches (more than any England side has ever won consecutively before), and it would have 12 out of 12 had it not been for that final game draw in the West Indies. Recent England recruit Andrew Strauss, who batted superbly, both in the game against South Africa that finished yesterday morning and throughout last summer, has now played in just 8 test matches and has been on the winning side every time. This is amazing.

All of which means that, what with England doing so well, now was a very good time for the England cricket authorities to be renegotiating the TV rights to cricket matches, and here is what they have done:

Live coverage of England's home Test matches will no longer be available on terrestrial TV from 2006 onwards.

The England and Wales Cricket Board has awarded an exclusive four-year contract to BSkyB, which will run until 2009.

In other words, I and millions of other BBC License Fee payers will not be able to watch test cricket live on the telly without paying extra.

I am selfishly unhappy about this. I like watching test cricket live on the telly, in among doing other things. Cricket is a slow game, and now that they have instant replays of anything very exciting, it mixes well with working on other things.

However, it is clear to me that the cricket people in question (the England and Wales Cricket Board – or ECB) are perfectly entitled to make this deal. If I want to go on watching their games, I will have to pay more. That is the deal they are offering, and it is up to me to decide what to do about that.

Others, however, take a more interventionist line.

Criticism of the ECB's decision was swift. The backlash amongst cricket supporters has been fierce and the governing body stand accused of ignoring their responsibility to promote the sport at a time when the England team is enjoying great success.

Labour MP John Grogan, a Yorkshire CCC member, told the Guardian he wants the list of "crown jewel" sports, which include the FA Cup final and Olympics, to be reviewed. Cricket was removed from the protected list in 1998.

"I think it's disastrous for English cricket," said Grogan.

"There is a real danger (cricket) will disappear from half the public's consciousness and youngsters will take up other sports.

"The government has to review what sports are included in the listed events."

Listed events. If you think that sounds like 'listed buildings', you would be right. What it means is that The Government, on behalf of The People, seizes control of various Big Sporting Events, and says that the people who have spent the last century or two organising them, and building up into the Crown Jewel Events that they have become, do not own or control them any more. Oh, they have to go on organising them. But they are no longer allowed to charge what they want to charge for their events. Which means that the events are not theirs any more. Greedy cricket supporters who, like me, want to watch cricket on the telly, but who do not want to pay what the supplier of the events is asking, are now agitating for the Government to steal test cricket from its rightful owners.

As usual, when the Government is being urged to Doing Something, the question of whether the people on the receiving end of this Something are being wise, or generous, or generally doing their jobs well, is all mixed up with whether the Government would be right to barge in and rearrange matters. But, these are two absolutely distinct matters. Maybe your taste in music is poor. Maybe you are worth more money than your employers are now willing to pay you. Maybe in refusing to marry this virtuous but rather plain girl rather than that silly but prettier one you are being both cruel and stupid. But that is a long way from saying that the government should force you to listen to better music, force your employers to pay you more than they want to, and decide who you should marry.

And maybe the ECB is serving cricket badly, by denying many of the potential next generation of England cricketers the chance to watch test cricket at an impressionable age. Maybe this is a mistake. Maybe the money they will make from the deal and which they will distribute to the England county cricket clubs, is money they should have been willing to do without. Maybe.

But – and no maybes about it – it is none of the Government's business to be deciding on behalf of the ECB what they should charge for their product, and to whom.

(2) (29)

What she said.

What she (the Telegraph's Janet Daley) started by saying was what they did in New York to bash the crime numbers down to a state bordering on civilisation from a state not bordering on barbarism. And then she turns her attention to the very contrasting state of affairs that still pertains in London, as we here hardly need reminding.

You will have noticed that this is precisely the opposite of what is happening here. Try ringing the police to tell them about an act of vandalism that is going on before your eyes and you will be treated with scarcely concealed ridicule: we've got more important things to worry about than some kids smashing up a building site. Never mind that the kids who have got away with that are likely to conclude that they can get away with pretty much anything.

Now New Yorkers have their city back and we are losing ours. …

I have a suggestion.

The politicos are cranking up this London Olympic bid. Well, all those of us who care more about people getting murdered than we do about people running marathons should offer the Olympiacs a deal. You can have your damned games if, by the time they come here, you have got on top of London's crime numbers. If, on the other hand, you obsess about the Olympics and regard harping on about murder as a mere distraction, then we should all flood the internet with "London: World Capital of Crime – Olympians Do Not Come Here – You Will All Be Murdered" propaganda. "London Welcomes The Olympians" – "Now Hand Over Your Wallet Or Die", etc.

Could some computer graphics genius perhaps do something with those Olympic ring things to turn them into a piece of anti-crime anti-the-political-causes-of-crime propaganda? Slosh some blood on them, perhaps, or make a couple of the rings into the front end of a double-barrelled shotgun.

The good thing about this arrangement is that I believe that it would work spontaneously. No one would have to be in charge of anything. But, if any of the people who do think that they are in charge of the Olympic bid tell us that we are being unpatriotic if we go on about crime in London instead of ignoring it and suffering in silence, they will be spontaneously attacked, and in a way that will really hurt them, with globally circulated (especially in Paris of course) bad news about what an appallingly unsuitable city London would be to hold these stupid games. Shut up, they will say. And the reply will be: no. Either you help us, or we screw you. That will be our message to them. And I think, after they have had a taste of it, that it might prove rather persuasive.

Which means that it is possible is that the Olympiacs might actually be recruited as allies in the campaign sketched out so vigorously by Janet Daley. Which means that something along the lines she says might – quite soon actually – start being done.

If London did do a New York with its criminal arrangements, as a result of the Olympics coming here, I for one could easily put up with a few weeks of Olympiac madness.

(0) (7)

As an unashamed football (not soccer, dammit) fan, I must confess not to always having the highest regard for Sir Alex Ferguson, who will lead out his beloved Manchester United squad for his 1,000th match in charge as manager. He can be an irascible old fellow, and his carping about the decisions of referees is tiresome.

One cannot, however, doubt his passion for the game or his record of success in winning a hatful of trophies, including the European Champions League cup in 1999, as well as his careful and often fatherly nurturing of a raft of wonderful young players like Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, and of course David Beckham.

By the rapid hire-and-fire standards of modern football, Fergie's longevity is a wonder to behold. He reigns above ManU with every bit as much pomp as that other great Scotsman to have managed United, Sir Matt Busby (the man who probably did more than any other mortal to create the great club that it is today).

And Ferguson's tenure has coincided with football's rise to unparalleled commercial success, and whether one is bored senseless by sport or an addict like yours truly, one cannot doubt that Ferguson and Manchester United have played a huge part in making football the successful enterprise it is now.

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Further to this posting and previous postings involving Zimbabwe, the England cricket tour of Zimbabwe, etc., this story is the kind of reason why I am not that bothered about this apparently very stupid cricket tour that is now going ahead. No tour, and there would be that much less reportage of Zimbabwe and its disgusting ruler. What has happened is that about half the media have been banned from entering Zimbabwe, to write about the cricket! I suppose the fear is that they might wonder what all that shouting and screaming and people bashing is that goes on outside cricket grounds (and everywhere else – except in Safari parks apparently, see the comment on that previous posting) in Zimbabwe these days.

All the same, the ICC, cricket's global governing body, is making itself look ever more ridiculous:

For most countries, intervention from the government in this manner would be grounds enough for withdrawing from the tour but the ICC gave Zimbabwe special dispensation because of the situation in the country under the regime of president Robert Mugabe.

Well, exactly. A normal government cannot be allowed to behave like this. The Mugabe regime, on the other hand, must obviously be spared the interfering attentions of inquisitive journalists. How else can this disgusting regime grapple unhindered with all of the many, many problems caused by its own disgustingness?

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Instapundit thinks there is a connection between the dodgy cover-ups in US public life such as Rathergate and the Sandy Berger affair, as detailed here, and the basketbrawl and its public implications as detailed here. For good measure, he invites us to call him crazy.

I do not think he is crazy, but he might be taking a short term view. As Jim Geraghty put it:

There's one set of rules for regular folks, and another set of rules for celebrities, former high-ranking government officials, and other "important" people. If we break the rules, we pay the price. If a Dan Rather lies on the air, or Sandy Berger steals classified documents, there's no consequence.

Well, yes. I would posit, though, that rich and powerful figures in society have always benefited from these sorts of shenanegans. There is nothing new there. What IS new is that thanks to the compressed news cycle and bloggers, whistleblowers and better education, is that people are much less willing to put up with it. Compared to the dodgy dealings of earlier times, Rathergate is small beer indeed. We are not talking Teapot Dome here.

That is not to say that we should not worry about this level of dishonesty. Dodgy dealings by those with public responsibilities should never be tolerated. But it is a positive sign that people are increasingly unwilling to tolerate illegal behavior from what is laughingly known in some quarters as the Great and the Good. (Maybe one day people will worry about the actual laws that get passed. I remain an optimist.)

Instapundit thinks there's a connection between dodgy dealings and boys behaving badly, either playing or attending sport. I remain to be convinced. The actual fight in question seems to me to be a bit excessive, but hardly unprecedented. I have seen worse fights in Australian country football, and as for players and spectators interacting, well, after 25 years of watching cricket, I think I've seen it all before.

The shock that US bloggers seem to be in over the affair does suggest that it is new to American sports lovers though. But as a sportslover with a more global perspective, I would say that the behavior of sports fans (and indeed players) is probably somewhat improved, if you take a long term and global view.

But then, when it comes to the long term (longer then the next electoral cycle), I am a raging optimist. I think Professor Reynolds is wrong on this one.

(2) (8)

This afternoon, the BBC showed the highlights of the international rugby match played yesterday between England and South Africa, at Twickenham. I already knew that it would have a happy ending. (I find important rugby internationals very hard to watch properly, and always try to tape them, so that, if England win, I can then settle down and enjoy them properly. I am not, in other words, a Real Fan.)

Anyway, yes, England won 32-16, scoring two tries in the first half, with South Africa only managing one try, at the end when it was too late.

This was not a result that many people expected. Why? Because no one really knew what to expect.

South Africa won the recent triangular tournament of the Southern Hemisphere giants (i.e. against Australia and New Zealand), but what does that mean nowadays? Hard to say. After all, last weekend, Ireland beat them in Dublin. Narrowly, but they beat them.

As for England, who knew? Since that World Cup triumph (actually since just before it – England peaked before the World Cup rather than at it and only just clung on to their form enough during the World Cup to win it) England have been in decline, and then in … disintegration. Big Name after Big Name announced their various retirements. Leonard, Johnson, Dallaglio, Back. Manager Clive Woodward had always said in public that the World Cup, once won, was only the start and that he and his happy band would then proceed to win the next one. But in truth, winning this thing once (and for the very first time remember) was always the important thing, and once Everest was climbed, climbing it again held insufficient magic for the older players, especially since their only contribution would be supplying a bit of continuity before retiring in a year or two's time. Other players got injured, or revealed that they already were injured, and in no state to play in any games other than such games as World Cup Finals. Others just needed to put their feet up. So the World Cup team fell to bits with extraordinary suddenness. England came third in the Six Nations at the beginning of this year, their lowest position for many years, and only escaped a total thrashing from France in the final game (which had earlier been billed as some kind of huge decider type confrontation) because the French got bored and let England back into the game. And then when England journeyed yet again to Australasia to try to repeat their pre-World Cup triumphs of a year earlier (that was when they peaked), they were just murdered.

Eventually Woodward himself realised that putting together another team to win the World Cup again would not be the same either, so he said bye bye also, muttering about being some sort of soccer manager, and amid autobiographical claims that he only played rugby instead of soccer because his snobbish dad made him. Now he tells us.

So the England team for the current crop of Northern Hemisphere versus Southern Hemisphere internationals now being played in Britain really were an unknown quantity, above all because there is now a new boss, a man called Robinson. Andy Robinson. New guys were no longer playing for as long as it took World Cup Giants to recover from their various injuries and tirednesses. Now, they were playing in the certain knowledge that the Giants are all history, and that if they are now in the starting line-up for the biggest matches (like against South Africa at Twickenham), that makes them the best, instead of just the best of the rest. Non-household names like Corry, Worsley, Moody, Borthwick, Grewcock, Henry Paul (he is Henry Paul because he is really from New Zealand and has a brother who rugby league, for New Zealand, I think) are now first choices, with no Everest behind them to render their current efforts meaningless. Joining them are guys who, if you have only been watching internationals, you may never have heard of. Titterell. White. Somebody called Cueto. What sort of an England rugby name is Cueto? (Well, no odder than Dallaglio, I suppose.)

A few Big Names from … oh, that World Cup thing … do remain. There is Josh Lewsey, the flying winger. There is big beefy centre threequarter Mike Tindall. There is big, beefy but fallible (especially with his line-out throwing) hooker, Steve Thompson. Above all, there is the twinkle-toed genius who scored England's only try in the You Know What and who then took the summer off, a man also called Robinson. Jason Robinson. He is a black Born Again Christian, so, for some English purposes, evangelical Christianity does still have its uses. As one of the TV commentators said recently, one of him facing just one opponent is like having an overlap already. He was badly missed during the Australasia tour in the summer.

Most intriguing of all, there is a new fly half, called Hodgson, who would have been in the You Know What squad had he not been injured and had to stay at home. And why, pray, is there a new fly half? Does Jesus Christ's younger brother Jonny not now play fly half for England, now and for ever? Well, no he does not. Not since the You Know What. His very last kick for England (I think) remains the drop goal that won the You Know What in the dying moments of extra time. Since then, he has been hurt. His shoulder is damaged.

It is not impossible that Wilkinson has played his last game for England. Not likely, just not impossible. Why? I'll list the reasons.

One: Wilkinson seems to be one of these people whose mind is stronger than his body, with the former constantly demanding of the latter things that it cannot quite do. (As the bald guy said in Top Gun: "Son, your whatchamacallit is writing cheques that your whosadaisy can't deliver on!" or whatever it was.) Physically, Jonny W is no weakling, of course not. But mentally he is very strong, as in very mentally determined to do physically amazing things, so this could be a real problem for him, especially as he gets older. He is not just hurt now. He keeps getting hurt.

In particular, Wilkinson loves to tackle people, one of his most memorable moments (apart of course from the drop kick at the end of the YKW) being an extraordinarily violent tackle (more like a head-on collision really) that he inflicted on the unfortunate French captain a year or two back. He survived this collision, in fact he won it completely, leaving the French captain strewn all over the track for the next two hundred yards with himself still careering along the rails. But that tackle was greeted not so much with a collective roar from the crowd, as with a collective eupphhh!!! – as if 70,000 people had all been simultaneously punched in the ribs by 70,000 giants, all at the same time. Such contretemps take their toll.

Two: Wilkinson's prime skill is his goal kicking. When it comes to running and passing, he is good, but no genius. It only needs a rival fly half to step forward who outshines Wilkinson in these skills to threaten King Jonny's reign. Why? Because tries get you five points, seven if you convert them, and so are still the best way to win rugby matches. There is also the fact that even the best goal kickers, Wilkinson even, are capable of losing their touch and suddenly becoming ordinary. Ask the golfers.

Third (see above): Charlie Hodgson. He, apparently, is better than Wilkinson at passing and running. And he is not a bad goal kicker either, and has it in him to get a lot better at it (see below).

A week ago, against Canada. Hodgson ran and passed brilliantly, but he kicked goals … well he basically did not kick goals apart from the very easy ones, despite numerous opportunities to do so created by, e.g., himself. And whereas kicking goals is kicking goals, with the opposition team no more involved than the crowd, running and passing depends a lot on the opposition, and Canada are only Canada. So, for Hodgson, the game against South Africa was huge. And he did not disappoint. He jinked his way through for the first England try, and generally played splendidly. Most amazingly of all, he had a dream of a day kicking goals, missing nothing and thus scoring 27 of England's 32 points.

Although, it has to be said that the basis of the England win was a massive forward effort by all those big beefy new boys, Corry, Moody, Borthwick etc. England, it turns out, really do have that strength in depth that people like me were, until yesterday, doubting. It must also have helped that yesterday was by far the coldest and most miserable day of this autumn so far. South Africa, who do not like such things anyway, had no real preparation for such miseries, it having been mild and dry until yesterday. Meanwhile, for England's players coldness and dampness are like sunshine to a West Indian cricketer. The point of these digressions is that yesterday, England did not just win. They were winning throughout, and nothing makes a fly half look better than being surrounded by a winning team, forwards going forwards, opposition backs on the back foot, etc.

Nevertheless: Wilkinson, look out. From having been England's sporting number one, you could find yourself demoted to England number two fly half, if Hodgson carries on like this.

There is also a new scrum half called Harry Ellis whom a lot of people are now talking about. Dawson (England YKW scrum half) seems to be past it now, and his number two Bracken has bowed out. Number three for the last few years has been a guy called Gomarsall, but Gomarsall had a somewhat poor game against South Africa, and Ellis could soon be the starter.

Despite all the changes in the team, and the departure of Woodward of course, the most important recent England rugby appointment might eventually prove to be a man called Joe Lydon. Joe who? You would not say that if you were a rugby league fan, because Joe Lydon used to be a rugby league god. And, he has now become the England (rugby union) offensive coach. In English, that makes him the man who tells the England backs how to score tries. Previously, he was the boss of England's outstandingly successful seven-a-side rugby team, from among whose ranks so many fifteen-a-side regulars keep emerging. Do I detect the influence of Lydon in picking Henry Paul (ex rugby league) instead of YKW hero Will Greenwood, who now languishes on the England subs bench, alongside YKW hero Ben Cohen?

Before the highlights of the England South Africa game, the BBC also showed the highlights of England versus New Zealand at rugby league, and you got a sight of just how good those league fellows are at running and passing, and hence what Lydon brings to rugby union. The underlying point is that the best union players are now all as ferociously fit and skilful and well trained as league players have long been. Attacking Union runners used to rely on the other fellows being either tired or just plain crap at tackling, but that no longer works and they have to learn a whole new bag of tricks. These last couple of games suggest to me that England are learning such tricks.

I know, I know. England always say they are going to play Expansive Rugby, but then, when faced with the choice between losing expansively and winning boringly, they always settle for grinding up to the other end and kicking penalties. And so it may be once again. But this time – I think, I hope, I pray – it really could be different. Against Canada, for all that Canada are amateurs to England's pros, I thought I detected a genuinely different approach among England's backs. In particular, they seemed willing to throw very long passes, as a matter of routine, during the first twenty minutes, and not just towards the end when they were either playing desperate catch-up or celebrating an easy win. There really did seem to be something different going on. And then yesterday, despite the first rate opposition and vilely wet weather, England scored a couple of very good tries, the second being by this Cueto chap, after a long kick found him all alone on the wing. I could really get used to Cueto if he keeps doing that.

Meanwhile, also yesterday, New Zealand defeated Wales yesterday by the narrowest of margins. The great Joe Rokocoko, the one truly stunning player on either side, scoring two New Zealand tries, including one second half masterpiece of guile and pace that was one of the best I have seen on TV in a long time. So despite losing, Wales are back in business, as Ireland have been for some while. Even Scotland have not been doing too badly either (by their recent catastrophic standards).

And France? Very unpredictable. Another different story. I still fancy France for the next YKW, as do many. Like England four years ago, they are now desperate to win it, and, like England, to do so for the first time.

But, after yesterday, and for the first time since they did win it just over a year ago now, I am starting to fancy England too. I really must get out and watch England v Australia next weekend, while it actually happens, in a pub. If England can win that, they will really be up and running.

(4) (100)

Everyone is entitled to their sensibilities, however wacky, just so long as they do not try to make them the law of the land. As a result when I describe Los Angeles Times writer T. J. Simers as a 'weird prude', it is not with the sense of loathing, hatred and vitriol I would have used were I under the impression he was suggesting that his disquiet over a picture of a beautiful young woman in a pair of shorts (and presumed wish to see people share his puritan values regarding women) be reflected in the law of the land by imposing censorship.

But a 'weird prude' is indeed what I think he is. Whilst I see that bizarrely the age of consent in the benighted state of California is 18, in the vast majority of the world and even in much of the USA, the age at which one is permitted to engage in sex is 16. Moreover even if for some reason you conclude that the age at which young adults should actually have sex should be 18, surely only the most purblind would actually expect a 16 year old to be asexual even if they were abstinent.

So when an attractive physically active 17 year old has a picture taken wearing no less clothing than that in which millions of people have seen her win tennis tournaments...

... T. J. Simers asks, no doubt thinking the true answer is beyond the pale:

Now what do you think when I tell you the girl in the ad is 17 years old?

Well, yeah. The girl is question is Maria Sharapova and since she won Wimbledon, quite literally tens of millions of people know exactly how old she is. And what do I think? I think "Nice legs! What a babe". I am, distressingly, old enough to be her father, but that does not change the fact she is a very attractive young woman. So what?

He continues:

Sharapova may or may not be the most mature 17-year-old the world has known, but she's still 17. A kid. And if the message to young girls everywhere in the L.A. area is that sex sells - rather than Wimbledon championship tennis, shame on anyone who rewards AEG this week and takes their daughter to Staples Center.

Where were her parents? "There you go," said Lindsay Davenport. "I wouldn't do it, and I can tell you my daughter wouldn't either."

Well Lindsey Davenport was a great tennis player but I for one am also relieved she never struck such poses, though gallantry prevents me from elaborating what I think are the obvious reasons for that. But why oh why does Mr. Simers or Mrs. Davenport think a 17 years old should an asexual being? The advertisement was not one in which Maria Sharapova was offering to have sex with anyone, just displaying her athletic assets (her body) in a way in which many would find rather attractive. Being attractive does indeed sell so why pretend otherwise? Is the fact she is not pictured in the act of playing tennis somehow make her sexuality more obvious than these...

 

Clearly this is not a young woman who is in denial regarding the fact she is a sexual being and hardly seems like some bewildered victim of heartless ad man dressing her up as Lolita. I rather doubt the camera man had to wrestle a teddy bear out of her arms to get her to strike that pose. For T.J. Simers to find the WTA image offensive is perverse and suggests to me that he must have some quaint notions of what 17 year olds are really like and how people should perceive them.

Millions and millions of people are married or in long term sexual relationships by the time they are 17 and many of those are also parents, which suggests that the peculiar notion of infantilising young adults and calling them 'kids' for as long as possible is rather far off the mark.

I think what really made this whole thing seem so daft to me was that I have just got back from an interesting exhibition about the Crimean War which features an account of a 14 year old who had accompanied the British forces on that campaign and it all really does make some of the modern notion of a strict division between adulthood and childhood seem truly preposterous when talking about a worldly 17 year old Russian woman who, if you have ever heard her interviewed, is obviously no fool.

There is something profoundly odd about the mindset of a certain ilk of conservative.

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The famed Australian cricketer (and much else) Keith Miller has just died aged 84. While idling through some obit-ing about this remarkable man, I came across this amazing throwaway paragraph, seized upon by Tim Blair and included in the original posting, but originally in a comment, here:

After what he went through during the war, cricket always remained just a game to him. He flew Mosquito night fighters. A lifelong love of Beethoven saw him leave his group during a raid over Germany and fly a further 50 miles to Bonn, where he flew low, at some risk, over the city – just to see the place where his hero was born...

I had no idea that Keith Miller cared anything for such things as Beethoven, let alone that he cared that much. (And I am guessing that he did not endanger anyone else's life besides his own, right? Perry?)

It is truly amazing how much new stuff you learn about people when they die.

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I have not really managed to develop much of an interest in the Olympic Games currently underway in Greece. I am watching the television right now. A bunch of Greek 'fans' are objecting to some US athletes for reasons I cannot quite seem to understand, judging by the less than helpful BBC commentator team.

The Games are not supposed to be about nationalism, and yet the constant focus seems to be on how many of 'our' (British) athletes have won how many gold, silver and bronze medals. When the Games are completed, there will be the usual bleating/gloating over how well 'our' men and women did. If 'we' do badly, be ready and primed for a great wailing about the unsportiness, unfitness, lack of moral fibre blah blah of young British folk.

It is easy to forget that the Olympics were originally envisioned as celebrating the value of individual achievement and struggle over nationalistic competition. I think it is fair to say that this hope has been well and truly thwarted.

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I have always regardless the Olympics with indifference at best (I am not a great sports fan) but clearly the people organising the games in Athens are completely demented.

Strict regulations published by Athens 2004 last week dictate that spectators may be refused admission to events if they are carrying food or drinks made by companies that did not see fit to sponsor the games.

Sweltering sports fans who seek refuge from the soaring temperatures with a soft drink other than one made by Coca-Cola will be told to leave the banned refreshment at the gates or be shut out. High on the list of blacklisted beverages is Pepsi, but even the wrong bottle of water could land spectators in trouble.

These people would be funny if they were not so self-important. And from a PR point of view: message to the folks sponsoring the Olympic... rule number one is do not piss off your prospective customers. Morons.

And whilst on the subject of sporting madness, what I cannot understand is why the furore over well known lothario Sven-Goran Eriksson's love life? So he has some hanky panky with a kiss-and-tell money grubber who happens to be female employee of the Football Association... so what? The guy is the coach of the England football team: he is in the sports business which means reasonable expectations of probity are surely somewhere between rock stars in hotel rooms and sailors on shore leave.

If there is any scandal here it is that Sven's standards seem to be slipping: at the risk of being ungallant, 'beauty' Faria Alam is not quite of the same 'calibre' as Italian lawyer Nancy Dell'Olio or Ulrika Jonnson.

links via AdRants and the Big Blog Company

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Can it be true that Lance Armstrong is to be stripped of his title by the French authorites? Say it ain't so, Lance

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I don't have Sky Sports TV, because then all pretence of doing anything at all with my life would disintegrate. But I am a sports fan, and I am currently watching a game of cricket, on Ceefax.

You'd be surprised how enjoyable this can be. Ceefax is especially good for following limited overs cricket, where each side only has a fixed number of balls to bat against, and where it's all finished and done with in one day. These kinds of games can fluctuate wildly, and just watching the scorecard tick over can be very enjoyable, and fits in well with performing other tasks.

And there is no kind of cricket of which the above is more true than Twenty20 cricket, where each side has only twenty overs (equals 120 deliveries) to make its runs, and where the whole thing is over in one evening. And as if to emphasise the extreme extremity of this extreme form of cricket, the teams are not called boring old Yorkshire or dull Derbyshire. They are called things like the Yorkshire Hystericals and the Derbyshire Desperados.

These games fluctuate particularly wildly, and as if to make that point, one of the star batsmen of my team, the Surrey Psycho-Killers, just got out, for 32, against Kent Velociraptors. Another dismissal now, and Kent would definitely have the whip hand. More Surrey slogging and they should win. Okay, I would rather be there, especially since the Oval, where this game is being played, is only a walk away form my home. But Ceefax will do nicely, and this way I get to write this.

Last week, I swear I witnessed another game of Twenty20 cricket which was reduced, by our characteristically vile and windy weather last week, to each side only having five overs to bat each. Yes. They each had just thirty balls to score their runs. Northants Something Scary Beginning With Ns versus the Gloucester (inevitably) Gladiators, I think it was. Five5 cricket, you might say. But I can find no trace of this game on the internet. Did I dream the whole thing? No I did not. Here it is!

The point of all this is to emphasise how lively cricket seems to be in England just now, despite the fluctuating form of our national side, and in the world generally.

This guy is extremely down on these guys, just now. But however well or badly cricket's mere administrators do, the underlying strength of the game is now a world sporting fact, if only because of the rise and rise of India, in the world generally, and as a great cricketing nation in particular.

Twenty20 cricket is already part of the Asian Games. Next, the Olympics.

David Carr will not he happy.

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I spend a lot of my time writing a sports minded blog, Ubersportingpundit, which tries to do to sports what Samizdata.net does for economics and politics. Indeed, many of the contributors to this blog also contribute to Ubersportingpundit.

Ubersportingpundit covers the various Australian football codes, cricket, rugby, and UK football. However, I would like to 'beef up' the UK football coverage for the coming season. With this in mind, I'd like to invite Samizdata.net readers who have strong views about football and the willingness to express them on at least a weekly basis the opportunity to write for Ubersportingpundit.

I'm not looking for someone to write match reports on Aston Villa vs Charlton Atheletic; I'm more interested in someone writing about David O'Leary's strategy to take Villa forward on a tight budget and how Alan Curbishley intends to fill the hole left by the sale of Shane Parker to Chelsea.

I am also looking for another cricket correspondent, preferably someone of South Asian background, who will give a different view to the Anglo-Australian cricket coverage that Ubersportingpundit currently supplies. Residence does not matter, but a willingness to cover India, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, and Bangladeshi cricket issues does.

If you are interested, please drop an email to 'scott' at 'ubersportingpundit.com'. Renumeration is at Samizdata.net rates. (i.e., the goodwill and esteem of the editors!)

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On Saturday afternoon, a gorgeous looking Russian seventeen-year-old called Maria Sharapova won the Wimbledon Ladies Singles title, and the media have been in raptures ever since. Personally I was enraptured ever since she won her quarter final against a Japanese lady. But when Sharapova beat Serena Williams in the final, the world really noticed.

When Sharapova plays, she looks like a Bond girl. When she has won, she immediately becomes a giggly American schoolgirl. She is, from the female gorgeousness point of view, the biggest thing in tennis since the now somewhat ageing Anna Kournikova. Plus, she can really play. (Kournikova never won Wimbledon, or anything else big that I recall. Not that I ever cared.)

So, I was not surprised when our very busy-with-other-things but still very caring and concerned editorial supremo asked me last night to dash off a posting about the lovely Maria, so that we could have a picture of her up here.

However, underneath all the drooling from the likes of me and Perry, there is a more serious story here, which is why it took me a bit longer to write this than I promised last night. Yes, Sharapova is gorgeousness personified, and long may it last. But there is more going on than this.

I can imagine some Americans regretting that their champion, Serena Williams, got beaten by a Russian. Yet, for all that she is Russian, Maria Sharapova is also as American as Apple Pie. She and her entire family came to America. On the back of betting the farm on young Maria's talent as a tennis player, her family chose America, and what could be more American than that?

Born in Siberia, the one-time pauper took home over $2.5 million in Wimbledon prize money - but that will be only the beginning of an earnings career that looks likely to make her the wealthiest Russian tennis player in history.

...her father, Yuri Sharapov, who travelled to Florida 10 years ago after leaving Chernobyl with life savings of $1200 in his pocket, will shield his striking daughter from many of the offers, but there is no shortage of suitors.

Sharapova was spotted as a 6-year-old during an exhibition match in Moscow by Martina Navratilova, who took her under her wing, a relationship that earned her a spot in Nick Bollettieri's prestigious Tennis Academy in Florida at the age of nine.

I had already decided that I was going to tie this story to the similar tale of Martina Navratilova, because Navratilova has a lot in common with Sharapova. Navratilova also went west to find freedom, on the back of her extraordinary tennis talent. A picture of Navratilova is not what Perry de Havilland had in mind when he asked for this posting, yet I feel that it is entirely appropriate. Navratilova found the exact same thing in America that Sharapova has found: freedom. The freedom to develop her amazing talents, and the freedom to be herself.

Now, I agree that when confronted by Martina Navratilova, the Samizdata droolometer behaves very differently to when it is confronted by the likes of Sharapova, especially when you factor in Navratilova's sexual preferences, but underneath all the joking, the story is very similar.

"I was so stubborn, so independent, that I was more American than Czech, even as a little kid," she reflects in her autobiography, written in 1985 with New York Times sportswriter George Vecsey. "I didn't feel I belonged anywhere until I came to America for the first time when I was 16. I'm not a mystic about many things - I tend to be pretty pragmatic about life - but I honestly believe I was born to be American."

I bet Sharapova would say just the exact same thing. Believe it or not, Martina Navratilova actually played again, this year, at Wimbledon, at the age of 47 (but this time really for the last time), eventually losing in the women's doubles semi-finals.

After Sharapova had won her title, the BBC's commentators all started clucking anxiously to the effect that, although in itself very sweet and all that, this story might be setting others a bad example. What if dozens of other families bring dozens of other wonder-kids to America, but then the wonder-kids do not win Wimbledon, and what if they are all then disappointed? Don't risk everything and come to America. What if you fail? What if you don't live out the American dream? It was all so desperately British. (British national motto: Better safe than American.)

But I cannot for the life of me see that any sort of bad example is being set by Sharapova and her redoubtable clan. The worst that could have happened to them was that they would have become rather poor and disappointed Americans, and the same applies to any others who follow their example and arrive in America with their super-tots but do not do so well as the Sharapova family did. Being a poor and disappointed American is nothing like the worst thing that can happen to you in this world, no matter what the BBC may say.

In the unlikely event that no one has yet done a cartoon of the Statue of Liberty waving a tennis racket, this omission should be corrected at once.

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The present UK government, like many socialist-leaning administrations, does not like cars. Besides complaints - sometimes justified - about pollution and congestion, a lot of the hatred of the car contains a puritan impulse (sometimes this is also seen among a certain tweedy sort of conservative). Congestion charges, petrol taxes, speed cameras, road bumps... you name it, owning a car will soon be on a par with smoking, eating red meat, or confessing to enjoying recreational sex.

Well, I have bad news for the puritans. I spent last Saturday in total petrol-head heaven - the annual Goodwood Festival of Speed in west Sussex, and the event was a total sellout. I saw the Lotus of the late Ayrton Senna driven immaculately on a wet track at 150 mph and hear the unbelievably high noise that a F1 car makes. Vintage Maseratis, Ferraris, Lotuses and BRMs vied with Le Mans endurance cars such as the Ford GT40 or the Gulf Porsche (of the kind that Steve McQueen drove in the movie, Le Mans). Magic. There is an almost sensual pleasure involved in the sight, shape, noise, and yes, the smell, of a very fast car.

The crowds were large although not so big as to impede my enjoyment. From what I could see, Britons remain firmly in love with cars, including very fast and noisy ones. I would not presume to check the political/cultural views of the crowds, but I would guess the bias would be towards liberal (small l), fairly pro-enterprise, pro-fun, and not very keen on environmentalism and high taxes. If I were Conservative Party leader Michael Howard, then the Goodwood Festival of Speed clientele would be the sort of folk I would have in mind as a target constituency. I would call it the 'Jeremy Clarkson Voter Segment'.

The Goodwood event also reminded me of something else, which is the high number of South Africans, Finns and Scots who have excelled as drivers over the years. I wonder why that is?

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So far, I have not been all that enthused by the Euro 2004 European Championship football tournament being held in Portugal at the moment but finally, it appears, the sporting event has sparked into life. This evening, Croatia came close to beating the former champions France, in a thrilling game. Earlier in the day, England, who lost their first game in the last minutes to France, managed after some hiccups to overwhelm Switzerland.

All to the good. I must say that watching some of the matches has reminded me of why, despite my annoyance at the antics of highly paid sportsmen, I still love watching football, and why I despise those who think it is amusing to sneer at we plebs and our love of what Brazil's Pele called the "Beautiful Game".

Take this piece of drivel from an anti-sports snob, for instance:

The players are even more loathesome than the fans. All professional sportsmen are more or less imbeciles, of course, but only footballers manage to be so utterly charmless with it. They are essentially overgrown spoilt children, diving and rolling around pretending to be injured, and practically wetting themselves whenever someone scores. There is a general, and sometimes quite fantastic, ugliness. If I had my way, I would have them all shot.

I wonder if the author of this piece would like to pass on his profound thoughts to one of the England team? Seriously though, for all that I despise the moronic behaviour of certain England football "fans" causing mayhem, I also despise a certain kind of anti-sport snob who imagines he or she is being terribly daring and original by sneering at the pleasures of the ordinary guy and his enthusiasm for team sports.

Oh well, come on England!

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Trade here seems to be rather thin (although since I first put that it has got a bit thicker), just as it seemed to be this time yesterday. And this time yesterday I started concocting a posting (for my Culture Blog and to link to from here) about the strange things to be seen on or from Chelsea Embankment, just to the south of Samizdata HQ (which I was visiting the other day for reasons that need not concern you). This morning I finished it. Thinking about this posting some more, I now consider the ducks to be rather mundane. But the red sailed sailing boats and the bus are quite fun, I think.

Here is one of the red sailed sailing boats.

The point is that you do not see little sailing boats on the river in London very often. I seldom do, anyway. Follow the link above to get to a bigger version of this picture, and for the bus and the ducks, and for further commentary.

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My recent posting on Slovakia contained a scoop and I missed it. The leader of the Slovak governing party's campaign for the European elections tomorrow is former ice hockey player Peter Stastny.

I knew the name (one of the few names in ice hockey I ever knew of), but failed to connect it to the poster boy of the Slovak Democratic Coalition.

From the comments to my last posting, my description of SKDU as conservative-libertarian is controversial. Considering that the new Libertarian Party candidate in the USA was selected because he campaigns on sticking to the Founding Fathers' intentions (nationalized Post Office and all), I stand by my description for now.

What is amusing is the contrast between the Slovak and the Austrian election: the posters in Austria oppose reform, the Slovaks put a celebrity on the poster and bring in massive tax reforms in the right direction. American show-biz versus Austrian corporatism. I know which I prefer.

[Thanks to Tim Evans at CNE for providing the tip-off about Peter Stasny.]

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Sad news: Economist / baseball analyst / blogger Doug Pappas has passed away at age 43, the victim of heat stroke while vacationing in Texas.

Pappas chaired the Business of Baseball committee for the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR), and his work on the history of baseball's finances was consistently intelligent and provocative. I mention this in Samizdata because Pappas was also one of the foremost opponents of taxpayer funded facilities for professional sports and was thus a friend of liberty as well. Pappas relentlessly criticized commissioner Bud Selig's claims that Major League Baseball needed corporate welfare to survive.

I am a SABR member, but never got to meet Doug Pappas; for more in-depth tributes from people who knew him, see the excellent baseball / war blog Baseball Crank and David Pinto's Baseball Musings, another excellent baseball-only blog.

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With the minds of the world's intervening classes fully occupied elsewhere, Zimbabwe is now a problem too small for those who might otherwise have done something about it to be bothered with, yet still too big and difficult for anyone else to be able to handle. So, Robert Mugabe's monstrous and murderous political machine will continue to churn its way through what remains of the country and its institutions.

If the anguish of the cricket world serves to draw some of whatever international attention is left over from Iraq to the anguish of Zimbabwe, then so much the better. Personally, I do not give a damn about cricket, or England cricket, or Timbuktooan cricket, as such. Cricket will stagger on, no matter how this Zimbabwe row plays out. But if cricket helps to keep Zimbabwe and its misgovernment in the headlines, then the more and more continuous is cricket's anguish, the better.

Cricket-wise – and this is the new development in this particular bit of the story – the state of the Zimbabwean cricket team has become so disastrous that even the International Cricket Council has started to worry about it. Until now, the ICC has only been concerned with (a) money, and with (b) making England's cricket administrators squirm, pretty much for the sheer fun of it (but also because of (a) money), by demanding that England send a touring team to Zimbabwe later this year, no matter what. But now, the Zimbabwe team is such an embarrassment, and the continuing schedule of so-called Test matches between the Zimbabwe also-playeds against Sri Lanka, and soon, even more embarrassingly, Australia (the best cricket team on earth just now), that even the ICC has realised that cricket as a whole is being, as sporting administrators like to say from time to time but usually only when someone cheats, Brought Into Disrepute. ICC administrators are thus inexorably being brought into personal contact with the people who now rule Zimbabwean cricket.

I do not know for sure what is going to happen any more than any one else knows for sure, but here, for what it is worth, is my guess about how events will now unfold.

Since the people who now rule Zimbabwean cricket are thugs operating under the personal orders of Robert Mugabe, contact between the Mugabe Cricket Thugs and the ICC can only be a good thing, and all the better because it is potentially so newsworthy. I expect the ICC people to discover (as they already sort of know) that these Mugabe Cricket Thugs are indeed Thugs, and what is more that they are Mugabe Cricket Thugs whose word is worth nothing from one day to the next and with whom it is impossible to do coherent business of any kind. Robert Mugabe does not care about the ICC, any more than he cares about the rights and wrongs of murdering people, and the Mugabe Cricket Thugs know this. All that Mugabe now knows or cares about cricket is that some uppity white people ("rebels") have been making a nuisance of themselves, and they must be taught a lesson, at no matter what cost to Zimbabwe.

Now some more damned foreigners are interfering in Zimbabwe, taking it upon themselves to tell Zimbabwe how to do things, and my guess is that they too will get a right messing around from the Mugabe Cricket Thugs, who are now far more terrified of Robert Mugabe's wrath than of a little thing like Zimbabwe being threatened with expulsion from Test Match Cricket. So, such expulsion will be duly threatened. And then, when whatever deal has been made between the Mugabe Cricket Thugs and the ICC has been solemnly sworn to by the Mugabe Cricket Thugs and then welshed on within a few hours, Zimbabwe will be duly expelled from Test Match Cricket. The more humiliating, public, dramatic, acrimonious and downright unpleasant this process becomes, the better, because the more humiliating (etc.) that it is, the more it will broadcast the vileness of the Mugabe regime to the world, and more to the point to parts of the world which have until now regarded England's imperial past as more important than Zimbabwe's mass murderous present. If the many cricket-lovers of India (which is a lot of people) could be persuaded, perhaps as a result of a slanging match between one of the Mugabe Cricket Thugs and one of India's ICC reps, to decide that Mugabe Should Go, well, then he will indeed go, a little tiny moment sooner than otherwise, and a few thousand lives may be spared.

It would appear that this process of mutual recrimination – of deals and then withdrawn deals, of consultations and then recriminations – is well under way.

As I say, if all this foolishness serves to draw some more attention to the sorry state of Zimbabwe, then it will have done some good.

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I've been flagging up England versus Zimbabwe cricket here because I anticipated that the row about whether England ought to be playing cricket against Zimbabwe, given the state of Zimbabwe, was not going to go away. What I had not anticipated was that Zimbabwean cricket would itself be wrecked by the same processes which are destroying Zimbabwe in general. I should have, but I failed to.

The Zimbabwean cricket team (like Zimbabwe itself) is now a racially and politically polarised shambles:

Zimbabwean cricket will reach meltdown this morning when 15 rebel players and their lawyer draft a letter rejecting the board's offer of mediation and renewing their boycott. This time they will walk out for good.

"This will hopefully be our final letter," one of the rebels said. "We'll probably be set free in about 14 days when they fire us." The Zimbabwe Cricket Union will be forced to pick Test sides from the willing but hopelessly inexperienced young players who crashed and burned to a 5-0 one-day series defeat against Sri Lanka.

So what have these "rebels" been rebelling about. Well, their problem is that the Zimbabwe cricket team is now being selected, not by people who know their cricket, but by people who know their Robert Mugabe.

As Michael Jennings (who did see this coming a year ago) said on Ubersportingpundit about three weeks ago:

As far as I can see, any argument for continuing to play Zimbabwe is based on the idea that cricket and politics have been largely separated, and that the strongest team is being fielded. This is now manifestly not so, as players are being selected (or not) on racial and political grounds. …

And things have not got any better since then, as Scott Wickstein explained on Ubersportingpundit today.

Tony Blair has said that England "shouldn't" tour Zimbabwe in the autumn. But he isn't willing to decide the matter, and I can see his point.

The problem is that the ICC (International Cricket Council) has dug itself into a position of insisting that England must tour Zimbabwe, on the grounds that (now that South Africa has been sorted) politics and cricket must be kept separate, and the dominant ICC voices (i.e. India, and also Pakistan and Sri Lanka) are from countries whose citizens are extremely reluctant to admit to white people that they might have made a mistake. Although actually, they could change their policy now, on the grounds that Zimbabwean cricket has also changed. The Zimbabwean team used to be selected on cricketing merit. Now it is not.

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I've just been relaxing in front of the telly watching a show called Fifth Gear, on Channel 5. This show was preceded by another automobile-based show about "Building the Ultimate …" in this case, building the ultimate racing car. (Although, luckily for me, given my actual tastes, I switched back to BBC4 TV in time to witness this amazing boy doing his thing.)

Trouble is, what with speed cameras and satellite snooping systems and politicians who just plane hate cars, except for themselves to be driven about in, there are fewer and fewer places where you can drive these monsters in the manner intended by nature.

So, Fifth Gear went looking for the answer, and they came up with Race Resort Ascari. (Either that or they were told about the answer, and they stitched the question onto the front.) The Race Resort Ascari website is long on atmospheric photography and on self-importantly waffly abstractions ("The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express" – Sir Francis Bacon) and short, as befits the website for a super-luxury product, on trivia like what it is and what it costs to buy it, so I will have to describe this place myself, based on what Fifth Gear showed. Basically what Race Resort Ascari means is that now, you can not only own an ultimate racing car; you can actually drive one at its ultimate speed, around a privately owned race track. You can now go on holiday and drive your car at two hundred miles per hour, just like in the car advers on the telly. And if that palls, you can have a go with one of the other cars they have there permanently. A grand prix car? No problem. A finely tuned rally car? Step inside and foot down.

Financially, obviously, this is one of those "if you have to ask you can not afford it" deals. (I think I heard the figure of £100,000 mentioned.) Personally I would never spend my money this way no matter how much I had. But even so, I salute the principle.

The next step is for someone to build a money-no-object private road which does not just go around in a circuit in the one little lump of land, but on which you can actually go from somewhere to somewhere else, and the further apart these somewheres are the better.

At two hundred miles an hour. In your car. Yours not mine, for once again, I would not be queueing up for this service any more than I now want to spend any time at Race Resort Ascari. Nevertheless, that I would love to see. That I would love to share a planet with.

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The state of New South Wales, Australia (which contains the city of Sydney) is in some ways irritating. If anything, the state government is even worse than the government of the United Kingdom in attempting to over-regulate every aspect of its citizens lives. Carrying weapons of any kind is completely illegal. (I like to carry a Swiss Army Knife, and technically doing even that is contrary to the law). If you want to go into a supermarket and buy a bottle of wine, or a newspaper, or anything but the mildest of medicines, there are laws preventing you from doing so. (Liquor stores, newsagents, and pharmacies are all granted local monopolies). And heaven forbid if you want to go to a quite cozy bar for a drink. But there are some compensations, as fellow Samizdatista Scott Wickstein and I discovered yesterday evening.

Scott and I ventured to what is now named "Telstra Stadium", which was the main stadium for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, which is now sponsored by a telephone company. (More than 50% of the shares of said telephone company belong to the Australian federal government, but I digress....). It was a beautiful evening, and after a beer or two in a nearby bar, we headed for the stadium.

The game was an Australian rules football game between the Sydney Swans and the Melbourne Demons. The atmosphere inside the ground was extraordinarily pleasant. Unlike in certain sports I could mention, the home and away supporters were not segregated from each other, and the atmosphere was enormously pleasant, however fanatical were the Melbourne supporters. (And boy, are the Melburnians fanatical). With 18 players on each side, seven umpires, and certain strange figures called "runners", who carry messages from the coaches to the players while the game is going on there are as many as 45 people on the field at once.

The game is lightning fast, and completely incomprehensible to foreigners. While many Australians think that Aussie rules football is a matter of life and death, in global terms the game is incredibly insignificant. Both teams could probably be bought for what Roman Abramovich spent to bring Damien Duff to the Chelsea Football Club in London.

As it happened my team, the Swans, ended up losing. But there are some compensations. Sydney people are enormously proud of their lifestyle, which involves going to the beach a lot, eating fine food, relaxing, and simply enjoying what life has to offer. And that applies at football matches as much as anywhere else.

And however many millions Mr Abramovich has spent, I seriously doubt that there is a bar where Chelsea supporters can enjoy oysters together after the game, as there is in Sydney. And even if there is (ha), they are certainly not this reasonably priced. And even if they are that, I am sure they are not freshly shucked.

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H-A-P-P-Y.

I am H-A-P-P-Y.

I know I am.

I am sure I am.

I am H-A-P-P-Y.

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One reason for not wanting England to go ahead with its projected cricket tour of Zimbabwe this winter is that the despotic ruler of that unhappy land, Robert Mugabe, will undoubtedly regard such a tour as proof of his own international magnificence, and of the indifference of all people in Britain to his many murders and other atrocities.

Things in Zimbabwe are so bad that even the UN has noticed, and wants to throw other people's money at the problem.

The United Nations is appealing for more than $94 million to provide urgent humanitarian aid to Zimbabwe. The United Nations says economic mismanagement has brought Zimbabwe to the brink of a serious humanitarian crisis.

Yes. Things are about to get really bad out there. Hurry. Give money, before people start to die.

The United Nations says Zimbabwe's economy is a shambles and getting worse. It says inflation has shot up from 100 percent in 2000 to 600 percent this year. And, last year, it says, the Gross Domestic Product dropped by 13 percent.

When I say throw other people's money at the problem, I actually mean throw other people's money at Robert Mugube, for it is undoubtedly he who will hoover it all up.

Money isn't going to solve this problem. In fact that kind of money is the damn problem, or at any rate a big slice of it. Serious international pressure, on Mugabe's version of Zimbabwe, and on all the scumbag politicians in other countries who are protecting Mugabe's version of Zimbabwe, might make some small difference by speeding the collapse of that disgusting regime by a few months and hence saving a couple of hundred thousand lives, or whatever it would be. Anything which might draw attention to this horror story, such as a nice little row about the England cricket tour, is all to the good.

But now here is another reason to hope that the England cricketers cancel their trip. If they do, it may mean that London will not get the 2012 Olympics.

If England boycott their tour of Zimbabwe this winter, it could have a knock-on effect on London's prospects of hosting the Olympic Games in 1912...

... and they seem to have lost a century there, but never mind...

...according to a report in Friday's edition of The Guardian. What is more, the potential costs to the England & Wales Cricket Board are spiralling by the day, and if they are suspended by the ICC for their moral stance, they could lose up to £50 million in gate receipts, sponsorship, and TV revenue.

"The ECB is once again in an invidious position because of the utterly tragic situation in Zimbabwe," said John Read, the board's director of communications. "A one-year ban would cost the ECB tens of millions of pounds, and would have a devastating effect on all aspects of the game, including our ability to help nurture and develop the two million schoolchildren that play cricket up and down the country. It is difficult to envisage a more serious scenario facing cricket in England and Wales."

The ECB's stance has also caused widespread distrust among African IOC members, whose votes will be crucial when it comes to deciding which city is awarded the 2012 Olympics. It has been noted that there was no such opposition to Zimbabwe's participation in the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, partly because of a fear of an African boycott.

Rejoice David Carr.

Maybe the ECB should start a "Boycott the Tour" fund, to cover the cost to them of pulling out of this abominable expedition. I agree that it is tough on them to be used as a political stick to beat Mugabe with. So, all those of us who think their tour should be used as a stick anyway, because every stick helps, should be asked to pay for their opinion. One thing is for sure. Money spent that way will do a whole lot more good than UN "humanitarian aid". Plus, it would publicise the whole disgusting mess very satisfactorily.

Armed humanitarian aid, that went in there and actually helped all the afflicted Zimbabweans and cut out the middle man (Mugabe), preferably by apprehending him (dead or alive), would be a different matter.

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There is something very Georgian and 18th Century about this but I suppose it qualifies as entrepreneurialism of sorts:

The final punch lands, exploding the fighter's nose into the braying crowd, and the broken, unseeing, bare-knuckle boxer submits. The winner lifts his bleeding hands in celebration, knowing the victory won by his fists will line his pockets.

Welcome to the boxing underworld of bare-knuckle fighting, where the exhausted victor can hobble away with as much as £50,000 in cash.

Tax-free cash as well I should think.

These brutal confrontations have long been outlawed. But even now in country lanes, fields, barns and warehouses, grown men are pitting themselves against each other to settle old scores - and earn big money - at the risk of appalling injuries.

A reaction to the 'risk aversion' culture, perhaps?

Organisers say the police rarely break up a fight - it's easier to let the contest finish naturally than risk a riot.

Also they might get the crap beaten out of them.

Ricky English, an unlicensed promoter, has signed up hundreds of fighters in the three years since he started in the fight promotion game. It is big business - he is organising fights up and down the country, charging spectators up to £50 a head.

"This is for the novices," he said. "Fighters won't go amateur any more. They're sick of all the rules, the standing counts and the tap, tap, tapping. They want to have a fight and earn money. And they're earning money."

So is he trying to tell us that overregulation has spawned a thriving 'underground' industry?

"It's great fun. I had one fighter with a glass eye who'd take it out before a fight. Crowds just love it," said Rocky Rowe, who promoted unlicensed fights for many years. "It's a bit like karaoke."

Surely it cannot be that painful?

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Blogger and libertarian authoress Virginia Postrel, in her recent book, The Future and Its Enemies, made a telling point that having fun and free enterprise are increasingly being fused in the same activities.

She cited the example of sports like professional beach volleyball. Now, there are few activities which might excite the moral scorn of the miserablists of the left and right more than a group of young men and women (the latter in rather fetching garb, ahem) punching a ball to and fro over a net. Well, if the idea of volleyball as part of an enterprise culture offends the scolds in our midst, then how about skiing?

I have recently had my annual fix of shooting down ski slopes in the French resort of Val D'Isere, a magnificent resort . I enjoyed a fantastic week. There are few adrenalin-boosting activities to match it, in my view. And putting aside the obvious points about this activity, one thing struck me - skiing is a classic part of a capitalist, fun-loving, life-affirming culture.

Skiing is 'pointless' to those who think we should devote our energies to 'higher' activities, or who think that all those resources spent on ski lifts, skis, hotels and airliners should be diverted to other, worthier goals. Skiing is a vast industry these days. Unlike spectator sports such as football or cricket, skiing is 99 percent participant sport. Millions of people of all ages - mostly being relatively fit - go skiing in places all over the world every year.

Many of the people who work in ski resorts - guides, holiday reps, lift attendants, bar staff and so forth - all seem to form part of a new culture remarkably similar to the sort of laid-back surfing culture made legendary in southern California. While affecting a sort of casual demeanor, most of the people seem in deadly earnest about ensuring they serve the skiers well. A lot of the holiday staff, many of whom have taken big salary cuts to go to the mountains, seem to speak a sort of 'leisure industry slang', a sort of hybrid of Australian 'matespeak', Californian 'coolspeak', and in France of course, overlain with that Galoise-smoking sang froid of the expert skiier with his nonchalant posture.

Skiing is a major triumph of capitalist organisation and enterprise. And even in the French Alps, in the homeland of the 35-hour week and dreaded bureaucracy, it seems one of the most successful businesses in France. In fact, I got the impression that many staff in the French ski businesses have to work for far longer than is permitted under the nation's job-destroying regulations.

And as a final observation, skiing is risky. Good grief, allowing folk to go down a slope without a State licence - are we mad?

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Later today, kicking off at 4pm, England play Ireland in the Six Nations rugby union tournament.

This is, on paper, the toughest game England has faced since they won the World Cup in Australia last November. But it is also the true homecoming of the England team, because today, after beating the tournament's two weakest sides, Italy in Italy and Scotland in Scotland, they now play the first of their two games this year at Twickenham. When England get on top at Twickenham the home crowd roars them on and, in effect, doubles the winning margin.

Several other things make me optimistic about tomorrow's game.

England's forwards, now without their revered but retired World Cup captain Martin Johnson, are going through changes, which makes me hope that England will really want to get points by scoring tries as well as just by grinding forward with the forwards. The England backs have looked promising for years now, and they still do, and I live in hope that one day they will blow someone completely away with a dazzling performance. Could this happen today? Jason Robinson seems to get better and better with every game – and it adds immensely to his aura and must also add to his confidence that he got England's only try (a very good one) in the World Cup Final. Josh Lewsey is also improving. And Ian Balshaw is getting back to his best of two years ago. Greenwood and Cohen also know quite a bit about how to play rugby. Plus, there is no Jonny Wilkinson to rely on to kick twenty points, which gives England an extra incentive to play fast and furious.

In general, playing for England is now the hottest ticket in world rugby, and England coach Clive (now Sir Clive) Woodward's ruthless willingness to sack people as and when he thinks he needs to makes competition to stay in the side ferocious. World Cup Heroes know that they are not sacrosanct and nearly men know they have a good chance of being picked Real Soon Now. So when you do play for England these days, you just know that you have to play really well to keep on playing.

But do not write off Ireland. They came within a kick of beating losing finalists Australia in the World Cup. Brian O'Driscoll played a blinder a fortnight ago when Ireland blew Wales away in what looked beforehand like being one of the closest games of the entire tournament. And England will not underestimate them. Any more than England underestimated Ireland last year, when they thrashed them last year in Dublin.

What I am saying is: (a) England's best is good enough now to blow Ireland off the pitch, and (b) there is every reason to hope that England will indeed play at their best.

Not that you can ever be sure with sport. As I say, Ireland/Wales was supposed to be close this year. And it is a rare Six Nations when there are no big surprises.

I won't be saying much more here about this game. I will just add an addendum here tomorrow with the score. The told-you-so-ing or egg-off-face wiping will all be happening at Ubersportingpundit.

UPDATE (5.55pm): Clang. England 13 Ireland 19. Time to scrape all that muck off my face and make an omelette with it.

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This is the story that is all over the broadcast news tonight, and will be all over the English newspapers tomorrow:

Three Leicester City footballers have been charged with "sexual aggression" after three women claimed they were attacked at a Spanish hotel.

Paul Dickov, Frank Sinclair and Keith Gillespie, who deny the charges, will now spend another night in custody.

The judge in Cartagena said the charges were serious enough to go to trial.

We are now enduring that horrible moment when someone very famous is charged with something very serious, but when no one other than the arresting officers and the accused has the faintest idea of whether the accused are guilty or not, and when the logical thing for everyone else is to say nothing.

I can now hear the ITV news, trying desperately to turn whatever tiny scraps of information and background chit-chat they have in front of them into something portentous enough to serve the needs of this, their top story this evening. But what on earth can they say? The real writing of the story can only seriously begin when whatever court ends up being involved reaches its verdict.

Meanwhile, you have to remember just how important lots of people in England feel football to be. (A great, great many of them make our own David Carr look like a total football agnostic.) In the city of Leicester, this is the biggest news story for years. Leicester City are facing relegation from the Premier League. This could quite well finish their chances of avoiding that fate. To talk about something as trivial as the relegation of a sports team from a football league to a lower football league when some men have been charged with a crime may seem very odd. But that is what this is about, and why this is such big news here.

It is the combination of vagueness and disastrousness to something which so many people take so seriously which gives this story its special atmosphere.

With a regular disaster, like an earthquake, or a terrorist outrage, the disastrousness of the disaster is not in doubt, and there are plenty of things to say because there is actual news to report, in ghastly abundance. But not with this. Fans and other players foolish enough to open their mouths on the subject are now queueing up to say that they "do not believe" that these men would do such a thing. Others who are equally ignorant are muttering under their breath that there is no smoke without fire, and what can you expect of footballers, who are a law unto themselves and think they can get away with murder? Neither opinion is worth anything. This is why the civilised world has law courts, to replace ignorant speculations like those with disciplined investigation.

The only solid facts here are that this is very bad for Leicester City football club, and that these charges are serious.

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This, a report from the London Evening Standard, is going to make David Carr very happy:

London's rivals for the 2012 Olympics have already started exploiting a row between British and Irish officials over Northern Ireland which could seriously damage the bid, Standard Sport can reveal today.

The row has become so inflamed that Ireland's International Olympic Committee member Patrick Hickey, one of the leading figures in European sport, has said the British Olympic Association, who organise this summer's team for Athens, could look like "clowns".

The Olympic Council of Ireland, who say they have traditionally had jurisdiction over the area, is angry that the BOA have suddenly decided to add the words "Northern Ireland" to their team contracts for the Athens Olympics.

But what is so clownish about that? This story explains the situation rather better:

Hickey said, "they would have to withdraw those letters in the team agreement where they have added Northern Ireland. Otherwise they will look completely foolish when we turn up in Athens with seven to 10 members of our team from Northern Ireland and nobody from Northern Ireland on the British team. They would look like clowns".

Yes, that would be clownish all right. But there is more involved than that. The Irish suspect that the British use of the words "Northern Ireland" in those team contracts could be a sign of action to come, at some time in the future. Back to the Standard:

The BOA strongly deny they have attempted to change anything and played down the dispute. The Irish see the move as a threat to the future of all-Ireland sports teams. …

Odd, those "all-Ireland" sports teams. The only game I know about in this connection is Rugby Union. (Irish people do not concern themselves with cricket very much.) And yes, next Saturday, the opening match of the Six Nations Rugby Union championship will be France v. Ireland, at the Stade de France in Paris. Ireland as in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, with two different Irish national anthems if I am not mistaken. No doubt this arrangement was arrived at during an era when sport and politics inhabited different universes, and the politicians regarded what the sportsmen did as entirely the business of the sportsmen. Also, in former times, whatever arrangements the British made with their neighbours were no-one else's business. Now, sport is big business and big politics, and Britain is just one beast in the global sporting pack. Now, the mere wording of a team contract can take on a huge international significance:

Hickey revealed today that several bidding cities, keen to take advantage of London's problems, had already contacted him since this newspaper broke the story about the dispute last week.

My guess is it was one of David's lawyer friends (all lawyers know all other lawyers – this is a well known fact) who wrote those contracts, in a deliberately provocative manner, and then rang up all the competing cities to tell them about this row. After all, if enough people say there is a row, there is!

So David's No Olympics for London campaign is getting nicely into gear, and I congratulate him on progress so far.

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One of Australia's greatest golfers, Greg Norman, is among a number of male golfers who want to limit, if not resist completely, the number of women golfers playing men in top-class tournaments.

Straight off, before the equal opportunities industry kicks into gear, we should remember that however dumb and sexist many golfers are said to be (or in some cases, actually are), golf clubs are, by and large, private associations. If women are annoyed at missing out on playing golf against the best, then by all means let golf clubs be opened which cater for both sexes, but we should also resist all attempts to ban the right of clubs, however fuddy-duddy, to set their own rules.

Also, a point for Norman and his ilk to recall is this - the handicapping system. So long as the golf handicap of a man is treating equally - on a par (heh) with that of a woman, then why are the guys getting upset? After all, if you have to be a scratch golfer to make the cut at the Masters, say, then if women really aren't good enough to play, then the handicapping system in play will expose this rather quickly.

In truth, I suspect that Norman and his fellows probably fear that women are getting better at the game and will give them a serious run for their money.

But like I said, this issue is strictly for the clubs, the members, and the paying customer. Message to government - stay out of it.

Right, time I went to the driving range.

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I happened to catch the BBC Radio 5 sports punditry show Fighting Talk on Saturday. One topic under discussion was whether soccer's FA Premier League should "do something" about dominance of the current top three teams in the league, it being alleged that their success made the rest of the league boring. One of the pundits was against this notion, making the point that, as little as 15 years ago, there were different dominant teams. Those who celebrated Liverpool's invulnerability in the mid 1980s could hardly have imagined that that club's place would be taken by Manchester United in the 1990s. Indeed, barely six months ago, nobody could have predicted the emergence of oligarch-funded Chelsea as title contenders. She argued that the league had evolved "organically" - any problems would tend to correct themselves - and lamented the prospect of a "genetically engineered" league with structures designed to hobble the successful teams and boost the mediocre.

I thought it was interesting to hear those specific terms used to support a laissez faire position and it struck me that there is a paradox about environmentalism. That is that, while it holds that organic processes are desirable in food production and any kind of "artificial engineering" is bad, it holds that the reverse applies to society and the economy. Capitalism has developed without a plan. Nobody had to sit down and design civil society. Yet these natural phenomena are scorned by the likes of the Green party whose underlying premise is that society should be re-engineered so that it can become "more natural".

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On the same day that Prime Minister Tony Blair launches London's official bid for the Olympic Games in 2012, I hereby announce the start of my 'No Olympics' campaign.

"The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games will enhance sport in London and the UK forever," said bid chairman Barbara Cassani.

And, by curious coincidence, 'forever' is about how long we are going to have to spend paying for it. No. Non. Nein. Njet. Let the French have it. Or the Russians. Or the Brazilians. Or somebody. Anybody. Just not here. Go away. Sod off. Scram. Sling your hook. Get lost.

I think I shall call a press conference.

UPDATE: The French have also launched their official bid. Apparently, they are the favourites. Good. I support the French bid. Vive la France!

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Stephen Pollard quotes from and links to this article, but doesn't comment other than calling it "fascinating".

It certainly is. Will Buckley's starting point is one that will now be familiar to all attentive Samizdata sports posting readers, which is that in India there are now a lot of fans of the game of cricket. More than there are people in Europe, is how I have put it here in the past. I'll say it again, but differently. There are more Indian cricket fans than there are inhabitants of the USA. That ought to get our readers' attention.

When Tendulkar bats against Pakistan, the television audience in India alone exceeds the combined populations of Europe. In contrast, when England played Germany in Euro 2000, the combined audience of BBC1 and ITV was 17.9 million. The chief executive of Star TV (Sky's Asian wing) asked himself recently, what is sport in India? It's cricket.

Indeed. And you can't separate the rise of Indian cricket from the rise of India itself, which has undoubtedly been one of the great world stories of the last decade. Without going into the whole they're-stealing-our-call-centre-jobs things yet again, we can certainly say that economically those Indians have sure pulled themselves together recently, partly because of all that computer stuff, and partly because they no longer have the example of the USSR to misguide them.

All of which means that India is not just crazy about cricket; it has money to spend on it. Hence the interest being displayed by Mr Murdoch's men. Australia may be the current world champions of cricket, but India are a cricket superpower in the making. Australia have made cricket exciting now. India means that it is certain – absolutely certain – to remain so.

So, if cricket definitely has a future, what of English cricket? England versus Australia (the "Ashes") used to be the biggest deal in the game. Not any more. What Will Buckley reports about the way cricket is played in England is, for me, the most interesting bit of all.

On the face of it, England cricket is in terminal decline. Played only by second-raters, and watched only by old age pensioners awaiting death in their deck chairs. England haven't been a big force in cricket since the golden days of Ian Botham and David Gower back in the nineteen eighties. Oh, the likes of Stewart, Atherton, and now the new captain Vaughan have kept soldiering on, mostly in adversity, but who wants to watch that? (Their most recent effort was getting beaten by Sri Lanka.)

Nevertheless, the certain knowledge that, with or without the country that invented it, cricket has a great future must make England's cricketers want to be a serious part of that future, and Will Buckley's piece contains the best explanation of what is wrong with England cricket and how to correct it that I've yet come across. I've heard the cure he offers many times before, but I've never heard the vital bit of thinking behind the cure makes sense of it, and hence explains why it might work, as opposed to just rearrange those deck chairs with their snoring pensioners.

Former England fast bowler and (briefly) captain Bob Willis (together with the aforementioned Michael Atherton) now runs something called the Cricket Reform Group, which presumably just means that he has opinions which he wants people to listen to. And his opinion is that the basic problem with England cricket is that to be a top England cricketer you have to take a flying leap of faith at the age of about eighteen. In order to be considered for a spot in the England side, you have to bet the next decade of your life. There are no half measures. If you aren't prepared to be a full time county cricketer, you can't ever be an England test cricketer.

Not surprisingly, this is a bet which generation after generation of highly talented young English cricketers have not been willing to place, considering what the stake is. That's Willis' explanation, and to me it really rings true. What Willis wants is a structure where you can play first class cricket throughout your twenties, while still having a life. The time when you decide how serious you are about cricket is not when some county says yes to you, but when England does. Says Willis:

'At the moment you have to commit to a first-class career at 17 or 19 years of age. This doesn't apply anywhere else in the world and it shouldn't do so here. We want the 38 counties turned into 18 new cricket associations based at the current first-class grounds.' The associations will be broken up into three leagues of six and play 10 first-class games a season from Friday to Monday.

'In other words,' says Willis, 'you will be able to use your 20 days' holiday allowance every year to ensure you are available.' No one will be forced to make a final choice between cricket and another career until they have established in which direction their talents lie.

Here is something else I didn't know:

'It is evident that the County Championship system does not produce England cricketers on a regular basis,' says Willis. 'Andy Flintoff, Simon Jones, Alex Tudor and James Anderson were all fast-tracked past the Championship system.'

In other words, they joined the sort of ad hoc England club that they've formed to get past this problem. Flintoff is the most exciting England cricketer now playing. Anderson and Jones both look real prospects.

This, as I say, is the best thinking about England cricket that I've heard of in half a century of watching it and wondering about it. It explains so much.

Like: why English county cricket seems to be afflicted with an air of defeat. They mostly seem like losers. Why? Aren't they pleased to be making money doing what they love?

No. They are being paid only a pittance, to do what is for them only a pale substitute for what they really wanted. They look like losers because they are losers, in other words. Their lives are slipping through their fingers while their contemporaries race ahead in Real Life, which they only get to start on if they abandon their dreams of cricket stardom altogether. No wonder they're all so miserable.

I sense that, what with India getting so good, and Australia still being so good, and India versus Australia now being the great rivalry in cricket, and what with the example set by that other England team sport that has in common with cricket in that it is also not soccer (I'm talking about rugby) the England cricket people are in the mood to do whatever it takes to get England back into serious international contention and to stir up a bit of support from English people under forty. As rugby coach Clive Woodward has been saying for years of England rugby, we have the players. England has the cricketers. It's just that most of them are too good at normal life to allow themselves even to be available for selection.

By the way, as Will Buckley also makes clear this applies especially to people of Indian descent who now live in England and who in the years to come must somehow be encouraged to play cricket for England in greater numbers than so far. The Indian diaspora will be second only to the original English imperial diaspora in spreading cricket to new countries, but that's another posting (probably by Michael Jennings and on Ubersportingpundit, but I couldn't find it.)

And talking of the Empire, in the olden days of English county cricket, lots of cricketers just used to play county cricket every day of the week, without being paid anything. These were the "gentlemen". And then there were the "players", who were paid. The gents had initials in front of their names ("E. R. Dexter", "P. B. H. May", "M. C. Cowdrey", ("B. J. T. Bosanquet")) on the scorecards and in the newspaper reports, while the players just had their surnames, like servants ("Hutton", Larwood"), unless there were two with the same surname in the same team, in which case they had their initials printed after their surnames ("Bedser A. V.", "Bedser E. A." – famous twins who used to play for Surrey) And then, one day, the gentlemen couldn't afford to do this anymore, and everyone just became players. England's uniquely unsatisfactory current arrangements are presumably explained by the fact that our cricket system now is directly descended from a system which used to attract lots of cricketers, because in England a decent number of decent cricketers could afford it, as they couldn't anywhere else. But now that they can't afford it here either, a system which assumes that they can is a disaster.

So all in all, thanks very much to Stephen Pollard for the link, unadorned though it was by much in the way of comment from him.

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He was not a 'show biz personality'. He did not appear in Hello magazine. He did not share his view with us about the case for toppling Saddam, and as far as I am aware, has not greatly troubled the front pages of the world's newspapers with drunken antics. He was, boringly, one of the finest, toughest sportsmen of the age. And boy, could he use a cricket bat.

Steve Waugh, cricketing colossus, has finally quit the field.

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Here on Samizdata we quite often give a mention to sport, having paid attention to the Soccer World Cup of 2002, the recently concluded Rugby World Cup, the University Boat Race, and cricket matches between England and Zimbabwe if only to keep on reminding the universe of the ghastliness of the current lunatic government of that unhappy country. Jonathan Pearce also writes here from time to time about various interesting and diverting sports. Most recently, we have featured a denunciation of the Olympic Games, only last Tuesday. We even occasionally mention Football of the American variety.

But for a true clash of the titans, you need look no further than the contest taking place right now in Melbourne between Australia and India.

The game? Cricket. Yes, cucumber sandwiches, more-tea-vicar, cricket.

Cricket in England is in a sad state of eclipse, with the national side having just been beaten by Sri Lanka (in Sri Lanka) amidst massive English excitement, about the Rugby World Cup.

How different are the fortunes of cricket in Australia! Michael Jennings began his talk at my place on Boxing Day by telling us that for an Australian like him, Christmas Day is Christmas Day as celebrated in England – with its snowy Christmas Cards and midwinter English feasting (in temperatures of around 35 centigrade), but that Boxing Day, December 26th, means the beginning of the Australian summer and day one of the Melbourne Test. Cricket is the game in Australia nowadays, as Michael has also been tells everyone who will listen. Their recent defeat in the Rugby at the hands of England is a trifle in Australia compared to the prospect of defeat by India in the cricket series currently in progress.

Australia versus India is the biggest national rivalry in cricket right now, having replaced Australia versus England, now that England are not a match for the dominant Aussies and been losing to them since the nineteen eighties. And in India also, cricket is the game. As I'm fond of telling anyone who will listen, India now contains as many cricket fans as Europe contains people.

Australia versus India. It's an enticing rivalry. A great sporting nation (despite not bothering about it they've still won the Rugby World Cup more often than anyone else) playing a great nation (never mind about sport), and what is more a greater nation with every decade that now passes, both of them slugging it out for the top spot at the sport they both take most seriously of all.

Both teams have great batsmen. The Indian Sachin Tendulkar is a genius, even if he's going through a bad patch just now. And the Aussie batting line-up is the strongest it has ever been.

For the last few years, the real Australian edge over India, in fact over everyone, has been their bowling, which has also been superb, and at a time when great bowlers have been rarer than great batters, and merely good international bowlers in pretty short supply.

But not right now. McGrath, Gillespie, Warne, are all unavailable, the first two because of injury and the great Shane Warne because of he is still serving out a drug mis-use suspension. So this is India's chance. India are already one up in the current series, and in the match now in progress they batted first and had a great first day. However, Australia skittled them out on the second morning, and replied with characteristically dominant batting of their own. So Australia are now in a position to win this game and to level and maybe even win the series.

Day three starts at 12.30 am on Sunday, in other words in about an hour's time as I post this.

But the man to read about all this is not me, it's Michael Jennings. Michael also writes for the Aussie sports blog Ubersportingpundit, and his latest posting there really gives you a sense of what is at stake in this truly epic confrontation:

I have said before that I think it is only a matter of time before demographic and economic factors in India take charge, and India generates a great, and probably internationally dominant cricket team. …

… If they could push on to 500 or 600 then Australia were likely in a position from which they could not come back to win the series. However, Australia were clearly underperforming, even beyond being without their best bowlers. Could Australia come back and punish the Indians? Australia have a history in recent years of coming back from a loss to absolutely smash the opposition. Could they do it here?

Well, after day two it looks like the answer may well be yes. …

So Australia may be in the process of coming back to smash India. But of course, India can fight back again. While I think a very big score from Australia is the most likely possibility, India have played well in the series so far and the possibility of a fightback must not be taken lightly, even if India have been written off by the Indian press. In their second innings and in Sydney a big contribution from Tendulkar would be really useful. The rest of this series should be something special. But I think tonight may be the key moment. Dominance in world cricket may well be at stake. Winning this series will not be enough for India to say they are the best in the world, but if they win and if they are the best in the world in five years time, this may be the key moment that they look back to.

Great stuff. Both the writing and the contest being written about.

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Will you join me in a special Christmas prayer? "Oh Lord, please spare us from the Olympics":

London will be unable to host the Olympics in 2012 unless the Prime Minister gives the go-ahead within the next few weeks for a £1bn rail link, the capital's Mayor, Ken Livingstone, says.

Don't do it, Tony. Just keep those Treasury purse strings tightly drawn and, with a bit of luck, the organisers of the whole foul jamboree will look for another city to infest.

No sane person could possibly want the Olympic carnival let loose on London. It is the equivalent of begging the government to add a zero or two to everybody's tax bills for a decade or more. Quite aside from the gargantuan cost of hosting the wretched thing, we will also have to endure blanket security measures that render every resident under virtual house arrest and months and months of laboured 'anti-drug' messages on every medium imaginable. And, given the times we live in, the whole chabang will be saturated with enough stomach-churning PC mummery to induce a vomitting fit.

And for what? So that we can assailed with wall-to-wall, 24/7 coverage of a bunch of physical education students from Uzbekistan competing in a culturally-sensitive, enviromentally-friendly, non-judgemental, compassionate, caring, 1500m peace-march. Feh!

I do not want the sodding Olympics. Not in 2012. Not ever.

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It's no good. Every time I think about Jonny's sun-kissed fringe. Every time I think about Dallaglio's try-setting run. Every time I think about that little girl at the airport, at 4:30am, holding up a homemade picture of the England rugby team framed in red tinsel, I feel like blubbing. Even now, as I write this, I'm filling up again. What a game.

I think it's something to do with having children. You just start becoming emotionally incontinent about everything. Or at least that's what has happened to me. But enough of this nonsense. I shall ask Mr Micklethwait to try to cure me by email.

But his post below set me thinking about something else. Having waded through various anarcho-capitalist tomes, in the last few months, there's something I've found particularly unsatisfying about them all, as they babble on about private courts, private arbitration, and private police. Where's the beef!

You hear tantalising snippets about successful anarcho-capitalist societies in fourth century Germany, in eleventh century Ireland, and in fifteenth century Iceland, but rarely, if ever, do you actually get to see the beef. What would an anarcho-capitalist society actually be like? And if it's such a good thing, why didn't the German, Irish, and Icelandic experiments sweep the world? Yes, those with the biggest spears, swords, and addictive philosophies, imposed their coercive natures upon the rest of us, and their useless miserable parasitical states. But even anarcho-capitalists will admit that even the worst dictator needs the support of the broad mass of his state's population, or at least their grudging acceptance, in order to survive. Otherwise, as revolutions like the recent one in Georgia have shown, the dictator is curtains.

So where's the beef? Show me anarchist law successfully in action, and then maybe I will believe. And yet there it was before me, all the time, like that big "W" swaying in the breeze before Phil Silvers in 'It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World'.

The typically Anglospheric state guards its 'right' to administer all internal state justice with a ruthlessly monopolistic intent. Except in one place. In this one small area you can deliberately break a man's leg, in front of tens of thousands of potential witnesses, and you will suffer nothing more than a curt dismissal from a patch of grass. In this one small area you can punch a man until he's unconscious, and kind men on television will accuse you of nothing more than a 'wee bit of nonsense'. And in this one small area, legal decisions are routinely made which change people's lives forever, but which are inapplicable to anywhere but this one small area, and even then for only a small time period typically less than half a day.

I am of course talking about 'The Pitch', that sacred Valhalla, from the concrete on the five-a-side soccer pitch at Wilmslow leisure centre, in Cheshire, to the verdant turf of the Telstra stadium, in the rugby world cup championship decider, in Australia. Here, men are men, flexible rules of the game are iron laws of reckoning, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri are tired and emotional, after the long trip to the game, from Alpha Centauri.

Am I stretching a point? Probably. But could this be a key? Could 'Sports Law' one day become the foundation stone of anarcho-capitalist law? Let's take a look at it. Dr David Friedman is covered. If you're a football player who doesn't like one set of laws, you simply move to another form of football laws which you do like. And you can do this on the field right next door, whether they're playing soccer, rugby union, rugby league, American football, Australian football, or even table football, if you fancy going back to the warmth of the clubhouse.

Professor Rothbard is covered. All the players or teams pay a competitive sports administration board (FIFA, the Rugby Football Union, the National Football League), to provide private judges, or referees, to adjudicate on the law. Even within these administrations these private judges compete to satisfy teams better than other private judges, under the same administration, so that they can officiate at the really big games and get the highest fees and advertising sponsorship.

Even Professor Hoppe is satisfied. Should a really difficult decision go beyond the ability of the appointed private adjudicator, this adjudicator goes up to a final arbitrational court, or as he's more often known these days, the 'television referee'. The television referee virtually always enjoys an unchallengeable respect within the game, and his decision is always accepted as binding and final, without the need for any further arbitration. Even in the worst cases of rough justice, the final result of the game always stands, regardless of any post-game televisual analysis.

Notice how quick and inexpensive this law is, compared to the years and cost it takes the monopolistic state to bring even the simplest case to trial. It is virtually instant. There may occasionally be a 10 second conference, with more minor adjudicators, or as they're sometimes known, linesmen, and possibly a 60 second decision going to the final binding arbitrator, up in the Gods.

But then, that's it. It's decided, and everyone on 'The Pitch' obeys the legality of the decision, and moves on. Except on very rare occasions. And if some player should lose his rag, and his team-mates remain unable to restrain him from prolonged legal dissatisfaction, he almost always pays for it afterwards in a total loss of respect for either his opinion or his inability to control his own temper.

Notice, also, that little in the way of policing is required. The referee makes a decision, and that's it. Self-restraint and the need to save face in the 'society' of the game, gets most players obeying 'The Law', though occasionally team-mates and linesmen, acting as proxy-police, are needed to suppress hotspots of dissent. Notice also how powerful this effect of self-restraint becomes, before the face of this flimsy anarchist law. You've got a six-foot-five, 32-inch-waisted, nineteen-stone man, pumped with adrenaline, who has just had his testicles gouged with a bullocking boot, who has retaliated in kind, and who is shouting and remonstrating at an eleven stone referee, and yet the merest display of a red piece of plastic and the point of a finger gets this beast of a man to turn, to walk away, and to obey the instruction to leave 'The Pitch'. Okay, so he's often unhappy, and lip readers refuse to reveal what he's saying on family television, but he does ultimately do what he's told, even if kicking some form of bench, or bench official, on his way off.

So speedy inexpensive legal decisions, competitive judges, competitive systems of law, the lack of a need for much policing, binding second level arbitration, legal stability, and a complete acceptance of all parties as to the ultimate legitimacy of 'The Law'. Ladies and Gentlemen. I give you a fully-functioning anarcho-capitalist legal system, in action. It can work.

(0) (15)

Many weeks ago I wrote a posting here about how (a) England just might win the forthcoming Rugby World Cup, and that (b) this might work to the advantage of the Conservative Party. Well, England did win the Rugby World Cup, so how might this help the Conservatives?

I certainly didn't have in mind that England's front rooms will now be echoing with the claim that "now we'll all vote Conservative then". No. This is more the sort of thing I had in mind, from Adam Parsons in yesterday's Scotland on Sunday.

It is easy in such times for the rest of us to fall prey to hyperbole, so let’s tread carefully here. But I think it is true to say this is an achievement of great importance, something that everybody can cherish. Not just because a British team has won the cup, nor that it is at last crossing from the bottom of the world and going to the top. It is something to do with the people who won it, and what they stand for.

England’s squad are a decent bunch of people. The likes of Josh Lewsey, Ben Cohen, Jason Leonard, Iain Balshaw – these are genuinely engaging characters, blokes you’d have a drink with.

In other words, they feel so very different from the image most footballers have come to represent over the past few years. On the one hand, we have people who have become the best in the world by training relentlessly, yet retain the level-headedness to acknowledge their supporters as their emotional crux; on the other, players who increasingly come to represent a streak of overpaid self-importance.

It is naive, I suppose, to hope that rugby could, even for a short time, replace football in the national affections, but I hope this victory will at least reverberate.

British soccer (as opposed to merely the English version) took two further knocks last week, when, in among all the England rugby fervour, both Wales (agonisingly) and Scotland (humiliatingly) failed to qualify for the European soccer championships next year.

This relative rise of rugby in the affections (England) and respect (elsewhere in Britain), and the relative decline in the esteem felt towards football, has, I feel, something of an end-of-era feel to it. It all adds to the sense of that New Labour/Princess Di/Things Can Only Get Better bubble bursting back into nothing whence it came. To put it rudely, that brief moment when the English told themselves (or were told by their newspaper columnists) that they preferred emotional incontinence to the old manly virtues of stoicism, calmness under stress, and grace and dignity whether one is victorious or defeated, to the uncontrolled emotional display of weeping copiously and in public when someone utterly unconnected with you dies, or running about like an escaped mental patient when you've scored a goal.

How this all maps across to politics is that merely working yourself into a frenzy either of well-intentioned benevolence or of anti-Conservative rage won't make the Welfare State, or the trains, or the schools, work any better, and that what is needed is a little clear thinking and competent execution. (We here at Samizdata would have a slightly different take on the kind of 'execution' that the Welfare State needs, but my point here is how British public opinion might now be changing, rather than about whether public opinion is about to become entirely sensible.)

I'm not sure that I like that Parsons' reference to mere supporters being an "emotional crux" for our rugby players, but apart from that, this is surely the thrust of what Adams says.

Here's Jasper Gerrard in the Sunday Times, saying similar things:

The attraction of rugby players is they are not football players: by this I mean they don’t wear Tiffany diamond earrings or drive Yank tanks bigger than a council house. If David Beckham is “metrosexual” (“secure enough to embrace his feminine side”, apparently) rugby players are full-fat, extra large heroes; they are neither secure nor insecure, it would just never occur to them to slip on a sarong.

Nor do they use steroids: muscle bound is how they come out of the packet. Some even make fine role models. Jason Robinson is unlikely to fail a random drugs test: a black Englishman from a broken home, he is also a rugby superstar, a born-again Christian and a gent.

They don’t forget that it doesn’t matter that much. Remember the gracious losing Aussie captain, George Gregan, or Go Jonny Go Wilkinson dropping the goal that won the World Cup? He merely smiled and patted someone else on the back. If a consolation goal dribbles off a footballer’s backside in the LDV Vans Trophy, he rips off his shirt, does six summersaults and hoists a V-sign at rival fans.

Yes. On Saturday it was the Aussies who gave the world a lesson in how to take the acute disappointment of defeat with dignity and generosity, which for me personally translated itself into getting a phone call just after the final whistle blew from Samizdata's own Aussie Michael Jennings, congratulating me on my victory, and telling me something I'd not then fully grasped, which was what a hell of a good game it was. And trust me, the English won't have missed this. Those Aussies are fair dinkum blokes, and not just when they're winning everything.

All of which just adds the sense that the emotional/political centre of gravity of Britain may be shifting back towards its Anglosphere foundations and away from the metropolitan New Labour infatuation with holidays in Tuscany and fine wine instead of good beer, and Old Labour loathing for the middle-class competence and decency personified by people like England's rugby players.

It won't turn the next general election all by itself, but it will make a difference, I believe.

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What an amazing game. What an amazing number of mistakes. What an amazing result. Jonny Wilkinson, can I have your babies, please? What a star. I've just aged about 300 years, watching the match, which went into overtime, and I'm just about to watch the post-match commentary, but what a sensational result. England. Rugby world cup champions. Fantastic.

Oh, and a few words for David Campese. No worries, mate.

(0) (14)

Well, as Samizdata's token Australian, I guess it is my job to do a little bit of cheering from the point of view of England's opponents in the final of the Rugby World Cup on Saturday. Like Brian, I have also been writing about the tournament on ubersportingpundit, but if he is going to bring it here and the commenters are all then going to complain about Australians I might as well use my God like Samizdatista powers too.

For in the other semi-final on the weekend, Australia versus New Zealand, the Australian side that have looked second rate all year suddenly came good, and played superbly to beat New Zealand. Sydney is getting excited. The final is Australia v England, a great grudge match.

Which leaves me with two things to discuss. The grudge, and the match. First, the match.

Very well as Australia played on Saturday (and they really were terrific) I think that if they play equally well and in the same way in the final, they will very likely lose. Why do I think this? Well, Australia won the game by going on the attack in the first half, getting a lead, and then defending ferociously as New Zealand attempted to score tries in the second half. At half time I was quite disappointed that Australia had not scored more than one try given the amount of possession they had had. Australia have the best defence of any side in the tournament, but I wasn't sure that they could hold New Zealand out for the second half. But as it happened, the defence was even better than I expected, and they did hold New Zealand out for the second half.

However, if Australia get an early lead of a few points and try the same strategy against England, and find themselves defending against England in the second half, it just won't work. Every time Australia concede a penalty, Jonny Wilkinson will kick the ball over the crossbar for three points. If Australia don't concede penalties (and in Rugby this is very difficult for prolongued periods), Wilkinson will start kicking drop goals. England won't score tries, but they will score enough points to win just the same. (They didn't score any tries against France, but won comfortably).

The more I think about it like this, the more I think England will win the game. The Australian team and coach must be thinking the same way. Therefore, I think they will not play with quite the same strategy they did against New Zealand. To win, Australia is going to have to score more tries, hopefully in the first half, than they did against New Zealand. While only scoring one try from lots of possession in the first half was okay against New Zealand, it will not be against England. Look for Australia to come out, and hit England's defences extremely hard in the first half hour. If they can break the defence, and score two or three tries, Australia will likely win. If not, England will.

Secondly, the grudge.

I have a copy of today's Times in front of me. On the front, I see a picture of a sheep, with the words "The bleating Aussies", and a suggesting that readers turn to the sports section. When I do actually turn to the sports section. Upon doing so, I find "England bored by the sniping but buoyed by the challenge" on page 42, followed by an article discussing how "ill informed" Australian sports jounalists are criticising England for playing "boring rugby" and generally bashing the English team. On page 43, 42, and 37, I find much the same thing. ("Whingers of Oz keep myth alive and kicking" is particularly good). In all the other newspapers I find much the same thing. In the comments of Brian's article here on Samizdata I find much the same.

Which is odd. Because there hasn't actually been very much Pom bashing going on in Australia. Oh, certainly there has been some. Ribbing the English is always fun, so some people do it just for the sake of it. And of course, England play very effective rugby, and criticising it as "boring" in an attempt to get them to change their style is always worth a try. (It worked in 1991, but it won't work here. England are far too professional this year). But Pom bashing hasn't and isn't the focus of Australian attention on the World Cup. It's been way down the scale. Prior to the semi-final, Australians were far too busy writing off their own team's chances to really focus on it, and they are still too busy enjoying the semi-final victory over New Zealand to do too much of it this week. (In Rugby, beating New Zealand is generally a bigger deal than beating England anyway). However, the English press seems utterly obsessed with it, to the extent that there is far more whinging about Australian whinging in the English press than there is actual whinging going on in Australia. I don't know quite why? Perhaps the English are so traumatised by losing to Australia at everything for a decade that they see it even when it isn't really there. However, having been reading the Australian press throughout the cup, and having spent a couple of weeks of the World Cup actually in Australia, all I can say is that what I have read in the English press is entirely different to what I have read and seen actually in Australia. All I can conclude is that the English press are seeing what they want to. If England win, it will be much more enjoyable if they can believe that Australia lost with bad grace.

However, given that there is more complaining about Australians going on than actual rugby coverage, I can only conclude that the English media are at this point completely rattled. And although this is enjoyable, it doesn't actually matter much. Because as Brian has said repeatedly, this English team is very well led and coached, and is by far the most professional team that England has ever had. And I don't believe that anything in the Australian or English press is going to affect this. If Australia are going to beat England, they are going to have to simply play great rugby. Hopefully they will. More likely though, England will win. And if they do, we Australians will mostly congratulate England on a good job, still feel reasonably okay because Australia did far better in the tournament than we expected to, and console ourselves by laughing at the England cricket team.

(1) (9)

I should have had a good brag about this well before now, but at least the delay has given the Guardian the time to translate the comments in the French and Australian sporting press about it all – it all being the fact that, last Sunday morning London time, England beat France 24-7 in the second semi-final of the Rugby World Cup, in Sydney, and are through to next Saturday's Final against Australia.

This was something of a surprise to some, and some included me. France had looked terrific all through the early rounds, while England had stuttered against lowlier opposition. But when it came to le crunch England were up for it and France crumpled.

The twin nemeses of France were the two Ws, the Weather, and Wilkinson.

After a warm and sunny week during which the French practised their fluent running and passing game, the actual game was played at a far lower temperature and in drenching rain and horribly gusting wind. As Le Parisien put it (translated for the Guardian):

Repeated errors, lack of control, appaling place kicking - on D Day, les Bleus blew it. We will no doubt be speaking for years to come of the dreadful weather that accompanied this match but it alone cannot exonerate the French team. In the pouring rain, the wretched English hung us out to dry.

France found themselves relying far more than they would have wanted on the kicking, in open play and at goal, of their young fly half Frédéric Michalak, who until Sunday could do no wrong. But on Sunday, he managed just two points, when he converted an early French try, and he then went on to miss four kicks at goal. His tactical kicking in open play was, if anything, ever more disappointing. Often French kicks that were supposed to be straight ahead, instead went straight up in the air.

England fly half Jonny Wilkinson, meanwhile, kicked far better in open play, as did the man next to him, Mike Catt. Like Michalak, Wilkinson missed a few penalty kicks, but in extreme contrast to Michalak he landed five. Equally important, he also kicked three 'drop' goals, as they're called. Drop goals, where you half-volley kick the ball while on the move, instead of kicking it after placing it on the ground, are hard to bring off in perfect weather and with no pressure on you. For Wilkinson to break the England international drop goal record by kicking no less than three of these things, in a World Cup semi-final in weather than was downright vile, was extraordinary. So it was Michalak 2 Wilkinson (and therefore England because England never managed a try) 24.

The French experience in this tournament put me in mind of that line in Top Gun, where flying instructor Michael Ironside says to Tom Cruise something along the lines of: "That was some of the greatest flying I've ever seen, right up to the part where you got killed."

I've been doing occasional pieces about this tournament for Scott Wickstein's Ubersportingpundit group blog, and that Top Gun thing was a line I've already used there. If you want to know more of how I've been seeing it all, go read that stuff. Writing it has been for me what the Americans call a learning experience, truly.

In other words, mostly I've been getting it wrong. I said that the New Zealand All Blacks would beat Australia in the other semi-final, and like everyone, I thought France had been looking great, but not England. Until last Sunday. But next Saturday morning it will be host nation Australia (victors against the All Blacks by 22-10 in the first semi-final) against England.

So far, England have scored hardly any tries, except against minnows in two of their opening group matches. Every time they've won against medium-ranking opposition amidst barrages of Wilkinson penalty kicks, the Aussie press has yelled: "Is that all you've got?", and: "Boring." I and every England fan would love it if England could run in half a dozen tries next Saturday and win with style. But if at the end of it England win, and the Aussies are still asking if that's all England have got and calling them boring, when what England have actually got is the Rugby World Cup, I for one will be very happy.

Nobody really knows what will happen. Most, like me, having been chastened by their wrong predictions for the semi-finals. If England play at their very best, they should just about shade it. If. But, they're good at games, those Aussies.

As to what it might mean if England were to win, well … let's win it first, eh?

(1) (18)

Yes it's the Rugby World Cup, and in the early hours of this morning London time, the mighty Fijians came within a point of suffering a shock defeat at the hands of plucky little USA.

USA captain Dave Hodges paid tribute to his players after coming within a kick of beating Fiji.

"No-one in the world of rugby gave us a chance, but we came out with a good game," said Hodges, whose team lost 19-18, having spurned a chance to win.

Fly-half Mike Hercus kicked for glory after Kort Schubert's try, but narrowly missed with the last action of the match.

"It was a good effort from all the players. We were very, very disappointed," said Hodges.

This rugby tournament still hasn't had a decent surprise result, having instead suffered an abundance of one sided results along the lines of Goliath 70 David 10, the most extreme of which so far has been England 84 Georgia (the one next to Russia – every name except one ending either in -dze or -vili) 10. Rugby is that sort of game. If one team is well on top the points will accumulate. Running over a line with a rugby ball in your hand and planting it down on the ground (in rugby touching down actually does mean touching down) is relatively easy. So, in rugby, upsets are rare, and it only gets really exciting when the teams are pretty evenly matched, as Fiji and USA turned out to be today, and as will be the case in the later rounds of this tournament, but has has tended not to be the case in the early round games now being played. So this Fiji USA game was very refreshing, and I eagerly await the recorded highlights of the game this evening.

In soccer, by contrast, a team can have all the possession and a string of chances, and have nothing to show for it. And then the other guys can run up the other end and score a goal with their one attack. Converting a solid chance into a soccer goal still takes some doing. Even open goals are appallingly easy to miss, as you will know if you've ever played this game, and when chances are missed the sturdiest shoulders can drop and underdog spirits can soar.

The Soccer World Cup not so long ago contained many upsets, with France (sensationally beaten by their own ex-colony Senegal) and Argentina, to name two famously strong and fancied teams, both going home after the first round of games. This is one of the many reasons why soccer is now the great World Game, while rugby is not. Soccer minnows can (sometimes) take great bites out of soccer sharks, so the fans of the lowliest soccer nations can still dream of fantasy results with their heroes winning.

Samizdata readers in particular will surely never forget how the mighty Portuguese – sporting no less a person than Luis Figo of Real Madrid – were humbled 3-2 by … plucky little USA.

(3) (16)

It may be silly that sport affects politics, but it does. In 1966, England won the soccer World Cup, and it definitely did rub off on the Labour Government then in power and on Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. British proles can do it, who needs the bloody toffs?, etc. etc. Wilson certainly milked that win all he could for his political team.

So when, in the quarter-finals of the next World Cup in 1970, the England soccer team was gut-wrenchingly beaten 3-2 (after being 2-0 up) by the very same opponents they'd beaten in the 1966 final, West Germany, they were widely debited/credited with tipping the balance in favour of the Conservatives at the general election held very soon afterwards. The proles weren't so cool after all, you see.

The England soccer team has never since scaled the heights of 1966, but the infusion of television money and foreign stars nevertheless gave English soccer in the 1990s a glamour and a cultural clout that it had probably never had before. Soccer now completely dominates the sports pages, having utterly routed the now very forlorn cricket as England's "national game". And ("New") Labour has once again made use of all that in its propaganda about rebranding and modernising and generally being Cool Britannia.

There is now another World Cup approaching which may have a similar, although more muted, political effect, in the form of the Rugby Word Cup, which kicks off next Friday when host nation Australia plays Argentina in Sydney. England are strongly fancied to win this, although the truth is that any one of about half a dozen closely matched teams could win, of whom England are just one. If England do win or at least do very well (by winning through to the final in grand style and then being heroically and narrowly beaten, say), this could have party political vibes back here in Britain. If England disappoint, ditto, in the sense that the dog I am about to describe won't have barked after all.

Basically, it would suit the Conservatives if the England rugby team were to triumph, while many Labour supporters would probably prefer England to make a humiliatingly early exit.

I've already alluded to the class nature of Britain and of British sport, when referring to the proles who are – and the toffs who are not – involved in British soccer. Something equal and … not opposite exactly, but very distinct, can be said about rugby. Here the class that dominates is what is called the "middle" class, although by middle what is really meant is the class of people who are upper, but then not too far upper. The class I'm getting at is the "upper half" class, the class sufficiently numerous to hold its own numerically when set beside beside the working class.

To be sure, there are toffs who play rugby, or "rugger" as such people call it. But the people from whom this England team come are not toffs. They come from the people who keep the wheels of British society turning by turning up themselves every morning for work and making sure that the wheels turn, rather than merely by owning the wheels and complaining about them in unattractive accents as they read the financial pages.

The England rugby team is widely regarded – certainly among British sports people – as the best major sports team in these islands just now, and it is a middling class, middle managerial atmosphere that this excellent team now gives off. They are professional in their economic status (without being as outrageously paid as the soccer stars), and they are professional in their social attitudes. They practice hard, and play hard, and almost always these days, they win. The England cricket people observe the rugby guys with unconcealed envy, and the soccer people are starting to pay serious attention also.

After they've won a game, the England rugby players talk in managerial clichés about how "I was lucky enough to get on the end of" a score, which was really created by a huge team effort, blah blah. What is absent is either any yobbish, prole-ish childishness, or any upper-class ironic detachment. They are not very wordy, and when they are it's generally rather dull and you wish they'd stop. Humour, when they do display it, tends to be of the laconic variety. They prefer to let their upper and lower body strength do the talking.

It isn't that these guys are without feelings. They have powerful feelings, but they also have an ability bordering on genius to control and to channel those feelings into the "job" (a favourite England rugby word nowadays), rather than, say, into quarrelling with referees or smashing up hotels. They are "Middle England", to use a politically potent phrase. During World War 2, their grandfathers would have been officers and NCOs in the civilian and conscripted bit of the Army. They aren't squaddies, but neither are they Guards officers. Nowadays, blokes like this go to universities, but not to the posh ones.

Professionalism has definitely made a difference to all this. The general run of amateur rugby players are a rowdier and more off-putting bunch than the top internationals, a lot more like professional soccer players. But behaviour like that doesn't win you good press coverage and hence good sponsorship deals, and more to the point, it gets you hurt and fat and it doesn't win you games.

The man who epitomises all this is England's star fly half and goal-kicking automaton Jonny Wilkinson, and it speaks volumes that David Beckham has been so content to share a pre World Cup photoshoot with Wilkinson. Wilkinson is now making a small fortune as the face of half a dozen advertising campaigns, from Tweed jackets to Lucozade.

You can see where I'm going with this. The England rugby team now gives off the precise atmosphere of teamwork, toughness, modesty, effectiveness, confidence-without-arrogance, upward economic mobility, emotional commitment, patriotism and yet non-toffness and non-ghastliness that the Conservative Party is trying to radiate, or ought to be trying to radiate if it knows what's good for it. If England do shine as brightly as they well could in this World Cup, it will be one more little boost for the Conservatives, and one more little nail in the coffin of the New Labour project.

Which is not the same as saying that seemingly very ineffectual person who now leads the Conservatives will make any worthwhile use of whatever rugby card he gets dealt. In fact, there is no better way of summing up what's wrong with the current Conservative Leader, a man called the Iain Duncan Smith (this has to keep being spelled out because it is a name that many, many millions of Brits continue to have trouble with), is that he doesn't look or sound or feel like anything remotely resembling an England rugby international, but that in order to do his job properly he should. There's a bloke called, I believe, David Davis, who, I further believe, passes what one might call the "rugby test". There are probably some younger Conservative MPs who likewise give off that rugby pro vibe. Most of the Conservatives fail the rugby test dismally, being varying mixtures of inbred toff genetic failure and soccer referee. They come across as privileged but undeserving of their privileges, and too weak and silly even to cling on to them.

Don't get this wrong. I'm not saying that the England rugby team consists entirely of Conservative supporters, any more than the England soccer team all votes Labour. I'm talking about whose people these people are, who identifies with them, who went to school with them, and would like their sisters to marry them.

Tony Blair's political triumph has been built on his ability to split Middle England down the middle and bite off a great chunk of it, without offending the proles and their various representatives too much, and there's plenty more mileage yet in that political bandwagon. But an England rugby win would suggest, perhaps subliminally, that if you want England (the country) to do well (and by extension Britain), then it ought to be run by the kind of people who now run the England rugby team, and by the sort of political party that most resembles the people in the England rugby team.

Soccer just now, by comparison, is suddenly looking threadbare and unappealing. It has been paid too much but has delivered too little. Following a traumatic slump in TV revenue, the latest infusion of money is now coming from the Russian oil tycoon/politician/gangster who has bought Chelsea. Soccer is not now Britain, or England, at its best. Stories like this or this really do not help. Coming as they do just before the Rugby World Cup, they point up the current contrast between England soccer and England rugby with particular force.

And as for soccer's supporters … While the rugby players dream of World Cup glory, the England soccer team is on the verge of being kicked out of the next European Championships because of the fear and hatred aroused throughout Europe by the aggressively drunken yobbishness of the working class louts who support it, and of the inability of the Soccer bosses either to control or to dissociate themselves from this mayhem.

The totemic David Beckham, as much Mr Cool Britannia as Tony Blair has ever been, has now moved to Spain, to play for Real Madrid. Coincidence? Probably. But there's definitely an air of fading glory about England soccer just now, and what is more of glory that never quite was glory in the first place.

So, a lot is riding on the England rugby team as they sweat through their final preparations in the heat of Australia. England's first game is against the unfancied Georgians, but, taking nothing for granted, they have picked their best team.

Meanwhile, Ireland also have a decent side, and are a good outside bet to get all Irish and fervent about everything and win the entire thing. What the political vibes of that would be, I haven't really given much thought to. I think it would probably weaken the case for Britain staying out of the Euro by "proving" that the enthusiastically European Irish are doing fine with the Euro. That's what would be said, anyway. But that's another argument.

(0) (7)

So Wunderkind Wayne Rooney does it again, saving England from an embarrassing result against those footballing soccer lilliputians, Lichtenstein. Old Mottie and the Brookmeister even blessed him, as is traditional, with those epithets of glory, "he's a natural", and "he's got a great footballing brain". Ah yes, the memories of Peter Beardsley came flooding back, that face, the one of a bulldog chewing a wasp. But Wayne Rooney! Is he really only seventeen? It hardly seems possible. He's a bull, he's a monster, his touch is awesome, almost Pele-esque. Are we blessed with the next Maradonna, the next George Best, or is it just the next Wayne Rooney? This is what I love about genius. The idiot egalitarians of socialism want every man and woman to be ratcheted back to the level of the lowest of the low, to be smacked into the most feeble of the feeble denominators, but when it comes to sport, they are the first to proclaim the greatness of the individual, the uniqueness of human ability, and the sacredness of talent. What is it about sport? Is it the only human arena in which all can acknowledge individual human greatness? If only we could extend this to other realms of human endeavour. Whatever the case, God Bless you Wayne Rooney, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you. May I only be there when you score the winning goal against Brazil in the next World Cup Final.

(2) (9)

This afternoon my fellow Samizdata-scribe David Carr took me to watch his beloved Chelsea play Leicester City at football, at Chelsea Football Club's home ground, Stamford Bridge, which is a walk away from the Samizdata HQ. He had a spare ticket, caused by the temporary absence in the USA of his usual Chelsea companion.

It was quite a day, if only because it was the first Chelsea home game of the season, and accordingly the first home game attended by Chelsea's new owner Roman Abramovich, the mysterious and infinitely rich young Russian who has been spending money like water on new players. £50 million is quite a lot to you and me, but to him it is apparently small change. Who knows how he made his money? Certainly no one in the crowd today gave a damn. It was enough that he was spending a little of it on their team. Abramovich got the biggest cheer of the entire day. It occurs to me that owning football clubs have now replaced owning national newspapers as the preferred hobby of the Infinitely Rich.

The Chelsea supporters by whom David and I were surrounded took the whole thing desperately seriously. They showed most excitement (a), as you would expect, when the two Chelsea goals were scored, and (b) when the referee ever made a decision of which they disapproved, i.e. not in favour of Chelsea. It seemed to me that for these person, football had completely replaced politics as the focus of their 'political' enthusiasms, if you get my meaning. Which might have something to do with why the Super-Rich have switched from owning newspapers to owning football clubs. Both are the result of their fantasies of political power. No politician (or for that matter newspaper tycoon) would ever get a cheer nowadays like the one that greeted Abramovich today.

I believe that one of the reasons football is the focus of such intense popular enthusiasm is that, when you watch it, it is possible to imagine that you could do most of the things you are witnessing. Cricket and rugby are my favourite spectator sports, but they never give me this feeling. They just look too skilled and difficult and dangerous. But football looks like something anyone could do. I don't need convincing that this is not actually so, and that in fact a massive amount of skill was on display today. But, my point is, it doesn't quite look that way to me. And I'm not the only one. When a Chelsea player missed what looked like an easy goal (which I'm likewise sure was not actually an easy goal at all) the woman behind me shouted out: "I could have scored that!" I think that this I-could-do-that quality is one of the reasons that football (or soccer as it is known in various parts outside the UK) is the world's number one sport.

And another reason why football has captured the popular imagination is that so much luck