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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 is involved. I'm not saying that no skill is involved. Skill is definitely involved, a lot. But so is luck.

The winning goal today, a cracking half volley by new Chelsea signing from Romania Adrian Mutu ("Moo!" "Too!" "Moo! "Too!"), was a stunner, but it also fell just right for him, and on most days he'd probably have blasted it high or wide or both. The other Chelsea goal was an "own goal", which means that a Leicester player scored it by mistake, which was also a big stroke of luck for Chelsea. On at three other occasions, twice for Chelsea (including the one that the lady behind me could have scored) and once for Leicester, potential scorers struck the woodwork, as the sports reporters say, i.e. struck shots that bounced back off the goal posts, and Chelsea nearly scored on about four other occasions. The Leicester goal only came after a decidedly controversial refereeing decision in Leicester's favour. So, depending on the luck of the draw and the bounce of the ball, the score could have been anything from about 3-0 to Leicester, to about 9-0 to Chelsea. This time, as most times, the result went with the side that created the most chances. But a chance is only a chance. Even though the Leicester side, if you sold them all, wouldn't have paid for even one of the Chelsea substitutes (all of whom were internationals), and even though Chelsea had more of the play in between the two goalmouths than Leicester did, Leicester could still quite well have won this game.

Football is thus what you might call a suitable focus for rational fantasy. Second or even third ranking clubs really can beat the big boys, sometimes. It doesn't happen all that often, but it happens. Poor people love football for the same reason they buy lottery tickets. Because it is so chancy, it gives them a chance.

It is no accident, I feel, that cricket and rugby, which are much more middle class games both in terms of who plays them and who supports them, are games that seem to depend less on chance and more on sustained skill, rugby especially. Luck counts for something in these games too, and sometimes for a lot, but not as much as, it seems to me, it counts in football.

Football on the continent of Europe is (a) more middle class in who plays and supports it, and (b) more based on skill and less based on luck. We sometimes have Italian football on British TV, and it is striking how much more of the time the ball spends being controlled by one side or the other. In England, the struggle between the sides for control of the ball is relentless, and periods of uncontested possession are rare and short-lived. I don't know why this is. Maybe it's something to do with climate.

I confess it, there were times when my attention wandered during the game this afternoon. Heathrow Airport, I couldn't help noticing, is a busy place, as is very clear from Stamford Bridge because it is just under one of the main Heathrow flight paths. A true believer wouldn't have bothered with something like that, but I am not a true believer, not a worshipper at the Universal Church of Football.

Partly it is my eyesight. I'm short-sighted, and my glasses need updating. I can just see so much more of sport when it's on my television. Plus, sport on television blends so much more comfortably with the rest of life, and it can be switched off if it gets dull or if your team is losing too badly. Plus, sport on TV is cheaper. Plus, in order to watch this Chelsea game I had to turn my back on a televised cricket match between England and South Africa, and at a most delicate stage. Thank goodness for videotape. Plus, I didn't really care who won.

But it was a great thing to have seen, a great thing to have done. I have attended a Premier League football game before, but this was, now I come to think of it, the first time in my life that I had witnessed a serious English Football Championship contender team in action, at its home ground, and if you haven't seen that then there's a whole slice of England that you've never tasted.

My warmest thanks (on a very warm day) to David. He certainly got the result he wanted.

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The most absurd intellectual property rights claim ever?

With their earthy tones and lizard motifs, Prince Harry's paintings won admiration at home and last week earned him a grade B at A-level. But his work has stirred anger in Western Australia, where he is accused of stealing Aboriginal themes.

The moral pygmies claiming 'ownership' of the images drawn by artists who died hundreds of years ago must be the world's biggest losers. Inacapable of artistic expression themselves, they demand the unearned greatness of their remote ancestors.

How sad that genuine aboriginal achievements are drowned out by the moochers!

The first foreign cricket team to visit England (in 1868) was comprised entirely of aboriginal players. Subsequently, Australian cricket authorities tried to forget about this as more than a century passed without a non-white player. Are they excluded from clubs, does the welfare system turn an entire race into a dependent underclass?

I don't suppose that the professional racial-awareness poverty pimps are demanding that aborigines stop getting welfare and solve their problems by economic means.

For the record, one of my French ancestors wore the Crusaders' red cross on white background in Palestine. Does this mean I should sue England soccer supporters for 'violating' my heritage, after all their king only went on the Third Crusade?

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Blogger Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings looks into the issue of American football teams whose names have sparked controversy, such as teams calling themselves the Redskins, and so on. Now I don't want to enter the swamps of that particular controversy, which Jim negotiates with customary dexterity. No what struck me is this - why don't European sports teams have such names at all?

For example, consider the Premiership football (soccer to you barbarians in the colonies) league. The teams are called Manchester United, Liverpool FC, Tottenham Hotspur, etc. Not many references to ethnic groups there (though of course football does have its ethnic issues, as any Glasgow Rangers or Celtic fan would point out). The nomaclature of football is pretty tame, even while the makeup of the teams and the fans is not.

Look elsewhere. English cricket teams are named after counties of England. All very staid. Of course when you go outside the field of professional sports, it can get a bit more interesting. I occasionally play cricket for a side called The Pretenders. (My favourite cricket team was called The Corridor of Uncertainty!). But at the professional level at least, British teams sound about as exciting as a German movie without the subtitles.

Why are our teams sporting such dull names compared to our American cousins? I need enlightenment on this subject.

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Today I received the following email:

Brian,

Brian has started a webring of Brians with blogs. If you would like to join us, go and sign up here.

Brian

What is a webring? If I signed up to it, would the rest of my life be ruined? The Brian who sent me this email seems to be gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that, consenting adults, some of my best friends..., I'm personally in favour of gay marriage, blah blah blah. But if I sign up, will I be bombarded with gay porn for the rest of my days?

In general, I feel that it is good that we Brians are getting together, and if a webring is what I think it may be, we can perhaps sit on one, in a circle, perhaps somewhere in the countryside, and discuss the Brian Issue. That is, we can discuss why cuckolded husbands, send-up substitutes for Jesus Christ, etc. etc., in the movies, all seem to be called Brian. Brian is not a cool name, is my point. Maybe we Brians can get together and change that. (The danger, of course, is that by getting together in such ways as these, we might merely confirm all the existing anti-Brian stereotypes, and cause Brianphobia to become even more deeply entrenched.)

Meanwhile, how many indisputably cool Brians can be assembled? I offer two outstanding contemporary sportsman: the West Indian cricket captain and ace batsman Brian Lara, and the Irish rugby captain and ace centre threequarter Brian O'Driscoll.

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Dale Amon on these pages rightly notes the anniversary of the Moon landings of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Well, it seems that another Armstrong is pushing back the boundaries of the possible on a slightly lower-altitude setting, in the current Tour de France.

Yes, I know, and before any churlish types feel the urge to carp, cycling is not exactly the most visually exciting sport around. But anyone who has actually taken part in competitive cycling, or seen, as I have, such folk shoot past on a French mountain pass, can only gasp in astonishment at what Lance Armstrong has achieved.

And being nice to the French, there can be few doubts that the Tour is one of the most physically demanding sports events known to Man.

Mind you, the next time I go to France, I am taking the autoroute.

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Formula One motor racing has suffered from becoming increasingly dull as a spectacle in recent years. There seems to be less overtaking. The cars often look silly with their gaudy advertising and don't have the aesthetic grace of old. Partly, I think, this perception of dullness is down to the increasingly safe nature of the sport. It is a terrible thing for folk to admit, but it is now much more difficult for a motor racer to get killed than during the heyday of Fangio and Jim Clark (arguably the two greatest drivers ever). I have actually driven around the old Nurburgring circuit in the Rhineland area of Germany - the track that nearly killed Nikki Lauda back in the mid-1970s. I was driving in a regular saloon car with my Dad and got out, shaking and trembling after negotiating the twists and turns of the track. How a driver could have thrown one of those massive old Auto-Unions or Mercedes around such a track and emerge unscathed is a miracle. No wonder the Germans rebuilt this fearsome track into something much safer

So maybe the loon who chose to walk on to the circuit at Britain's Silverstone track on Sunday was trying to inject an element of raw danger back into the sport. It was very lucky - and also a tribute to the bravery of the one of the track marshalls, that no-one got killed.

What was this twit thinking? No doubt the usual wailers from the nanny state brigade will start demanding all kinds of fresh controls and restrictions. And I have no doubt that our flat-earth chums from the anti-globalista movement will have motor racing in their cross-hairs eventually. All those gas-guzzling fast cars with their C0₂ emissions, ugh!

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This article by Mick Cleary contains what is for me the best sporting quote so far of the new century.

To get it you have to get the setting. Last Saturday England played and very narrowly defeated the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team, in Wellington, New Zealand. Either side could have won it, but England did, and it's only the second time that England have beaten New Zealand in New Zealand, the last time being in 1973.

The episode of the game that is already starting to be a rugby legend was the ten minutes early in the second half when two key England players, Dallaglio and Back, were off the field for ten minutes for infringements. New Zealand were encamped on the England line, and a New Zealand try looked like a pushover, literally, followed in all likelihood by another. Game over, in other words.

But for the next ten minutes the six remaining England forwards stood firm against the eight New Zealand forwards, and not only prevented a New Zealand try but contrived to get England up the other end and enable England goal-kicking wonder boy Jonny Wilkinson to kick yet another penalty goal. I can remember when eight New Zealand forwards would prevailed against twelve Englishmen. As I say, the stuff of legend.

But now here comes the money quote. England's mighty captain, second row forward Martin Johnson, was asked the usual bollocks questions afterwards about it all, and one of the questions happened to be about "what was going through your head" during those ten minutes. Ninety nine times out of a hundred a sportsmen in such circumstances would have replied with more bollocks about how we had to hold out and stand up and be counted and step up to the plate and blah blah blah.

Loosehead Graham Rowntree, who was later to resist calls to come off after badly bruising his arm, making scrummaging both difficult and painful, held his side up by hook, crook and balls-out defiance. "It was all hands on deck," said Rowntree. "The All Blacks were telling us that they were going to have us."

"All hands on deck." Now I'm not complaining. Rowntree is a rugby player, not a poet. That he responds with a cliché from England's dead maritime past when talking about one of the highspots of his life is no dishonour. I mean, if you'd just finished playing a game of international rugby, would you always have the right words ready?

Anyway, New Zealand didn't "have us". Mick Cleary's report continues.

They didn't. Captain Martin Johnson was asked what was going through his head as they packed down.

And here it comes. Enjoy.

"My spine," came the deadpan reply.

They press Johnson, most of them not having heard what they just heard. Maybe no flowery bollocks now, afterwards, but surely there was something a bit more inspiring than that said at the time?

Surely there were some stirring words delivered by the captain?

"Do you expect me to have some Churchill-type speech in my pocket for such moments," Johnson said with a wry smile. "I told them to bend over and push."

It's funny how the attempt to say something flowery results only in blandness and tedium – "all hands on deck". But, the man who in the very next breath proclaims himself as the verbal opposite of Winston Churchill – "bend over and push" – nevertheless finds the perfect phrase, at one of the highspots of his life, which will for ever afterwards decorate all descriptions of those amazing ten minutes of six-against-eight rugby. What was going through your head? "My spine." Beautiful. A bollocks question (and what a piece of pure luck that it was "head" rather than "mind" – "mind" would have spoilt it) is turned, by the simple procedure of taking it literally, into the feed for the perfect reply. From now on, whenever a British journo asks a panting sportsman what was going through his head/mind when blah blah blah, there will be giggles all round.

I still don't think it makes much sense to talk of England being the top rugby team in the world. That's for the World Cup to settle. Besides which Australia could beat England next Saturday. But one of the rules for enjoying sport is that when things go well for you and for your team, you must enjoy it. I can't say that I really enjoyed the actual game. All I did was listen to the last quarter of an hour on the radio, and take their word for it that it was a great performance, and all the greater for not actually having been all that good, if you get my meaning. But that "my spine" bit, which I've only just read, I really really enjoyed.

All hail Martin Johnson, and well spotted Cleary. Because people saying these things is not enough. They have to be noticed and nailed to the wall of posterity by a man with a column.

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Just a titbit. I'm listening to the England/Zimbabwe cricket commentary on BBC radio 4, and for some reason one of them, Jonathan Agnew, who used to bowl quick for some county or other (and for England occasionally if I remember it right), referred in passing to the fact that his newspaper reading this morning had included the New York Times. There'd been some reference to Agnew in the newspapers, it seems, but in the papers he'd been reading he hadn't come across it – something like that. They were just making conversation between overs. Anyway, Agnew's fellow commentator Mike Selvey, who used to bowl quick for Middlesex (and England occasionally if I remember right), then said:

The New York Times? I wouldn't believe a word of it. Their editor's just been fired.

I have been listening to cricket commentaries on the radio for the last half century. Never, never have I ever heard the New York Times get any mention on these commentaries before.

That brand is definitely suffering.

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My excuse for writing about cricket is that writing about cricket means writing about Zimbabwe, which is one of the wretched-of-the-earth countries just now, lest we forget. But the truth is that I just love cricket, and that I have loved it ever since the days of Hutton, Compton, May, Cowdrey, Laker, Statham, Truman, Dexter ... and those are just (some of) the English names.

So, what is the big story in cricket just now? Read Jennings, and the news is just that people have been, you know, playing cricket. Look at the cricket web sites and it's just cricket as usual. Who's in and who's out. Who's firing on all cylinders, and who has a cylinder injury and will be missing the next few games. Earlier in the week, the British cricket pages were full of how well the new England quick bowlers had done, and how badly the Zimbabweans had batted against them on that horribly one-sided Saturday when nineteen wickets fell and by the end Zimbabwe had lost by an innings in three days. (Girls and Americans: "by an innings" is very bad, and three days is not long at all.)

Yet above and beyond all these regular comings and goings, I believe that cricket posterity will have no hesitation in deciding that the current big cricket story happened just over a week ago, just before the England-Zimbabwe series got started, in the form of the newly announced ICC Test Championship table.

The new ICC Test Championship takes into account the result of every individual Test Match with a bonus awarded for winning a series. It also recognises the strength of the opposition in calculating the points awarded.

. . .

The ICC Test Championship reflects performances in all Tests completed since a given date (currently 1st August 1999), in contrast to the previous system which included some series played in 1996/97 yet excluded some more recent series. More recent matches have a stronger weighting and the rankings are refreshed every August.

A rating of 100 reflects average performance, so a team winning and losing a similar number of matches and playing a broad mix of opponents will have a rating close to 100.

For the up-to-date ICC Test Championship table plus full scenarios for forthcoming series and details of the formula for calculating ratings visit the official ICC website.

So why is this new "Championship" such a big deal? Isn't it just another ranking system of the sort they have long had for individual cricketers, and for the individual players of other sports like tennis, golf, snooker, and many more? So, in other words, what?

The answer lies in the peculiar nature of Test Match cricket. All the other big sports, including One Day Cricket, have actual world championships events. Ranking systems like this Test Cricket one are thus, for these sports, of secondary importance.

For example, the current England rugby team, if you believe the ranking system for international rugby, are now the best international rugby team in the world. But this will count for nothing if England don't win the forthcoming rugby World Cup. (In my opinion any of England, Australia, New Zealand or France could win.)

But Test Match cricket is such an unwieldy game that a Test Match "world cup" would either last for ever, or else change the nature of Test Match Cricket so profoundly as to make the event meaningless. Test Matches, by their nature, come in clutches of five day games, called "series", which resemble months-long military campaigns, not one-off decisive battles. Change that, and it isn't Test Cricket any more; it's some new hybrid.

Which means that this new Test Cricket ranking system is it. It's the World Championship of Test Cricket. The thing itself. Show me another international sports ranking system that is as important within its own sport as this one immediately is within Test Cricket. Now that they've finally got this thing working, the only surprise is that they didn't do it ten or twenty years sooner.

The effect of the announcement of this ranking system is comparable, then, to something like the establishment of the National Football League, or, for cricket, something like the invention of England's cricket County Championship. Before May 2003, random series of Test Matches would occur in this or that country. Some of them, like England v. Australia (always) or any team against Australia now (because by any ranking system you can think of Australia are now the obvious best side), are of great significance to the players and punters. Others count for far less. From May 2003 onwards, all that changes, and every game counts.

Games during series that had still to be decided used to count for far, far more than those awful, pointless games that occurred at the end of series that one team has already won. But now, every Test Match means something, just as every Premiership League football game means Premier League points, no matter what teams are playing. For when quoting that ICC Press Release above, I left out the killer paragraph, which is this:

The system means that there are no longer any `dead rubber' Test Matches and that in any series both teams have the opportunity to improve or worsen their rating.

Thus, for example, if the horribly weakened Zimbabwe side loses the second match in their three match series in England just as they lost their first game, as is altogether likely, the third and final game, even though it won't affect the matter of who wins the series, will still count for something. That brilliant West Indies win against Australia in the final game of their recent series against them, the three previous games of which they had lost, didn't only cheer up the Windies and give them an excuse for a party; it also now improves their international Championship ranking.

In other words, Test Match Cricket, which is the heart and soul of the game, just got much better.

More comments and links at übersportingpundit.

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Just watching the cricket between Zimbabwe and England today, I have a couple of further comments to add to what Brian was saying on Thursday.

The background to all this is that Henry Olonga in the recent World Cup wore a black arm band to mourn the death of democracy in Zimbabwe. (Olonga incidentally was in 1995 the first non-white player to play top level cricket for Zimababwe, although there have been many others since) Although he was a member of the Zimbabwe squad for the rest of the World Cup, he was not selected in any further matches in the tournament. Off the record, the team management admitted that they would have liked him to have played, but they were under pressure from the Mugabe government not to select him. The final stages of the tournament were played in South Africa, and it was revealed at the end of the tournament several members of the Zimababwean security forces had travelled to Zimbabwe to "escort" Olonga back to Zimbabwe after the last game so that he could be charged with treason. The South African government should have screamed in outrage at this violation of its sovereignty but didn't. Apparently good relations with the Mugabe regime are still important there.

Unsurprisingly, Olonga went into hiding and left South Africa, eventually turning up in England. Many of us thought that this was so outrageous that cricketing ties with Zimbabwe should be ended, at least for now. Over the past ten years, Zimbabwe had gone to some effort to build up a good cricket team, but by this point things had reached something of a sad, depressing joke. (Of course, the situation with the game of cricket was unimportant compared to the indignities being suffered by the people of Zimbabwe in general, but it was sadly symptomatic of it).

However, the Zimbabwe team's present tour of England went on as scheduled. The England Cricket Board (which isn't in a great financial state) needed the money. The Australian board, which is in a perfectly good financial state, also confirmed a tour for October, so the English board are not alone. The first game between Zimbabwe and England (which goes for five days) is presently being played.

As Brian said, there have been some protests against the game. Brian reported that Channel 4, the advertising funded but technically state owned television network that covers English cricket, used the rain delays in the match to provide some discussion of Mr Mugabe's vile regime, and to interview Henry Olonga.

However, turning on the match this morning, I discovered it was even better than this. Henry Olonga is actually working for Channel 4 as a commentator. I don't know if this is just for this match, or he will be doing it for the whole summer. Like Brian, I was very impressed by him. Olonga is very articulate and knowledgeable, and was doing an excellent job. Many television channels would just cover the sport and pretend that any political controversy was not happening. However, Channel 4, while still providing good cricketing coverage, has not done this at all. Not only have they given the state of Zimbabwe some attention, but they have actually given Henry Olonga some work. This is sporting coverage and not news coverage, so they haven't been overt about it, but in a nicely understated way that doesn't take anything away from the sporting coverage, they have made a statement. This is deeply classy.

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We in England have been neglecting Zimbabwe. There have been very few postings on the subject here lately, just this from me since the Iraq war, unless I missed something in my backtracking.

That is now changing. Today is day one of the test match cricket series between England and Zimbabwe. The first test is a Lords, the St Peter's Rome of cricket, and frankly the cricket has been fairly dreary. In a rain interrupted first session England, in the persons of Trescothick and Vaughan, managed 28 without loss. While I wrote what follows, England got to about 100 for the loss of Vaughan. (I could explain, but if you don't know what that means, you almost certainly don't care.)

But of course the real story is off the pitch, and frankly this aspect of the situation is proving a whole lot more satisfactory and less embarrassing than I for one had dared to hope.

Take the TV coverage so far, on Channel 4 TV. There has been some play, so that has focussed some attention on the situation. But the rain interruptions mean that Channel 4 have been wheeling out all their if-it-rains plans, and one of them concerns the matter of the, er, regime in Zimbabwe, and any demonstrations against and reactions to that regime.

There have already been demonstrations, both inside (one gutsy demonstrator made her point and got herself shepherded out) and outside the ground. And more to the point, much more to the point, Channel 4 have pointed their cameras at some of this.

If you know anything about TV sports coverage, you'll know that it can be very misleading when a real world news item erupts in its midst. The tiresome habit of certain English exhibitionists invading sports events in the nude was inflamed by the promise of TV coverage, and is now being suppressed by TV coverage of these idiots also being suppressed. When British soccer fans behave really, really badly, they don't always make it to the TV shows either. What actually happens between rival fans at Celtic v Rangers soccer matches in Glasgow, for example, is nobody's business, and certainly never gets to be the business of TV viewers in anything like its full lack of glory. All of which means that the Channel 4 recognition of the "regime problem" is very significant. An enthusiastic pro-Mugabe-ite watching the TV coverage here today would not be a happy bunny.

Pitch invader, demos outside the ground, mainstream news coverage of demos outside the ground, above all the prospect of this relentless drizzle of media focus going on and on throughout the tour, destroying all attempts to suggest that things out there are in any way normal – it's looking a lot worse than such a person would have been hoping for.

It may even be that the tour going ahead, but surrounded by the ever louder claim that it shouldn't have, is the worst possible media outcome for the "regime". I surely hope so.

Above all, there is Henry Olonga.

Olonga it was who, along with Andy Flower, wore a black armband in protest at the policies of his country's government in the first Zimbabwe game of the cricket World Cup, recently concluded in South Africa. It cost both of them their international cricket careers, certainly for the time being.

Olonga has just himself been interviewed on Channel 4, by TV pinup boy and cricket commentator Mark Nicholas, and he came across both as a formidably articulate critic and as a shrewd media operator. He thinks the tour shouldn't be happening at all, but now that it is, he is going to make as much media fuss around it as he can.

It turns out that Olonga is very British educated, having been born middle class in Zambia, brought up middle class in Kenya, and only arriving in Zimbabwe in the mid nineties. He is going to make an impact in England, I'm sure of it, if only because he's a character, his hair being African street but his voice being English posh.

Olonga is also a musician, which will add to whatever media fusshe manages to stir up. I really, really don't want this to be embarrassing. Embarrassing or not, if we want to piss off Robert Mugabe, we can all buy Henry Olonga's CDs. We don't have to listen to them, any more than we had to read The Satanic Verses.

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A wondrous row has erupted between two fat, middle-aged, uncouth, bearded geazers, one of them the British Minister of Education, and the other the Chairman of Chelsea Football Club. Mr Clarke is plugging a scheme to get sports clubs to help out with teaching the 3Rs to recalcitrant youth, and Mr Bates' Chelsea are the only football club not to be cooperating. Mr Clarke slagged off Bates, and now Bates has been slagging off Clarke, pointing out that the British state education system is appalling and getting worse and he, Mr Clarke, should see to it instead of attacking defenceless football clubs.

I have dealt with some of the boring educational angles of this story in another place, but the interesting aspect is that Mr Clarke has now said that he wants West Ham to beat Chelsea in their forthcoming and crucial Premiership clash tomorrow. Or, to put it another way, he wants Liverpool and Newcastle (rather than Chelsea) to qualify for the European Champion's League next year, and even more controversially, Mr Clarke supports West Ham in their desperate effort to avoid relegation, and accordingly he must favour the idea of one of the clubs above West Ham, such as Bolton, Leeds, or Fulham, getting relegated from the Premier League instead. Bolton, did you get that? I can't remember a Cabinet Minister wading into sport like this. Supporting your own team in a new-laddish, post-modern sort of way is one thing, but to mix this kind of thing with serious politics is new, surely, and frankly rather unsavoury.

Since Ken Bates is making trouble for a politician, we here presumably all now support Chelsea against the abominable West Hamsters and the even more abominable West Ham support Clarke. And that's quite aside from the Samizdata HQ being in Chelsea, and David Carr already being a Chelsea season ticket holder. I'm a Spurs man myself, that is to say, for the benefit of Americans, a supporter of Tottenham Hotspur. But Spurs are never involved either in trying to get into Europe or in being relegated because they come eleventh in the Premiership every year. Very dull. So by now I don't care what they do tomorrow and am happy to swing into line behind Chelsea also. I'll be keeping a close eye on the Chelsea game tomorrow and keep everyone posted. Go you … Chels?

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The recent war in Iraq has of course thrown up many examples of actors and actresses, many of them from Hollywood, who have taken a stand against war. What is interesting is that there appears, according to David Skinner in the Weekly Standard to be a divide in public life between the acting and sports communities, if one can use such a collectivist catch-all term like "community" (yes, I am aware there are nuances here). For example, while "documentary" producer and all-round blowhard leftist (I refuse to be polite) Michael Moore denounces Bush and the war, golfing god Tiger Woods (one of my heroes) takes a diametrically opposite stance, saluting the bravery of American soldiers on his personal website.

What is going on here? For example, I don't really know what British sportsmen and women like Manchester United's David Beckham or English cricket captain Nasser Hussein think about such things, although Hussein's recent decision not to play against Zimbabwe during the World Cup attests to a moral fibre not usually seen among the thespian community. And I admired the fact that Beckham, apparently, asked for the Stars and Stripes to be laid in the mddle of Old Trafford, Manchester United's home ground, at the start of a match just after 9/11. Skinner reckons that sportsfolk, unlike actors and actresses, have to deal in reality of a sort that makes them better suited to taking a view on issues like war.

I particularly liked this paragraph:

As competitors who directly face opponents, athletes may have less trouble accepting the probability of enmity between nations. They become famous over the strenuous opposition of other people. Their professional lives are in fact defined by antagonism and opposition. They have to individually dominate other players, and help their teams dominate other teams.

While with actors, he says:

when show-business types triumph, victory comes on a wave of public admiration that can make it seem like they were just elected the public's favorite human being. If competition is the watchword of sports, adoration and acclaim are the watchwords of show business. This kind of career makes for a weak political education as one grapples to understand why a president would take actions certain to make him unpopular in important parts of Europe and elsewhere.

I think he is definitely on to something. Maybe libertarians should forget about ever trying to network in the artistic community and get on the golf course instead.

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Surely Britain's Paula Radcliffe, who broke her own record by running the London Marathon in just two hours, 15 minutes and 25 seconds must rank as one of the greatest sportsfolk ever.

I watched quite a few of the runners grinding their agonising way along parts of the marathon course on a sun-dappled Sunday afternoon. It was hard not to be swept up in a general feel-good atmosphere. One of my favourite moments was seeing a bunch of guys running while carrying a small rubber boat from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), an entirely voluntary charity which is an excellent example of how free men and women can, without the guiding hand of the State, provide such useful services, often at great danger to themselves. Way to go lads!

Of course, in my view anyone who runs in a marathon on a warm afternoon is clearly in need of having their heads examined. What did Man invent Ferraris and Porsches for, for chrissakes?

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Just to say, in my capacity as the self-appointed Senior Samizdata Sports Commentator, that the best Oxford University versus Cambridge University boat race ever has just finished. When it did finish, they were not sure who had won, so close was it. Unbelievable.

Personally I don’t care anything about the Boat Race, or I didn't until about one minute ago. It just happened to be on the telly while I was composing this for my Culture Blog, which has now gone daily.

Usually it is clear who is going to win the Boat Race in the first twenty seconds, and from then on it's a procession. In this one the lead changed about four times, including just before or just after the finish because Cambridge were closing so fast.

It was the kind of sporting event where, as the commentators said just afterwards, all eighteen will be brothers for life. But get this: four of them already were brothers, the Smiths and the Livingstones, each pair in opposite boats.

Official verdict: Oxford by ONE FOOT. Closest race ever, apparently, because the "dead heat" they had in 1572 or whenever it was wasn't really. It was just that the umpire that day was drunk.

I overheard another interesting titbit in among the preparatory waffling. Apparently 90% of these oarsmen go into "banking", by which I think they meant "merchant" banking. I don't know what this proves. It could be that rowing is a fine preparation for financial titans. Or it could be that the financial services industry contains a lot of people with more ex-brawn than current brain. A bit of both, I should guess. They don't get paid anything to be in this race, but it seems that they clean up afterwards. Investment in networking. Speculate to accumulate. Apparently they were racing for the "Aberdeen Asset Management Trophy". It figures.

Some things the BBC does do well. They had this report up within minutes.

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The result from tonight's European Soccer Championship qualifying match between England and Turkey:

England 2 Turkey 0

On the battlefield, on the football field: Rosbeefs rule!

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That's not just a metaphor, let me tell you. Many is the England rugby team to have been ground into the mud of Ireland. After a several happy games scampering about in the sunshine of southern England, or Wales, or even in Paris, England then go to Dublin, try to carry on throwing the ball about, drop a few scoring passes, start to worry, drop some more passes, encourage the crowd, who yell at the Irish team, who then score an interception try, or a breakaway, or some such oddity, and suddenly it's only five more minutes left and Ireland are leading by a handful of points and that's how it stays.

But not today. The sun is shining, and England are leading by 30-6, three tries to nil. Ireland may get one try, or even two. They won't get four. The England defence looks impenetrable. Grand Slam England. Ireland have been good for longish periods, but England have been better.

I've been taping it, and pacing about chez moi doing displacement activities. How did all that washing up get done?

Yep. There she blows. Greenwood scores an interception try. Ireland 6 England 35. Greenwood actually ran away from the posts, to make the conversion kick for Jonny Wilkinson harder and Wilkinson just missed it. Greenwood is like that. He often thinks about how to celebrate before actually scoring, and I remember England's Napoleonic little scrum-half Matt Dawson giving the giant Greenwood a severe talking-to for being a bit exuberant when celebrating another try before he'd completed the formality of actually scoring it.

And in the middle of all this, my brother pops by with some books he thought I might like to have, including – wonder of wonders – a copy of Terence Kealey's The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, which I have been seeking vainly for months, ever since I heard Kealey speak at a conference. I don't remember telling Pete I wanted this. It's a beautiful day in London town.

England are pressing and look like scoring again. Yes! Try by Dan Luger. Five tries to nothing. Unbelievable. "Nobody said it would be a stroll like this, but England have strolled." 40-6. Five-nil. And Wilkinson won't miss this conversion. No he doesn't. Final whistle. Ireland 6 England 42. Now I can watch the tape of it, secure in the knowledge of a happy ending, like a Meg Ryan movie. Moral: don't count your chickens before they hatch, and they'll hatch. Then count them.

Well, if Jennings can wallow in the Aussies winning the cricket, I can wallow in this.

I wonder if Saddam Hussein is a rugby fan.

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The trouble with the TV coverage of the war isn't just that the various TV stations have their various biases. It's that most of the time nothing is happening. Long periods of boredom, and short bursts of total panic. Mostly nothing happens, so they recycle old stuff. But you still tune in to the nothing just in case something happens, and for the same reason they don't like to switch to anything else either.

How much more convenient is the televising of sport! You know when it will happen, and the excitement is spread reasonably evenly over a set period. Only one thing can happen at a time. Imagine if a rugby match, for example, took place over such a large area that it needed half a dozen different commentators simply to give you a rough idea of what is happening. And imagine if the players spent half their time holding press conferences to tell lies about who's doing best.

Well, rugby fans can see where I'm going. I'm going to Lansdowne Road, Dublin, where Ireland will play England in a Grand Slam shoot-out in the final game of the Six Nations rugby tournament, which has been televised in its entirety by the BBC, and very well they've done it. Ireland and England have both won the first four of their five matches, so it's winner take all.

France is also a fine side, but they were narrowly beaten both by England and Ireland. Wales, Scotland and Italy are scrapping it out for the bottom three spots. The best things about Scotland and Wales this season are their national anthems, which are truly terrific, even if they aren't proper UN-type nation states. Too bad those come at the beginning. Italy's anthem is dreadful, but they've actually played rather better this year. When they played England, they were 33-0 down after twenty minutes to a rampant England. They looked like they were going to lose by about 100-0, but in the end they lost by a mere 40-5, which must have felt almost like a win. A sporting Dunkirk, anyway.

Upsets can still happen. The Ireland v. England Grand Slam decider script was nearly spoilt by the hitherto abysmal Wales last Saturday, when they came as close as that (small amount signalled with thumb and first finger) to beating the mighty Ireland. I was away last weekend, so I missed that game, but I have a tape (thanks taping person – you know who you are) of the England Scotland game, which featured a terrific try by the small but perfectly formed Jason Robinson.

England ought to win. But then, they ought to have won a Grand Slam at least twice in the last five years, but this team has yet to win even one. They have tended (a) to look like the best team in the tournament by far, but then just when we're all excited (b) to play badly in and lose one game per season, for as long as anyone can remember. On the other hand, most of these losses have coincided with the absence of the fearsome-faced (it's the eyebrows) regular England captain Martin Johnson, and Johnson is playing this time. Indeed, there are no injuries to key England players. Number one scrum half Dawson, England's other mighty midget, hasn't been available for all the England games this year, but he's now fit as a flee. As in a certain other conflict, England seem to have too many big guns available to lose. On the other hand, Ireland are also a hell of a good side, with, in captain Brian O'Driscoll, one of the world's greatest players. What price England v. Ireland in the World Cup Final later this year? Well no. Beating Australia and New Zealand, very narrowly indeed, at Twickenham is one thing; beating them in their own back yard is something else again. First things first. First England have to beat Ireland, so that England go to the World Cup confident, and Ireland don't go there overconfident.

There is interest in this fixture out there in the Gulf, and from the point of view of morale boosting out there, the best outcome on balance – for don't forget that the Irish rugby team represents both Northern Ireland and the Republic – would be an England win.

But I would say that wouldn't I? Tomorrow, it's two appetisers in the form of France v. Wales and then Scotland v. Italy. Then on Sunday, the feast.

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I wanted to write something about this tale earlier, but have been rushed off my feet with work. Anyway, I think it notable that in an age marked by preening Hollywood celebs and British thespian luvvies spouting peacenik garbage about Iraq, it is heartening that in another aspect of life - sport - there are real examples of folk willing to take a stand where it matters.

Nasser Hussein, captain of the English cricket Test side, will not go down in history perhaps as a victorious cricket captain like Len Hutton or even David Gower. He will, however, go down as a man who stood on an issue of principle over Robert Mugabe's vile regime in Zimbabe. Defeated, mabye, but not with dishonour.

Addendum: for our American friends who haven't a clue about cricket, my apologies.

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The naval might of Switzerland has prevailed. A country with all the maritime traditions of Outer Mongolia, Iowa and Chad has prevailed where 152 years of British endeavour have failed. The America's Cup, a trophy given by Queen Victoria to promote yachting in the English Channel, and which has never been won by a British team has now changed hands from the USA (1851-1983 [No, that isn't a typo!], and 1988-1995), Australia (1983-1988), and New Zealand (1995-2003). And now Switzerland.

The main priviledge for the winner, apart from collecting a silver trophy named after its first winner, the schooner America is to get the right to host the next challenge, which is now expected to be in 2007. As this has to be on seawater, there is a little problem. Switzerland is about 450 miles from the nearest coastline. So the defence will probably take place in the Mediterranean or on the Altantic coastline of France.

It's all very jolly for Ernesto Bertarelli the Swiss owner of the Alinghi team, for Russell Coutts the New Zealander skipper hired to beat his former team mates. So why no British success. Until the 1970s, no one else but the British even challenged the New York Yacht Club. The explanation I offer explains why Italian and now Swiss challengers have emerged, despite no obvious historical tradition for this sort of contest.

In the first place, British ship design has been poor since the day that King Henry VIII watched his newly launched flagship the Mary Rose, capsize in Solent. Admiral Nelson is well known to have preferred a captured French frigate to the Admiralty's own designs. At the battle of Jutland in 1916, inferior ship design was responsible for the destruction from one hit each of two British battle cruisers and only the desperate (and dying) actions of a crew member saved the flagship from suffering the same fate moments later. At the same battle the only German loss was a cruiser which had taken over one hundred hits and was scuttled. During the pursuit of the Bismark in 1942, the largest British ship ever built (later overtaken by the Vanguard) HMS Hood took one hit from the German battleship. Three out of 1,300 crew survived as the Hood simply blew up. During the Falkands war (1982) it was discovered that the British frigate hulls were so thin that one Exocet missile would melt a whole section of it, and the anti-aircraft missiles didn't work.

Whenever a foreign government (Japan, Tsarist Russia etc.) has decided to build a navy, it has nearly always considered buying British. Yet having taken a look at what British shipyards had to offer, they almost invariably bought German, French or (before steam) Dutch. If the State Department will let them, they'll buy American.

Second, status. If one country could combine public money and individual talent to produce a succesful America's Cup challenge, it is France. Many of the yachting and long-distance windsufing records are held by French, especially Breton sailors. This is nothing new. Jean Cabot who landed in Newfoundland to secure the first English presence in the New World was French. Many of the place names hundreds of miles upstream in the US have curious names: Pierre, Des Moines, Boise to name but state capitals. The supreme British yachtswoman Ellen Macarthur is far better known in France than in the UK, indeed she seems to sail in French ships most of the time. When Macarthur completed a solo round the world trip a couple of years ago, the French president travelled 500 miles to welcome her ashore. I think the local British consul might have been on duty.

Third, taxes. Yachting is a rich man's toy. To compete in an America's Cup challenge, you need a cool $50 million to even think about taking part. You need a crew that's incredibly strong and intelligent, neither feature being the sort of thing a comprehensive education is designed to produce. You also need to be able to hire the best at top rates, again more money and dynamic management. The result is that only big corporations, very big family businesses and governments have the money for this sort of enterprise.

Britain has plenty of corporations and government, but not a lot of family businesses in the billionaire bracket. The main blame for this is taxation. 'Inheritance Tax' or 'Death Tax' as I prefer to call it, whacks 40 per cent of capital from one generation to the next. One of Britain's cutest institutions the National Trust was actually created to manage the property confiscated through taxation from Britain's wealthy families, hence all the stately homes one can visit. Luxembourg has no Death Tax, I imagine that Switzerland's can't be very high and the Italian situation can't be too harsh (one way or another).

Taxation also forces savings into distorted investment patterns, what the Austrian economists call "malinvestment". In Britain we have wonderful private and corporate pension funds able to provide a far higher proportion of our old age needs than any other European country. Of course this means that there are virtually no family businesses of large scale in the UK, unlike France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland. everything is owned by the funds and administered by fund managers.

It is obvious that board-room politics and being the skipper of a racing yacht don't mix, the best model on a ship is top-down autocracy. Politicians acting via bureaucrats also don't make very good skippers either, except perhaps in wartime. But a family business that can throw a hundred million away from time to time has exactly the right focus to make a success of a racing team. Witness the Grand Prix Formula One racing dominated by the late Gianni Agnelli's Ferrari team. Yachting is the same. So too was aeronautics before the 1950s.

So for land-lubbers like myself - and most Swiss people - the America's Cup has a curious function. It is a barometer of enterprise around the world. One of these years I expect to see a private challenge from Russia or China, now what an indicator of social change that would be.

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An article in yesterday's Daily Telegraph Sports section speculates as to why the bid for the Olympic Games in London for 2012 might fail. Apparently the expected losses for hosting the games will be a massive £2,600 millions.

However, as no one has actually published what the toal budget would be, I can only assume that normal public sector project costs will apply: i.e. the original sum multiplied by ten. It is easy to see why the government is apparently unconvinced by the urgency of commiting to such a scheme.

My critics may argue that this sum of money spent on promoting the Olympic Games will do a lot less harm than if allocated to almost any other public programme. This is true. One shudders at the thought of what dregs passing themselves off as doctors would be employed in state hospitals if this sort of money got awarded the National Health Service.

Oh dear, I just realised, the NHS has been given that extra sum over the next two years. Perhaps we should have persuaded the government to spend vast amounts of money on hopeless attempts to bring the football World Cup to Staines, or the Winter Olympics to Blackpool, or even finance half a dozen Americas Cup challenges.

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It's been a difficult time to be an England sports fan. First there was the shambles in South Africa with the cricketers. England, for all the difference it may make to anything serious, eventually refused to play their game in Harare, and Zimbabwe took all the points. And remember how I reported earlier, in my description of how cricket differs from baseball, that Zimbabwe even did better than England in the protest department. Well, this is a reminder that things like that can get serious.

Zimbabwean fast bowler, Henry Olonga, has been banished from the Takashinga Cricket Club following his public protest of political conditions in the country during a World Cup match.

That tells you a lot about the atmosphere in Zimbabwe just now. Hats off to Henry Olonga. He's only 26 years old, but maybe he figures that cricket in Zimbabwe has no future to speak of anyway.

Meanwhile our footballers (that's British football – not the rebel US variant) were humiliated by Australia, who are not supposed to be any good at that game. The Oz media went crazy, apparently. They do love to stuff the poms there, and stuffing us at cricket has got boring.

But yesterday things picked up. The England rugby team, are doing us proud just now. They proved Antoine wrong last weekend by beating France (see the comments we exchanged for the details) and now they've just won a difficult game against a Wales side smarting from defeat by Italy and with nothing to lose against a heavily fancied England, and playing in their own Millenium Stadium in Cardiff. Wales did well in the first half, but England scored two tries early in the second half (that's like touchdowns) and although England never cut loose, that was enough.

Rugby? Well, that differs from American football in that you don't wear girly space costumes, just rugged, manly shirts and shorts. Although that is beginning to change – the rugby players are starting to wear strange padded black undergarments. The rugby ball is pretty much identical to an American Football ball, but in rugby you aren't allowed to pass the ball forwards the way a US Football quarterback does. There is nothing like the same focus on the rugby "fly half" as there is on the quarterback, but the fly half is still important, and England have a particularly effective one just now, a little guy called Wilkinson. Wilkinson is the England team's specialist kicker of penalties (field goals), which are awarded when infringements occur rather than merely when you are in range. The game is interrupted less and is all over well inside two hours. Blah blah blah. Commenters, if you care, sort all that out for me, would you?

Meanwhile, England's cricketers yesterday roundly defeated Pakistan in the World Cup, and after the Zimbabwe nonsense, that game counted for a lot.

However, the cricket history books won't remember anything England did. For them, the big news will be that Shoaib Akhtar, the "Rawalpindi Express" became the first fast bowler to have been recorded as bowling a ball at over 100 mph.

One of the shrewdest comments on the differences between cricket and baseball which I tried to explain here in my earlier piece a week or two ago, was this, from Sam Ward (and I swear I didn't realise he mentioned my Iraq posting that got all the comments this week until I went there just now, but thanks):

One Key difference that wasn't made clear between cricket and baseball is this:

In baseball, when you do connect with the ball, you are forced to run at least 1 base, which results in being "run out" very often.

Cricket, on the other hand, leaves the decision entirely up to the batsman. If you don't hit it very well, you can simply remain in position and take another "pitch".

You can continue bunting the ball back to bowler (pitcher) as often as you like, and take runs only when you hit it somewhere there are no fielders.

This is the most important difference between the 2 sports in my opinion. The "forced run" in baseball balances things heavily in favour of the pitcher, since the batsman is forced to take a full swing at every pitch.

Cricketers can just bunt or let go as many balls as they like until they get that perfect, hittable ball. The only qualifier is that it can't hit your stumps.

Thus sums up the problem that "traditional" cricket has had in recent years very clearly, and it explains why attendances for these games have declined. Time was when solemn crowds of stoics in cloth caps or blazers would stand in their thousands to watch this kind of thing for hour after hour, but those days are gone. Relics of that age still attend county cricket games in England and snooze in deck chairs, but most of the excitement now is in one day cricket, which is the sort being played in South Africa. In one day cricket, there is a strict limit to how many balls each side may face, and towards the end of such a game "dot balls" (that is to say balls not scored off) are greeted with cheers by the supporters of the side doing the bowling. Just waiting for the right ball to hit won't do any more, which means that cricket is becoming more like baseball.

In general, English cricket crowds, when they can be persuaded to assemble, are a much more rowdy lot. What's happening is that British sport, like British society in general, is reverting to a pre-Victorian and less pious atmosphere, with more drug abuse and corruption and less general back-suited pomposity and solemnity, but also higher crime figures and more blatant political corruption. Cricket was a huge part of the Victorian era, with all-white muscular Christians playing up and playing the game, etc. Now they sport hideous, garishly coloured pyjamas, take drugs, and also bribes from shady bookmakers, and play a less elegant, but more exciting and belligerent game.

Or, you might say, cricket is becoming more American. The final commenter on my earlier piece, an American cricket enthusiast, added this:

We need to look for the kids that fall between the gaps of Baseball, Football, Basketball and be there with Cricket, which most kids find a very satisfying game to play , especially adaptive versions like Kanga Cricket, Kwik Cricket , Hot Shot Cricket. Having done a bunch of school demos of cricket , I know that a resurgence of Cricket in America can happen.
Edward Fox
Kansas Cricket Association
www.HotShotCricket.com
www.KangaBall.com

Both of these comments probably came too late for regular Samizdata readers to notice them. But I was impressed.

I tried to put all this up last night, before the Samizdata drinking session to celebrate us getting past half a million hits, but it was too complicated, so instead I merely became one of the many contributors to the eerie hush, see below. And on a day when Stephen Pollard was kind enough to say of us that "barely a day goes by" without fascinating stuff. Kalashnikov umbrellas aside, such a day passed yesterday. Apologies. But it was a Saturday.

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Last weekend I watched some good tennis from some young British players. True they were hammered by the best male tennis player in the world, one of the fastest servers in the world, and one of the all-time great doubles players. But the Australian tennis team would have fancied their chances against any comers on a surface of their own choosing, in front of a partisan crowd.

An Australian paraded a banner which listed a series of sporting indignities heaped upon the British in the previous year: massacres in the cricket, rugby league etc. But neither football (soccer), nor rugby union were mentioned. Patrick Crozier, writes about the novel indignity of being beaten by the Australian soccer team: nicknamed the "Socceroos", so what they call the England team I shudder to even think.

However, Patrick, like many British people goes from one extreme to the other. Just because the English invented soccer over one hundred and forty years ago, there is supposed to be something shameful about defeat to a newcomer. The same attitude exists in all areas of British endeavour since the mid-19th century. First it was an inferiority complex with Germany and the USA, later with Japan, then Germany and "Europe". In most cases whether it is the navy, the health system, schools, food, beer, state television, industry, Britain is always assumed either to be "the finest in the world" or it ought to be.

If there were anything remotely approximating the amount of effort put into achieving these ideals as there is spent on moaning about failure, perhaps these delusions would at least be productive. Instead we get whingeing succeded by overbearing gloating, then back again. Little wonder that for any foreigner that regularly competes against the English, there is great pleasure in victory.

But this time things have got truly out of hand. The England rugby union team has been beating the supposedly superior New Zealand, South Africa and Australia teams for several years. The latest round of matches was a professional execution of southern hemisphere pride. So instead of bleating about a soccer match, English sports fans would do better to find out what the rugby team is doing right. England deserve to be favourites to win the rugby world cup this year.

Sadly [not!], the English rugby team faces a truly superior force tomorrow at Twickenham: the French national side, who I have no doubt, will rub snotty English noses into the cold Middlesex mud. I shall of course observe this with my usual detachment... and resist wrentching my phone and pestering every English rugby fan I know for at least two minutes.

Then you'll have something to moan about!

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Patrick Crozier writes the editorial that The Times didn't publish:

No right-thinking Englishman can fail to be shocked by the unspeakable events that took place at Upton Park on Wednesday. Wednesday 12th February 2003 will long be remembered as a day of national shame; the day when the flower of English manhood, opened a can of beer, sat down in front of the television and watched aghast as its champions, men they trusted, allowed themselves to be beaten by Australians at football.

There will be those, ignorant of the ways of the world, who will say "Hey, the Aussies beat us at cricket, rugby, tennis and just about anything else so why should we bothered about a game of football?" Oh Lord, have mercy on them for they know not what they do.

Football is far more than just another sport. Football is sport. All others are mere distractions. Literally. The whole purpose of inventing minor sports was to give undesirables something to do and Australians something to win at while we, silently and imperiously, continued to hog the main prize. Now, even that is under threat.

There have been worse times to have been an Englishman. Oh, hang about, there haven't. But we have been humiliated before (remember Norway, remember Calais?) and we recovered then. The task now is to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves down and prepare for the fightback. Quite simply we must show the World who's boss.

We must begin by conducting a full enquiry into what happened. We must look at all aspects that led to this defeat with the intention of ensuring it never happens again. We must end the club versus country conflict. We must allow our champions to rest. We must consider whether it is time to rid ourselves of clapped out has-beens like David Beckham, Rio Ferdinand and Michael Owen and find room for the young stars of tomorrow. We must put pride aside and scour the world for the coaching techniques and tactical savvy that will restore our game to its proper place. No stone must go unturned. No sacred cow unslaughtered.

And having restored our team we must right the wrong. We must put piffling concerns such as European Cups, European Championships and Gulf Wars to one side. We must challenge the Australians to a series of footballing tests (perhaps we could call it a Test Series). Anytime, anywhere, any number of games. Let them choose the ground so that when we beat them none shall doubt our superiority - just like the Canadians did in '72.

There are dark days ahead but we can take inspiration from the words of Field Marshal Haig in 1918: "With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the freedom of mankind alike depend on the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment."

Patrick Crozier

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Okay cricket. There's a World Cup on, and it is focussing attention on Zimbabwe, and on Mugabe – extreme nastiness of. So cricket is worth explaining to people whom I wouldn't normally bother to bother about it.

For example, in their first game of the tournament two of the Zimbabwe cricketers, Andy Flower and Henry Olonga made a protest on behalf of their fellow countrymen:

Before the Group-A match started Monday, Andy Flower and Henry Olonga donned black armbands and released a statement condemning the worsening violence and famine in their country, as they mourned what they called "the death of democracy."

Brave men.

So anyway, I'll assume you know roughly what baseball is, and I'll assume I do, and I'll describe cricket basically by saying how it differs from baseball.

First, the similarities, and (I'm guessing) the common ancestry. Both involve a guy propelling a ball in the direction of a batter, and the batter trying to hit the ball.

A cricket ball is not so extremely different from a baseball ball, but I'm guessing it's a bit bigger and more than a bit harder and scarier to get hit by. Corrective comments on that welcome. (I've not done much with a baseball. All I know is what I've seen watching baseball on British Channel 5 TV.)

However, the manner in which a cricket ball is propelled at the batter is very different to baseball. In baseball, the pitcher stands in one place and throws the ball. In cricket, the "bowler" runs towards a fixed spot and when he gets there he "bowls" the ball at the "batsman". Important: the bowler must keep his arm absolutely straight, as he swings it round and lets go of the ball. If he doesn't do this, and instead is believed to be throwing it, baseball-style, even a little, this can cause an international diplomatic incident. If a bowler is "no balled" for throwing, i.e. yelled at by one of the umpires as soon as he does it, this is a huge deal for the bowler, for the bowler's entire career, for his team, for cricket, and for all cricket fans everywhere. Cricket fans like me can still remember the names of bowlers no-balled for throwing years and even decades after it happened: Griffin of South Africa, Meckiff of Australia ... You have to keep your arm straight!!

Being no balled for overstepping the mark and bowling from a few inches closer to the batsman than you should, well that's no big deal. You lose one "run" (which is what a point in cricket is called). You can't get a batsman "out" if you do it, but your cricket career won't be affected.

Next big difference: unlike in baseball, the ball once bowled then generally strikes the ground, in between the bowler and the batsman, and quite near to the batsman, before the batsman tries to hit it. Baseball, to a cricket fan, looks like an endless succession of "full tosses", that is, balls that never hit the pitch and which for a cricket batsman are extremely easy to hit.

Because the ball strikes it just before the batsman tries to strike the ball, the nature and state of the pitch makes a huge difference in cricket. It can vary a lot from match to match, and during a match. A good pitch for batting means that the ball bounces predictably off the pitch and is thus easy to hit. A "difficult" pitch means that the ball can sometimes deviate when it hits the pitch, and so when the batsman tries to hit the ball he's liable to miss, or to miscue.

Like baseball, cricket also has its equivalent of "curve" balls, or whatever they're called, in that a cricket ball in the hands of a skilful bowler also deviates in the air, when on its way towards the batsman. How greatly it does this depends a lot on the weather. With the possible exception of golf, there's probably no other game in the world where the weather counts for more than it does in cricket.

There are broadly speaking two ways to bowl. You can bowl fast, and make the ball swing in the air and deviate from the pitch. And you can bowl slow, and make the ball spin in the air and deviate a lot when it hits the pitch. For international bowlers fast means 80 mph and more, and slow means about 50 mph.

To cope with all the complexities caused for him by the bowler, the cricket batsman has one huge advantage over his baseball cousin. His bat is wider, and it is flat. It's not a stick. It's more like a big and very thick paddle. Hitting the ball quite often is not that difficult, and a good batsman will reckon on hitting the ball pretty much as often as he tries to.

The batsman scores "runs" by hitting the ball out amongst the fielders, and running the length of the pitch from where he started out to the other end, where the bowler bowled from. Every length thus travelled is worth one run. He can also hit the ball to the boundary (quite a common occurrence) and get four runs. Or (much rarer) he can hit it, home run style, over the boundary, and get six runs. There are two batsmen out on the pitch at any one time, one at each end. If one scores a run, that means they swap ends, and the other one then faces the next ball. Bowlers take it in turns to bowl balls in sets of six, switching ends after each set of six (after each "over).

Whereas baseball scores seldom go to more than a dozen runs, cricket matches typically involve totals of one, two, even three hundred, and sometimes more. In the game that opened the World Cup, for example, in which the West Indies narrowly defeated South Africa, both sides scored getting on for three hundred runs each.

How does a batsman get "out"? Answer, he's guarding his "stumps" (a line of three sticks stuck in the ground that stand about waste high behind him when he bats) and if he misses the ball when the bowler bowls it and the ball hits these stumps, the batsman is out "bowled". If the ball strikes the pads that the batsman wears on his legs for protection, and the umpire decides (after much yelling and gesticulating by the fielding side) that the ball would have hit the wicket, the umpire gives the batsmen out "leg before wicket" (lbw). And, if the batsman hits the ball in the air and a fielder catches it before it lands, the batsman is out "caught" – as is the rule with baseball, yes? And if the batsmen, when trying to complete one of those "runs" don't manage to cross before the fielding side picks up the ball and throws it at and hits those stumps, then the batsman who failed to make his ground is "run out", again, much as a baseball player is dismissed for failing to reach his next base before the ball does.

Each team has eleven players, all of whom bat, so when the fielding team have got ten of them out, that's it, the team is "all out", and the other guys take a turn. Whoever makes the most runs wins.

Cricket now comes in two versions. There the type that lasts a day, which is the kind they're playing now in the World Cup, and then there's cricket that lasts a seriously decent length of time, like three, four or five days.

One day cricket, a relatively recent invention not liked by purists of the old school, has a winner and a loser. Each team receives a set number of balls, and the team that gets the most runs wins. But in the original, longer version of the game, the contest can end in a draw. In that, both teams bat twice. Suppose that in the final "innings" the team batting second is trying to make two hundred runs to win. If it does that before all its guys get out, it wins. If all its guys get out before they reach a combined total of 200, they lose. But if time runs out before either of those things happens, it's a draw. Five solid days of desperately competitive action can end with no one winning.

I could go on, but I'll answer just one more important question about cricket, which is really a criticism rather than a question. This is the one that goes: Cricket, that's a game for a bunch of pansies and cissies, right? Only "gentlemen" play cricket, not regular guys.

If this is what you think, I can't stop you. But a word of advice. If this is what you want to go on thinking about cricket, don't ever play it. A long spell of bowling really takes it out of a man, and as for batting …!

Put it like this, how would you like it if a man ran straight at you as fast as he could and then propelled a heavy, potentially very hurtful ball at you at a speed that can sometimes get quite close to 100 mph? Trust me, you'd scared. Yet the proper way to bat is to get your body directly in line with this horror story, so that if the ball doesn't hit your bat, it is extremely likely to hit you.

Don't confuse the fact that the moments of the fiercest sort of cricket action can sometimes be rather, er, occasional, with the notion that when the action does happen it doesn't amount to anything. For a serious cricket fan like me to be watching a good tight run chase, with batsmen clouting fast bowlers to all parts of the field, well, life doesn't get any better.

Just before World War 2, there was a huge scandal in the world of cricket, know to this day as "Bodyline". Bodyline was a particularly scary way of bowling that was aimed right at the bodies of the batsmen, even more directly than usual. And who was doing it? The English. That's right. The gosh-I'm-most-frightfully-sorry – more-tea-vicar? – after-you-no-I-insist-after-you – English were bowling this bodyline stuff.

And our guys were bowling their Bodyline bowling at Australians. And the Australians were the ones saying that our guys were being too rough and nasty. That's right. Those rugged, crocodiles for breakfast, brave-hearted Australians were the ones saying that the English weren't playing fair, and with some justice I might add. It got very serious, with cabinet ministers on both sides getting dragged in and insults flying around in all directions, some of them even being uttered in the House of Commons.

I sometimes think that if Adolf Hitler had paid a bit more attention to cricket he might not have been so casual about letting that World War 2 thing get started, that I mentioned earlier, that broke out a few years after Bodyline.

By all means be baffled by cricket, and if you were when you started reading this, you almost certainly still are. But don't you dare try telling me that it's not a game for Real Men to be playing. I've played it, and I have the scars and the broken teeth to prove it. And when English teeth of my vintage got broken they stay broken.

When I heard last night about Olonga and Flower making their protest, I was mightily impressed, but I wasn't surprised. Cricket is a tough game, and the people who play it are tough, gutsy people.

Watching cricket is a different thing entirely. That can get very dull, no matter how many cucumber sandwiches are available, and getting people to do that, at any rate in England, is getting harder by the year.

On the other hand, I recently heard it said that in India they have more cricket fans than Europe has people, so the game clearly has a future for a good while yet.

For more cricket blogging, try Michael Jennings.

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At just after 11 pm London time, in about half an hour or so as I begin to compose this posting, NFL Super Bowl XXXVII will blast off, in San Diego, Southern California – and I will be watching it on British Channel 5 TV. In the last few years, Channel 5 have shown lots of American football, but not the Super Bowl itself. Sky TV would nip in and buy the Super Bowl, leaving Channel 5 with a stupid little highlights show the day after, and I eventually stopped bothering about any American football. But this year, probably because Sky has finally devoured all its adversaries in the shark tank that is British pay TV and doesn't need to spend money on such things any more, regular Channel 5 is showing the Super Bowl as well as having shown lots of the preceding games. They of course flagged this up loudly beforehand, which means that this time around I've been paying attention to the entire NFL season.

Something similar has happened with rugby. All of the Six Nations games this year are about to be shown by the BBC. For the last few years regular TV only showed highlights of the England home games at Twickenham, but now I'll be able to see all the England games in their entirety. Deep joy.

I don't much care who wins the Super Bowl. I'll be watching for the Americanness of it all, for Shania Twain at half time (although ST's recent album is a huge disappointment to my ear), for the astonishing skill of one guy chucking a ball forty yards, and another guy running full tilt and catching it without breaking his stride, which means that the ball must have been thrown exactly right, several seconds earlier, at a completely blank piece of pre-selected grass. Being a successful NFL quarterback must be about as easy as being a First World War fighter ace. Amazing. And I'll be watching because I like it when the people I hated at school inflict pain on each other instead of on me. The crowds that watch these games are exuberant, but not psychotic. The commentary is expert, but good humoured. The game itself combines immense intellectual complexity with raw human muscle power. The dancing girls on the touchline are great, as is the aerial photography of the stadium and its surrounding localities. Channel 5 TV reception in my home is very bad, but I don't care.

I do, however, have my criticisms of American football, most of them centred on what is called "parity", and when rootling around for a website link to include here I discovered that my doubts are shared by some Americans.

Here's what a certain Tony Hawley of News Tribune has to say about parity:

The NFL thinks it's the best pro sport because any team can win a championship in any given year. While that's an admirable trait in a league, it also makes it tougher to care about who wins the Super Bowl.

Since there are no superpowers any more, there are no teams you can count on rooting against. Since there are no perennial doormats, there are no underdogs to root for. Because any team can win a Super Bowl in any given season, it no longer seems like a great accomplishment when you pull it off.

Parity is achieved by such devices as imposing a "salary cap" on all the teams, so that they must basically all spend the same amount on player salaries, and by giving the worst teams last year the pick of the following year's best new players.

I don't like this. As Hawley says, it drains the meaning out of things.

Maybe Americans are religious. Maybe that's it. If God can't fix life, he can at least, in the person of the NFL, be made to fix American football to give everyone an equal chance. Maybe that's what is going on.

In English football ("soccer" – which, I learned the other day, is because our football is As-SOC-iation Football) the rule is: to them that have shall be given. If you get to be Manchester United, or Arsenal, or Liverpool, it's because you are based in a great and ancient city with a past glorious enough to have assembled a decent number of people to buy the season tickets and the shirts and the merchandise, and because with that foundation you also did everything else right as well. You built a good stadium. You bought good players and not just overpriced big names. You gelled your team of multi-national internationals into a team of team players, and when you got to the top you didn't get complacent but kept on improving. You have a good youth set-up. You find a really good manager, and you stick by him through bad patches.

Over here, God definitely takes sides. Currently He swithers between supporting Manchester United and supporting the current best team in London, Arsenal. So if some small town team knocks Manchester United out of the FA Cup, that's a miracle which, on those rare occasions when it happens, will be fondly remembered for decades. And if some non-major city team wins the Premier League, ditto.

What actually happened today was that Man U thrashed one of the lesser London sides, West Ham United, who are currently bottom of the Premier League and looking like being relegated, 6-0 in the Cup. And Shrewsbury (from a far lower division – total team cost £90 thousand) were beaten 4-0 in the Cup by Chelsea of the Premier League (total cost of team £80 million). Which of course is the way these things usually work out. It isn't fair. It is like life. But occasionally, just occasionally, and again like life, the game doesn't go with the form book. The big battalions and the big money don't always win the day.

(Oh-my-god! Celine Dion is singing an anthem. Did any of you see the send-up The Simpsons did of American football anthem-singing? Well, of course you did. Actually, God Bless America wasn't too bad. Now it's the National Anthem sung by … The Dixie Chicks! With jet airplanes! God bless America!)

They're off. The players are reading their names and alma maters to camera, and Oakland, all in white, look like they're going to open the scoring. Yep. Gannon gets sacked but Janikowski kicks the field goal.

I always have to wait until the game starts before I find out which team I want to win. And this year I find that I am supporting: the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. That's in Florida, right?

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Fellow bloggers and cricket nuts Brian Micklethwait and Antoine Clarke may have their own reasons for why Australians are currently vastly better than the English at playing cricket, notwithstanding the fifth and final Test match, which England won by a canter.

I reckon this story could explain why Aussie cricket fans are, well, able to get fully behind their team, and hence cheer their heroes to victory on a depressingly regular basis.

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As a bit of a "petrol-head", I have been saddened by the recent demise of Formula One motor-racing, which is increasingly indistinguishable from a procession of cars with few chances for overtaking or for drivers to demonstrate their brilliance.

There are few characters or opportunities for eccentric outsiders to take the field, as in the great days of Fangio or Jim Clark. So it is encouraging to read that F1 bosses are trying as best they might to tweak the rules to make the sport get our pulses racing once again.

Of course we may end up being disappointed once more, but fingers crossed, this great sport can get a much-needed dose of excitement again. And of course all good libertarians should want a sport that celebrates fast driving, the internal combustion engine and obscenely-rich motoring moguls. You can bet that the Guardianistas loathe it. In fact, the killjoys would probably ban it.

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John Ray identifies a teeny little error in my Anglo-Australian cricket piece that can't be left to correct itself only in comment number 8 on that:

Dear Me! Somebody has their history skew-whiff! Australia ruled by the Poms in Bradman's day? Australia became independent in 1901.

Clang. Sadly for me, and happily for Australia, John is of course right. First it was Shane Warne not bowling very many googlies, and now this. I feel like an England batsman, again.

My misremembering of Australian history is based on a misremembering of a Bradman biography (Bradman by Charles Williams - Little Brown, 1996) that I read some years ago, and in particular, I believe, a misremembering of the following paragraphs, from Williams' Prologue, which I quote here at some length because it's good stuff:

The task of Australians after the First World War, as the British Empire struggled to recover from wounds which were eventually to prove fatal, was to discover some unifying force which could propel them into what was clearly going to be a post-colonial era, and was therefore one of great difficulty. Some returned for comfort to suck at the drying teats of the mother country, adopting even more 'British' attitudes than they had before the War. But most felt instinctively that it was time to move on, and to find some way of expressing their rising nationality Without offending the majority who were still loosely, but umbilically, attached to the 'old country'.

In the end, it was as much a matter of elimination as anything else. Everybody was tired of war; party politics varied from State to State, were frequently sectarian and in many instances corrupt; and revolution could only be against the British, and was, therefore, unthinkable. It was thus that Australia turned to spectator sport as the prime vehicle for the aspirations to national identity which the War had produced. In retrospect, it was an obvious - if unconscious - move. It suited the temperament of the people, the climate of the country and the social disposition: the climate in the inhabited areas was ideal for outdoor sports both in summer and in winter; and it was on the playing field that class and religious antagonisms could be most successfully resolved.

Sport in Australia thus became an integral part of politics. (Of course, it was politics in the wider sense - the binding together of the polity rather than another manifestation of the parochial squabbles of the political parties. But it was politics nonetheless.) Sport allowed Australia to stand up in her own right. It both encouraged and disciplined the egalitarian individualism that was emerging as an identifiable Australian characteristic. It was to be Australia's way of showing the rest of the world that the continent was not just an appendage of the British Empire but a real and living nation.

There was a clear consequence. It followed naturally that the sporting hero achieved in Australia a status several ranks above sporting champions of other countries. He was treated, and to some extent still is treated, with a reverence, or hysterical enthusiasm, depending on the age and character of the hero, reserved in other countries for royalty or successful military commanders. But whereas after the Second World War there was a variety of sports in which Australians excelled, after the First World War there was only one sport of any consequence – cricket. Cricket was the means whereby the adolescent Australia could prove its worth. Cricketing heroes were its Davids and the British Empire was Goliath.

Of these there is no doubt that Don Bradman was the greatest... He was, in his day, a world figure... it comes as little surprise to hear that Nelson Mandela, when released from his long period in prison, wanted to know whether Bradman was still alive...

So I was not totally wrong in the overall thrust of what I said. I merely got Australian self-government wrong by the small matter of half a century.

As beleaguered England cricket captain Nasser Hussain is probably saying about now, perhaps in an Australian radio studio, you can't win them all.

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Like me, Tim Blair has been pondering England's amazingly bad performances against Australia - two down and three more humiliations to go. He suggests that something to do with better running between the wickets, or some such, might improve England's chances. He may be right. I am in no mood to disagree with any Australian on matters cricketing just now. (See the corrective comment on this, setting me straight about Shane Warne, from Michael Jennings. Michael, when it comes to being an Englishman who is confused about Shane Warne, I am not alone.)

But may I humbly add a further suggestion as to why Australian cricket is now doing so well compared to English cricket, apart from the fact that Australians are, you know, Australians, while the English are merely English.

Cricket in England is associated in most minds with a past which most of England is trying busily to turn its back on, along with putting an end to the Conservative Party, the Church of England, Grammar Schools, Latin teaching in Grammar Schools, Hunting, pre-modern art, the Royal Family (always under relentless attack), etc. etc. I am basically a pacifist in this fight, unlike many of my friends such as David Carr and Sean Gabb who are diehard reactionaries. I favour the voluntary principle rather than the past, and I think that the voluntary principle has a great future. But setting that sort of arguing aside, cricket is definitely on the reactionary side in this battle, in England.

Not so in Australia. As I understand Australia and its cricket team, cricket is as much part of the definition of the new Australia as it was part of the old Australia.

Consider the great Don Bradman, way out on his own as the best batsman ever to have played cricket according to his test match batting average, only just short of a hundred. (Next comes a whole bunch around the sixt mark - amazing.) Had Bradman made just a handful of runs in his final test match innings in 1948 at the Oval (which is a short walk across the river from where I now sit) instead of the duck (that's 0, zero, nothing for all you Americans who are reading this so fascinatedly) he did make, his test average would have been over a hundred.

During the inter-war period, when Australians couldn't even vote for their own government, Bradman was the great Australian national hero. Australia was a colony, ruled from London, and locally by the Viceroy. Pounding the Poms at cricket was just about the only way that Australia could get one over the Mother Country, short of launching a revolutionary war. Hence the rapturous Australian response to Bradman's heroics.

Thus, despite all the badges-and-blazers grumbles about Australian cricket nowadays from lefties, and despite cricket being lined up in many Australian eyes alongside the retention of the Queen as Australia's Head of State, there is something deeply modern (to use one of our British government's favourite words) about Australian cricket. Belligerent, uppity, anti the old order.

On those rare occasions when England does produce a cricketer capable of mixing it successfully with the Aussies, the most recent one being Ian Botham, you have the definite feeling that God got his storks mixed up and a consignment of DNA bound for Australia somehow got diverted to England by mistake. The only near-current English cricketer you sense the Aussies rate is Darren Gough, and he has just hobbled home to probable retirement.

In England if you are young, sporty, "modern", you mostly play football - okay okay, "soccer" – at which the Aussies are only just getting started compared to England. Soccer is our "modern" game. Soccer is what our New Establishment loves, not cricket.

So, although England's population is far bigger than Australia's, we simply don't have so many great cricketers as they do, and the ones we do have must be acutely conscious of dawdling out their working lives in a social backwater, watched (except on a few big occasions) by hardly anyone, and most of them asleep in deckchairs. Looking at an English cricket crowd is like looking at the Conservative Party in an even more geriatric and somnolent state than usual, if you can imagine such a thing. All very sad if like me you love your English cricket, but there it is.

The idea that getting the existing England team to run a bit more sharply between the wickets might make a serious difference to all this strikes me as very peculiar. But I'm English. What can I tell you about cricket?

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Samizdata, despite Antoine's admonitions, has been getting very depressed and depressing lately, so time for some more sports news. It's only a game, it doesn't matter, no dead bodies or territory changing hands, good way to let off fascist steam, blah blah blah.

Too bad the English news isn't that good there either. Oh well.

Anyway, cricket. (That's the one of which an American once said to Brit interviewer and sports journo Michael Parkinson: "And they do all that on horseback?") I wish I'd told you earlier in the year what I thought of the England batting, which is that it is a collective Graham Hick. Graham Hick was the Zimbabwean who never quite did as well as he should have as an England batsman, and who got lumbered with the soubriquet of "flat track bully", that is, good against bad bowling, but bad against good bowling. During the last couple of years, England have been racking up big scores against second-rate test bowling attacks, with very few flops, and it was being said that this time, this time, the Ashes series in Australian this winter just might be different. I thought then that this was folly. How you murder second-raters says very little about how you'll fare against the likes of McGrath, Gillespie and Warne.

As Warne said before the first test in Brisbane, England will hold their own if they are at their absolute best, but if they slip up Australia will be all over them and they'll crumple. Too right mate. England had one good day at Brisbane, but in the end were humiliated. And now at Adelaide they started with a good batting day and duly held their own, but then they had two bad days and are heading for another crushing defeat.

I saw this coming half a year ago. I did. But how can I prove it? I can't. I said it to Antoine, I think, but will he back me? Antoine? I doubt it. Maybe I imagined that I even said it.

So? What of it? Well, I can now see another disappointment being cobbled together by over-optimistic English sports commentators. England have just defeated New Zealand, Australia and now this afternoon South Africa at rugby, all at Twickenham (which incidentally is the town-stroke-suburb where Patrick Crozier lives), the English national stadium. The first two they only just squeaked past by the narrowest of margins. South Africa they did slaughter, but the South Africans played for an hour with only fourteen men. All three visiting teams were manifestly using these more than somewhat insignificant fixtures to test new men and new moves and new combinations. But never mind all that. Hurrah!! England are going to win the World Cup!!

I don't believe a word of it. England always peak between World Cups. And someone in the Southern Hemisphere, usually Australia, peaks at the World Cup. France play badly but not badly enough in the early games, then play one dazzling game, then get knocked out, and a Southern Hemisphere team wins it. England always contrive to look tired at the World Cup, presumably because they always are tired. All that peaking when it doesn't matter takes it out of you, I guess.

You read it here first.

I guess I'll have to cheer myself up with some more politics.

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I am now officially sick and tired of hearing about how the pending players' strike is going to kill Major League Baseball. The general manager of the Cincinnati franchise took some heat for a statement in which he basically argued that a players' strike would be the 9/11 of baseball. Dave Campbell of ESPN also invoked 9/11 in describing the consequences of a player strike. For you incurably hysterical types out there, let me offer the following words of reason:

Pro baseball will survive because it is played in a capitalist country.

As long as there are athletes who want to play, and entrepreneurs who are willing to organize it, professional baseball will exist in some form. There has not been a lack of either of these elements in the United States since the 1870s. Every time I have made this claim, among family, coworkers, students, etc., it has been met with howls of derision. The counter-arguments boil down to:

(1) what about the fans? the game is for the fans; what if the fans get fed up and leave? and:
(2) baseball has now gotten itself into problems that are unprecedented in its history, and it cannot possibly hope to survive, as the deck is stacked against it. Both these claims are lacking in merit, as we shall see.

If you look at MLB's attendance history (which of course I did), you will see that there is NO evidence that past strikes have had a long-term impact on baseball attendance. None. In 1972, a strike cut about ten games off the front of the season. Attendance per game dipped in 1972 -- but attendance was higher in 1973 than it was in 1971, and has not since fallen below 1973 levels. A similar pattern emerged around the longer 1981 strike -- attendance was higher in 1982 than in 1980, and grew from 1982 into the 1990s.

In 1994, the players again struck, this time in August, and the season came to an abrupt end. This time, it looks like baseball paid a price -- attendance in 1993 peaked at 30,979 fans per game, and has not risen to that level since the strike. But 1993 is a poor year to use as a baseline, because two new teams joined the National League that year, and first-year expansion teams draw exceptionally well. One of those teams, the Colorado Rockies, set an attendance record that still stands. If you use 1992 as the baseline, or just throw those expansion teams' totals out of the league average for 1993, baseball had fully recovered its attendance base within about two seasons of the end of the strike.

But let's suppose the doomsayers are right, and baseball loses half its fan base. Let's say MLB attendance falls from 30,000 per game to 15,000 per game as a result of the pending strike. Can we put that into some historical context?

There used to be a time that insufferable sportswriters called the "golden era" in MLB history. Roughly defined as the years 1947-57, these are the seasons that sportswriters like Roger Kahn, in hushed and reverent tones, describe as the greatest ever. Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle played during part or all of The Golden Era. Baseball was the only well-established pro sport. Baseball was The National Pastime, a huge part of our popular culture. Right?

Well, guess what? The average major league paid attendance during The Golden Era was 14,010 per game. Yes, baseball is in danger, the doomsayers tell us, of having its attendance fall all the way back to ... essentially what it was during The Golden Era, when baseball was allegedly pure as the driven snow and beloved by all Americans.

What about those organized labor problems? Look, these issues are as old as baseball. The threat of the union striking is nothing compared to what players used to do when they didn't like the way the owners treated them -- they used to FORM RIVAL LEAGUES! The Federal League, to name just one, played in 1914-15; future Hall of Famers like Eddie Plank, Chief Bender, Joe Tinker and Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown defected to the upstart league. The Federal League didn't last, but it was a major wakeup call for the AL and NL. The AL itself started as a rebel league too, except that it survived. If the pampered players of today had the cojones to pull off something like THAT, the owners would have a lot more to fear than they do in Donald Fehr, the morose players' union chairman.

So rest easy, fans. Baseball is here to stay. How do I know this? Because capitalism is alive and well.

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What a superb showing by British shooter Mick Gault. He keeps winning at the Commonwealth Games in spite of having to do all his training in Switzerland.

The reason he has to train in another country is that Britain took a giant lurch towards becoming a police state in 1997 by outlawing all handguns (not to mention seeing firearms crimes soar since then).

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Responding to my praise for golf, Steven Gallaher (of I don't know where, but his email has "us" at the end of it, so I'm guessing somewhere in the USA) says this:

On the other hand, my observation of the golfers I get paired with on those occasions when I go to the course alone is that most do not care to suffer the consequences of their actions, and so they don't. Lies are improved and mulligans are taken. Short puts are never attempted; they are assumed to be made. Per-hole score is capped in one way or another (often twice par).

Which presumably means that you don't score yourself as having taken any more than eight shots on a par four hole, even if you actually took eighteen. I don't know what a mulligan is, but it sounds equally sneaky. This all reminds me of the stories about Bill Clinton's dubious self-scoring habits as a golfer.

Perhaps our approach to golf is a reflection of our approach to life. If so, what does that say about our culture?

As usual, Steven, the news about our culture is not good. We're all doomed, doomed. According to reliable eyewitness accounts, Western Civilisation has been in headlong and uninterrupted decline at least since the time of the ancient Sumerians, i.e. ever since anyone has ever kept reliable eyewitness accounts of anything. Either that, or you play all your golf in Arkansas.

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Adam Breeze emails us from Cheshire, one of England's golfier counties, thus:

Following on from Brian's comments on Tiger Woods and his views on freedom of association, I just wanted to draw fellow readers attention to David Duval - last year's Open winner (and one of the best golfers in the world for the past few years) who cites The Fountainhead as his favourite book. See this feature at jacksonville.com.

Is there something intrinsically libertarian about Golf? The individual's never ending struggle to conquer nature etc...

I suspect that there is something libertarian about golf, and that it's not just the accident of it being the socialising and deal-making game of choice of the Chamber of Commerce types.

As Adam says, golf is the ultimate individual's game, in which every predicament the player finds himself in is the consequence of his own previous actions. In golf, you make your choices and you deal with the results of your own choices. There's no one else to blame.

There can be few greater tests in sport of an individual's character than to have to play a very difficult golf shot immediately after - and as a direct result of – having just played a very bad shot. Ernie Els passed this kind of test during the final play-off hole that won him The Open last Sunday. I know it's only a game and all that, but the statistics both of the money involved and of the numbers of folks watching, both at the course and on TV, were presumably vast. Els went into a bunker. But he got himself out to within three feet of the hole, and sank the putt. And all this having earlier lost what looked like a secure lead late in the final regular round, which caused him to have to compete in the play-off holes in the first place.

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I ask for advice about what to say on the radio about Third World poverty. Nothing. I mention the USA soccer team and the emails flood in. Well, one did, from Radley Balko, whose email ends with @cato.org, which makes him something to do with the Cato Institute, which makes him someone with a back to be scratched.

Okay then. I said that our media are saying that the USA is ignoring the World Cup. Not so, says Bradley Balko. The USA's media are ignoring the World Cup. But, says, Radley Balko, the USA's people are paying it some definite attention.

I was at a bar in Arlington, VA this morning for the game. 2:30am on a Monday morning. Absolutely packed with soccer fans. As was the other bar up the street that stayed open for the game. This, and they weren't even serving beer.

God bless Brad "John Malkovich" Friedel.

Radley Balko does a blog called The Agitator where he picks up on the rumours that the Portuguese tried to get the South Koreans to agree to a draw. I just heard from our TV that this rumour is all over our newspapers too. He also has pictures reinforcing the Malkovich/Friedel similarity. And he has things about civil liberties violations in the wake of 9/11, the crazinesses of the war on drugs, and such like. If you like personal-stroke-political-stroke-humorous, have a look at it.

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England 3    Pastry-Eating Surrender Monkeys 0

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Yes Brian, people in Croatia are very happy that our footballers have defeated Italy... the moment the match was over the streets were filled with people holding glasses of beer and bottles of loza, car horns were being blown and I could hear the crackle of guns being fired off into the air from all directions.

Like Perry said in his earlier article, modern societies do like to express their identities through sports... and of course the fact that historically Italy has a habit of invading us tends to make the significance of any 'national' clash on the football field take on a certain extra flavour just as the fact Britain and Argentina have fought a war against each other adds much the same spice. So just imagine how the English felt after defeating Argentina, then add the sound of rifles and pistols being fired off into the air and you should be able to picture the situation across Croatia!

... and of course guess who gets tricked into providing the logistics for the celebration party for my football mad friends this afternoon...

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I promised myself, no more soccer for a few days. Give it a rest, Brian. Let David do it. Don't join him in the St George and Assorted Dragons Asylum for the Temporarily and Quite Possibly Permanently Deranged (any website you try for that will probably work). But do tell us Natalija, what are your fellow countrypersons making of today's big World Cup news (and it couldn't have been closer): Italy 1 CROATIA 2 ?!?!?!?

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Soon Natalie Solent will be going: "Boys, enough already with the soccer, there's a nuclear war about to start over Kashmir, new laws trashing what little remains of our email privacy, a vile British government to be overthrown, a bizarre British monarchy to be argued about, leftist websites to be denounced, Weighty Issues to be Addressed, etc. etc." And emailers should be warned that even my fascination with soccer, in the USA or anywhere else, has its limits. Nevertheless, I found this from Rick Drasch most diverting:

There are regional considerations with soccer in the US. I grew up in Connecticut (where all towns are named after English towns or Indian words), and let me tell you that soccer is THE sport in southern New England. I have been playing soccer since I was 5. In school, we had no football team; our baseball team was a joke; but our high school soccer team is one of the best in the nation. The dominance of soccer extends throughout Connecticut into Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In high school, I personally did not know of a single football team in the state.

And there was me thinking that US soccer was all South American immigrants or maybe British immigrants, or else hired foreign guns.

As kids, we were genuinely interested (or at least tried to be) in what passed for a professional soccer team for our region, which I think were the Cosmos or some lame name like that. But games were rare and not advertised, and certainly not televised.

This must now be changing fast. You can now presumably get some kind of soccer from somewhere on the internet at any hour of the day or night if you know where to look. If not now then pretty soon.

I'm not sure of the reason why soccer dominates in that region; it's not a monetary one. One theory I have is that it is a population issue. When you have 30 kids per class (of both genders), try and field a football team. If you actually manage to do it, you'll still get killed. Nobody wants to watch your pipsqueak quarterback get terminated with extreme prejudice by a linebacker from a school in Jersey with 3000 students.

Or it could just be that it tain't called "New" England for nothin', gov.

I don't think that Rick's heart is really in that last bit, do you? - but the point about the physical danger of American football is surely a good one. With soccer, when you are severely outclassed, all that happens is that you get beaten 8-0, the way that Saudi Arabia was beaten 8-0 by Germany the other day. In general, I've heard it said, soccer is less likely to inflict severe long-term injury than American football, despite and in fact because of all that pain-preventing equipment that the footballers wear which enables them to carry right on jarring themselves to what eventually turns into an early and painful death. Hence the enthusiasm of those soccer mums.

To take my imagined Natalie Solent objection seriously, why blog on about sports like this? For the same reason that all newspapers have sports pages, I guess. It's part of life, and a big one.

There are lots of reasons why we who love sports love sports. Here's one that I haven't seen mentioned lately, which is that with sport you do at least know what the hell happened. The daily bread of Samizdata is, let's be honest, politics, or more loosely, "public issues". But the trouble with "public issues" is that so often they aren't. Simply finding out what the hell happened can take you all the time you have to spare.

Sport isn't like that. The USA really did beat Portugal 3-2. It wasn't 4-2, nor was it 2 all. It was 3-2 to the USA. It was 3-1 at half time, and at the end it was 3-2. I know it, and if you care, you know it. Way to go, USA!!

Well, imagine if we didn't know, but only had lying press releases and evasive performances from the FIFA Press Secretary to go on, like at a summit conference.

"Mr Secretary can you tell us the score?"

"Gentlemen, I'm not able to reveal the exact score at this moment in time. This will, we now anticipate, be revealed rather more fully next Thursday, after the FIFA Results Subcommittee Meeting. What I can say is that this was a clean, honest and vigorous game, much enjoyed by all concerned."

"Yes, but who won?"
"Is it true that two of the Portugal goals were own-goals?"
"Was anybody sent off?"
"Which of the USA goalkeepers played in the game?"
"Did Figo play?"
"How well did he play?"
"Did he score any goals?"

"One at a time please. Yes madam."

"Can you tell us what colour shirts the two teams were wearing?"

"Why yes I can ma'am, the USA's players were wearing...."

Etc.

World Cup Finals would be so vitally important that, as with Bilderberg meetings, it would be permanently denied that they ever happened. As for them ever telling us what the score was and who won, forget it.

But mercifully, sport is not like that. It has its intricacies and secret dramas and concealed scandals, but the basic story is out there for us all to see. Sport is egalitarian not only in who gets to play it and how likely they are to get hurt, but also in who gets to talk about it in a reasonably well informed manner. Answer: everybody who wants to! No wonder so many people prefer sports talk to politics talk.

And if we libertarians want to get our voices heard and our memes circulated in human as opposed merely to libertarian or more generally political company, then those of us who are inclined to join in with this sports talk should do so.

Bring on the Argies.

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More from the Lemley family of California, in answer to an earlier question I posted:

My youngest daughter (5) plays soccer, and my oldest (8) doesn't. (My oldest is more of a bookworm.) My youngest played her first year last year, liked it, and she's going to play again next year. (The leagues play in the fall.) It's pretty low-key, like "here's the ball, and you go this way ... not that way, this way." She has fun with it, and we play in the backyard from time to time. The hope for her, and most girls her age, is that they have fun with the game and keep playing for as long as possible.

What this little report illustrates is why "soccer" has done so well. It's simple. You just need a ball and a willingness to have fun kicking it this way and that. This is not a capital intensive game. You can practice it anywhere, and wear just about anything while you're doing it. Hence the legendary successes that can be achieved by countries who are failing at virtually everything else. Argentina's economy is a global embarrassment just now, yet they are among the favourites to win the World Cup. And hence football's capacity to spread. "Soccer" is catching on in the USA, even as the more unwieldy and expensive "American" version of football (which is more like our rugby) fails to ignite over here or in mainland Europe, except as a way to entertain US expats.

By the way, the USA ladies team are the world champions, no less. (I heard a Channel Five commentator on US baseball mention this last night.) And in general, it seems that, like Russ's daughter, most of the Americans who get interested in soccer get interested in playing soccer. Over here "football fever" has tended to mean millions of couch potatoes or travelling fans who merely watch soccer, a numerical fact reflected in the TV adverts which have in recent years become sodden with a truly depressing worship of football fandom. Hurrah, say these adverts, for the "real" fans, who waste their entire lives getting worked up about the results of games in which they do not play, and who might on the basis of this mania be persuaded to buy this or that beer or snackfood and thus sink even further into bloated immobility. Now I like to watch football myself, but please don't tell me that this is the most profound thing I do. Happily it seems that my sense of being insulted and patronised rather than befriended by these adverts may be quite widely shared, and that this era of British football watching emotional excess may be fading. Most of the adverts in this genre that I most hate were actually on TV a few years ago rather than right now, and meanwhile "ITV Digital" has discovered that there are limits after all to the televised football appetites of Britain. But how much more pleasing it would be if "football fever" meant Britain's football clubs each having a dozen amateur and youth teams playing every weekend.

What's the betting that some time during the next two decades the USA wins the World Cup? And what's the betting that when they do, most of the USA hardly notices?

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Now, there is a headline that you don't see too often. The sports sites here in the US, such as ESPN.com and SportingNews.com made note of the American team's 3-2 triumph over the favored Portuguese, but didn't make it the day's top story -- after all, the NBA and NHL finals are now underway. Plus they understood that this was a preliminary-round game, that the US might not advance out of their group and that Portugal could still win the World Cup despite this loss (although it is difficult to see how they would beat Argentina or England when they can't beat the US, it is still possible.)

No such restraint was shown by America's news dailies. While American sports fans yawned, American journalists fawned, comparing the win to the "miracle on ice" at the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980, in which the US hockey team beat the Soviet Union in the semifinal round. So why is the World Cup getting so much coverage here in the US? I have a theory: finally, the press has found something that America really, really sucks at.

We used to suck at the Winter Olympics, but this time around we dominated. The American economy continues to grow while Europe has stagnated; Mississippi, the poorest American state, would be midpack among European nations in per-capita income. The fourth estate desperately wanted to believe that we would not be able to hold our ground in Afghanistan, and ran "quagmire" stories right up to -- and even beyond -- the fall of Kabul. Now the World Cup rolls around, and FINALLY, the press has something to report on that America does not dominate. And they love it.

It's just a theory, but I suspect that's what's going on. It's not as though America is suddenly in the throes of soccer fever. I am a bigger soccer fan than 99.9% of Americans, and soccer is maybe my 5th or 6th favorite spectator sport. If you pressed me, I could probably name all the teams in the English Premier League or the Italian Series A, but I cannot name a single player on the US World Cup team. So what does that tell you?

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Russ Lemley of Torrance, CA, and more to the point USA, emails this charming vignette of the family life of a Samizdata reader, thus:

I was probably one of 30 people (maybe that's too high) on the west coast of the US who saw any portion of the US-Portugal game live. The game started at 2 am LA time. I got to bed last night kinda late, so I didn't get up until 3, at just about the beginning of the second half. I actually waited a minute before turning on the TV because I was afraid to see the score. When I turned it on and saw the score was USA 3, Portugal 1, I got lightheaded and almost fainted. Then I kicked myself (figuratively) for missing the first half!

The second half I was on pins and needles. (Soccer (er - football) is boring - bah! I'm a baseball nut, and even I fall asleep watching pitching duels sometimes. Even with one own goal, that second half drove me nuts!) Although the US was playing defense to hold their lead, they held up very well considering their opponent. When the game was over, I was so ecstatic that I could hardly contain myself. But I had to. Do you know how hard it is to jump and down in elation without waking up your wife and two daughters at 3:46 am? I figured it out, and hopefully this will be good practice for the US games against Korea and Poland.

Bring on Italy!!!

Maybe not all our readers quite get what a result this was, and how good Portugal are. Luis Figo is Portuguese, and he is one of the most highly regarded players in the world. Or try this, from our good friend The Guardian, from this morning's sports section:

In Group D the US look to be one of those teams that are always at the World Cup but never contribute much. Anything but a defeat against Portugal would be a major shock.

I've feel as if I've been reading for ever about the USA's "soccer mums", mostly in connection with which way they would vote. My attitude was: vote how you want ladies, where's the soccer? I have my answer. And I'm told the US ladies soccer team is pretty good, yes? Russ, do your daughters play soccer by any chance?

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They've just scored a final minute equaliser against Germany. Final whistle! 1-1! Let's hope I'm as wrong about England.

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Well would you ever? It seems that one of those little no-hope teams from somewhere in the north-of-Brazil region has just beaten Portugal 3-2. This is the biggest drama since Senegal beat World Cup holders France in the opening game, a result already noted here. I've been looking for another team to support when England get bounced out by Argentina on Friday. (Ireland are, even as I blog this, being disposed of by Germany.) I may just have found it.

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According to the BBC website, 11,990 people have voted on whether Roy Keane, the captain of the Republic of Ireland team at the soccer world cup in Japan (who can't play England unless both sides win or lose in the semi-finals) should have been dropped by his manager or not.

Last week about 3,000 voted on whether Britain is ready to join the euro and 55 per cent said yes. If England are knocked out playing badly, by a EU country, I predict a swing to the euro. If England win, then Mr Blair can bamboozle us in during the celebrations (he'll have about three years if the last time is anything to go by). Go the Eurosceptic should hope for dignified defeat at the hands of Brazil in the semi-final.

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There is no particular point to this post except as a sort of primer.

In a few minutes, I shall be commencing my journey to Cardiff to watch my team, Chelsea play in the FA Cup Final.

It is significant in that the result may be reflected in the ferocity or otherwise of my next few postings.

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To be a bit more serious about it, and having thought about it some more, I think that my fellow Brian (Linse) is probably right to talk about "soccer", and that I should stop calling it "football". In fact I think we should all stop calling anything "football", without qualification, unless the context makes it entirely clear which variety we're talking about. There are just so many different varieties. American, "Association" (soccer!), Gaelic, Australian Rules, rugby (union and league), and many, many more I'm sure. Soccer/football is, I now accept, one of those conundra that require that English – English English, I mean - be spoken differently, by the English, in order for us to make sense elsewhere in the Anglosphere.

In Germany, they call soccer "fussball" with the "ss" being done as a Germanic squiggle, a word I smile at. And in the noted American TV sitcom Friends, what we here call "table football" is called "foozeball" (guess spelling). What's that about? ( I don't mean: horrid Americans bleah!!! I mean: what's it about? Why "fooze"? Is it some weird USA-German thing?)

Christopher Pellerito's comments earlier today about the relative dullness of the soccer that Americans get to see make a lot of sense. Here in Europe we note big differences in the national styles of the different national soccer leagues. The Italian league is shown regularly on British TV, on Channel 4, but I - and many others I talk to - can't stand it. It's too slow. It's like watching a cross between soccer and armchair philosophy. Hugely skilful, and no doubt hugely diverting to play, but not, for me at least, any fun to watch.

The British Premier League has recently gone from muddy cloggers to world class with the arrival in Britain of a mass of foreign players. A big moment in recent British social history, never mind sporting history, came recently when a British premier league club – I think it was David Carr's Chelsea – fielded a team for a Premier League game with no English players, or even British ones. I rather think we have the European Union to thank for this. The Premier League has always been fast and furious. Now it's also very skilful.

However, the ultimate in pace and skill may be the Spanish League, if that wondrous Real-Barca game was anything to go by, which maybe it isn't.

Interesting thing about France, though. They undoubtedly have the best soccer team in the world just now. Zinedine Zidane (who scored a very clever goal for Real against Barca on Tuesday) is probably most people's current pick as the best soccer player in the world. But, their league is financially rather feeble, and French clubs seldom figure in the later stages of the European Champions League. I think this may be an African thing. Much of the French team these days consists of players of francophone African origin. And African men, I rather think, and in contrast to white couch potatoes like me, love to play but don't get nearly so excited about just watching. And the original French French have never been that keen on merely watching soccer, compared say, to the British, the Germans, the Spanish or the Italians. Which is why there are so many superb Afro-French soccer players now playing in Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy, especially in Britain, and especially for Arsenal (the top London club, on course to win this year's Premier League title).

Brian Linse may also be pleased to know that I also like to watch American football - cheerleaders, million dollar one-off adverts and all - and bitterly regret that Britain's Channel 5 TV, which has extensive and often live and uncut American football coverage right up until the Superbowl, has stopped showing the Superbowl itself live, on account of Sky TV (Rupert Murdoch's British and European satellite TV operation) having bought that. C5 only shows a few highlights a day later. The good news, for a cheapskate like me who doesn't like paying for pay TV, is that Sky, having given "ITV Digital" such a roasting recently, is cutting back on its sports spending in the manner of a victorious army easing back on its ammunition budget. The England home games in the Six Nations rugby have lately only been shown in full on Sky. But now the Six Nations is reverting to being shown in its entirety, live and uncut, by the BBC, for which hurrah! And maybe C5 will also get the entire as-it-happens Superbowl back. If so, double hurrah.

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The Brians (Linse and Micklethwait) are going to argue right past each other on this soccer thing until they realize what the real problem is: Americans do not get, and have never gotten, The Real Deal when it comes to soccer. We are used to seeing baseball, basketball and hockey played at the highest level in the world; but Americans never get to see the very best soccer players as they toil away for the likes of AC Milan, Arsenal, Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, etc. The soccer [MLS and indoor mutations] that most Americans do get to see, frankly, DOES suck and IS rather boring, but I do enjoy tuning into the English Premiership, where 0-0 and 1-0 matches are the exception rather than the rule.

I think that American sports would do well to emulate some of the things they do in Europe! (And ask yourself, Mr. Linse, whether you really want to see scantily clad cheerleaders at a match between Paris St. Germain and Auxerre, for example.) I love the idea of "relegation" -- every year, the top few teams in one league and the bottom few teams in the next highest league have to switch places! Imagine Major League Baseball played under these terms -- instead of an American and National league that are equals, fashion an upper and a lower division. No more making excuses about small markets and such -- small market teams would mostly play each other in the lower division, occasionally getting bumped up to play the big boys.

I have been away from the Blogosphere for a while, because I recently moved from my native Detroit to Washington DC, but I did enjoy ringside seats for the weekend's, uh, festivities downtown. It is easy to dismiss the protestors as uninformed stooges duped by Chomskyite / Naderite garbage, and too many bloggers have already dwelled on their behavioral and rhetorical excesses for me to bother piling on. But I did come away with a few impressions of my own ...

-- there is an excellent book by Brink Lindsey (of The Cato Institute) called Against the Dead Hand: The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism. Lindsey points out that, while both proponents and critics of "globalization" talk as though globalization is happening at breakneck speed, nothing of the sort is actually occurring. The world is becoming more liberalized, but it is happening at a snail's pace. So what are all these people protesting against, exactly?

-- it seems fashionable at these protests to compare the plight of the Palestinians to that of the civil rights struggle in the US. More than one advocate described the Palestinians as "the [big N's] of the middle east." This is an idiotic and meritless comparison. The Civil Rights movement here was about creating individual liberties for African-Americans ... whereas the Palestinian question is about the conflicting claims of groups to govern a certain land mass. And regardless of whether the Palestinians get their own country, they are not much into individual liberty!

-- It's too bad none of the anti-IMF protesters knew what they were talking about (e.g. what the IMF is, what it does, who pays for it, etc.) because the IMF does deserve to be roundly roasted for creating a culture of global financial moral hazard. But hoisting a sign that reads: "IMF = International MoFo" doesn't cut it.

-- shouldn't a committed "anti-globalist" also oppose things like global government, the United Nations, etc.? Just a thought.

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Brian Linse says, among all the other things he said on Monday 22nd, that football (or "soccer" as he calls it) is boring. He proposes a number of USA-type "reforms" to rescue it from its current state of total global obscurity.

Personally I thought that the highlights I watched last night of Real Madrid's 0-2 first leg victory over Barcelona in Barcelona - an amazing result for Real, which virtually guarantees their place in the European Champions League final in Glasgow, against either Manchester United or Bayer Leverkusen - were about as good as sport can get without my own team being involved and winning gloriously.

But if you agree with the (Ain't No – pah!!) Bad Dude, probably because you are also an American, or perhaps because you think that blogging and politics and whatnot are more important than "soccer", then go to Soccernet Europe (the "soccer" disease is spreading I'm afraid) to find out how boring football is when Stefan Effenberg is involved.

Effenberg is currently out of the Bayern Munich line-up for having (a) "long been a controversial figure" and now (b) for saying in a recent interview that unemployment benefit should be cut, and then refusing to take it back.

(My thanks to Antoine Clarke for pointing me to this story.)

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Who cares about Israel playing Godzilla on the Palestinians? Record loss at Lloyd's? Bury it on page 7. Are the Tamil Tigers coming in from the cold in Sri Lanka? Sorry, you seem to have mistaken me for someone who gives a damn.

England football captain and Spice husband David Beckham has broken a bone!

Oh the humanity! The horror... the horror...

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It's important for us libertarians to celebrate the fun that free people have and the good that they do, and not just to bitch about politics.

Natalija Radic is handling pornography very capably, I'm sure we'd all agree. Dale Amon and I have done stuff about music. Science and technology have been celebrated here, by both David Carr and Perry de Havilland.

But sport is one of life's great pleasures, both to do and to watch others doing. Yet sport has here mostly been complained about, by David again, picking on a sport he doesn't like.

Last weekend's sport was, for me, mostly good, but it started badly. I awoke on Saturday to learn from my Ceefax that England had just been slaughtered in a one-day cricket game by New Zealand. Was this an omen? At Twickenham later in the day, England were to play Ireland at rugby and experts were tipping England to win heavily. But Ireland killed Wales two weeks back, and the last time heavily-tipped England played Ireland, Ireland won. Might they sneak it again? No worries. England routed Ireland with a huge first half display (31-6) and went on to win 45-11 despite appearing to lose interest with half an hour still to go.

With this win England went top of the world rugby rankings, jumping ahead of … New Zealand! I can remember when England couldn't lose at cricket to New Zealand in their worst nightmares, and couldn't win at rugby against New Zealand in their wildest dreams. The New Zealand rugby team, remember, is no mere gaggle of sporty blokes who happen to like a bit of rough-and-tumble on a Saturday afternoon. This is the mighty All Blacks, the very definition of New Zealand nationhood and manhood. And now England are better than them. But worse at cricket. Strange times.

Chelsea, the club which plays the sport (football) which David Carr does like to watch, were meanwhile beating Depressing Northern Town Who Used To Be Far Better 3-1 in the sixth round of the FA Cup, and on Sunday my Tottenham Hotspur beat Post-Industrial Wasteland Rovers 4-0. Chelsea and Spurs were then drawn against each other in the quarter-finals. I'll keep you posted about that, and perhaps David will too.

On a more serious note, I'm struck by the parallels between what David was objecting to about the Olympics and what Natalija's opponents were saying about pornography. Both were opposing the thing in question because of what it looked like, and what it might lead to. Porn is sometimes faked up to look like something truly nasty - non-consenting sexual aggression - and hence might lead to that truly nasty thing for real. And sport often looks like Nazis being nasty, so what might that lead to?

But isn't the point of sport that it takes a whole facet of the human psyche (especially the male human psyche) and sucks it into a morally neutral cul-de-sac with no real-world consequences? Those athletes marching through the stadium with their flags and anthems, or those fans baying in hideous, collectivist unison may be behaving a lot like Nazis, but they are not in fact Nazis. Sports fans like me talk about people getting "slaughtered", "routed" or "murdered" (see above), but that's only metaphorical. No actual countries are going to be invaded. No Jews are going to be gassed. Okay, sport plays with psychological fire, and sometimes it gets out of hand. In South America, footballers miss crucial World Cup penalties and get murdered by crazed fans. In Britain, unpleasant political collectivists spend their lives trying to turn the pseudo-mayhem of football into the real thing. But the real-world mayhem that results is nothing compared to the horrors of big-time political collectivism, in those miserable parts of the world where such stuff still matters.

In the fantasies of collectivist politicians, huge crowds shouting in huge stadiums only shout in their honour. Such persons must hear the roars in a British football stadium with something close to despair. They slog away at organising their silly political meetings and party rallies, and at most a few hundred political hacks and obsessives show up. Yet thousands turn out for a dreary, lower division football game. The biggest crowd in Europe in recent years was in Paris, but it wasn't for any politician; it was when France won the World Cup.

I believe that in Iran not long ago, the government made a collective, collectivist fool of itself by trying and failing to stop an international football match. Too much collective adoration of something that wasn't them or their boring and annoying opinions, you see. Sport only gets political if the politicians take against its essentially non-political nature, or try to use it by pretending that the crowds are really theirs. Wise politicians, even collectivist ones, leave well alone. At least, they say to themselves, the crowds aren't shouting against us. (Might that be why some libertarians also dislike sport? Big crowds expressing hostility to the wrong things?)

Most sports fans know that sport is only sport. They go mad, scream at each other, smash into each other (if they're playing), … and then meet up for a drink afterwards. It may look nasty for the duration, but it's only a bit of fun, to be wallowed in when your team wins and shrugged off as only a game when they lose. We're just blowing off steam. It's not real. Well, it is real. In fact it's great. It's great fun. But only, in the end, that.

Which is exactly the libertarian defence of pornography. That too only has a tiny few nasty real-world consequences. Mostly that too is just fun.

With sport as with porn, we libertarians should draw our lines carefully. On the one hand, there is that which merely looks evil, might lead to evil, might evoke memories of evil, might lead people down the path towards evil, and which is perhaps therefore in some sense morally evil now. We can argue about the nuances of all that, but no one should be sent to prison if they lose such arguments. And then there's that which is uncontroversially, aggressively, definitely evil, now, which should be prevented or failing that be punished, either by the law or by force of arms.

I refuse to end on that grim note. To end instead with some more consequence-free fun and to ram home just how much fun sport can be, let me tell you what my sporting highlight of the weekend ended up being. It happened not in a rugby game, or a football or cricket game, but in David's accursed Winter Sports. The however-many-metres-it-was five blokes' skating race. Four blokes were racing in a bunch for the medals. Bloke five, an Australian, was way behind. Then, just as they were all about to flash over the winning line, blokes one, two, three and four all collided with each other in a crazy, slip-sliding tangle. Bloke five, being far enough behind to skate around it all, but not too far behind, won. The silver and bronze medallists got their gongs by sliding over the line horizontally. David would surely have enjoyed that and maybe he did.

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Fellow Samizdata contributor and cunning shyster to the cognoscenti David Carr has written recently and at length why he dislikes the Olympics and I agree with some of his remarks.

However I do not find the Olympics entirely without its attractions...

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Despite my best efforts to filter out the Olympics, the bru-haha about the Skating Gold Medal has managed to show up as a blip on my radar screen. If I have got this straight, a Russian pair was awarded the Gold and a Canadian pair the silver only that seems to have outraged the whole world for some reason (there is a war on, you know) so a gaggle of IOC apparatchicks went into a furious round of secret investigations and deals were made in various smoke-free rooms and, voila, now the Canadians have the Gold medal instead. Apparently the judges got it all wrong

Which leads me to a question: how does anybody know?

First of all, skating is not a sport. It is a hobby; a genteel pastime, especially when it's called 'Ice Dance' which is skating for homosexuals

Secondly, how does anybody know who 'won'? In football, Team A scores more goals then Team B. Simple. Team A has won. In Boxing, Fighter A is parading around the ring holding a belt while Fighter B is being carried out feet first. Fighter A has won. In swimming, Swimmer A makes his way across the pool quicker then Swimmer B. No arguments; Swimmer A has won

Now skating: Couple A does some circles, triple salkos and pirhouettes. Couple B does some circles, triple salkos and pihouettes. And the winner is...??????

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One of my one of my overriding concerns over the next couple of weeks is to avoid any TV coverage of the latest outbreak of 'Olympic-itis' from Salt Lake City. The last thing I want to do with what little and precious spare time I have at the moment is to spend it watching a bunch of po-faced fitness fanatics running up and down mountains and listening to a wailing selection of national anthems most of which sound like Turkey's entry for the Eurovision Song Contest.

That's what it all feels like to me: Eurovision on steroids, which is ironic given the Cromwellian intolerance of the IOC for any of their participants swallowing so much as a paracetamol lest it give any of them an 'unfair advantage'. But I say let them take all the steroids they like. Who cares if they grow horns? In fact, let them grow six titties, four sets of genitals, a spare arse and a third leg. At least it would make the relay races interesting and that I would pay to see.

Short of that I think I'll pass because former footsoldiers of the East German secret police dressed in sequin jumpsuits and doing triple-salkos is the very antithesis of my idea of entertainment and is it just me or is there something disturbingly reminiscent of the Nuremburg Rallies in those torchlit opening ceremonies? For sure the sight of all those glowing hopefuls being paraded around in their humiliating 'national costumes' with a 'Strength-Through-Joy' grin on their faces has a jumper-over-the-head factor of about 50. Those about to die of embarrassment, salute you!

I suppose it would be extravagantly churlish of me not to mention the transformation of Olympic events from taxpayer boondoggle to corporate sponsor-fest which, at least, has put a stop to the bankrupting of cities in which the spandex-circus was unfortunate enough to land. In those days they were not so much athletes as locusts in lycra, devastating a whole landscape before buggering off and leaving behind grand white-elephant stadia like monuments of a long lost race.

But corporatisation has had the unfortunate side-effect of morphing the games from dull and condescending expressions of post-war aspiration to multi-culti clappy-happy jamborees in which we are all supposed to enthusiastically join in North Korean style.

The Olympic Games are an expression of 20th century state collectivism; the manifestation of a time when 'golden youth' had to have spiffing lungs and rippling muscles in order to be productive citizens, a healthy individual meant a healthy polity and a nations worth could be accurately measured by how far its citizens could chuck a rock. The fact that the British usually collect less medals than an average French combat division is one of the many reason why I love this country.

The Olympic Games is an idea that has outlived its usefulness. At best it is arcane, at worst it is faintly sinister and, even if it were neither of those things, it would still be a dreary, nauseating waste of time.

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Ah, those famous lines from the Stealer's Wheel. Brendan Nyhan over on American Prospect drew my attention to the fact that Ted Kennedy was not the only one making a total ass of himself over the meaning of a game of American football.

Now there was a time when Rush Limbaugh was actually witty and insightful, hell I went to see his show live once in New York some years back. Yet after listening to his radio remarks (available via the Brendan Nyhan article linked above) I am forced to the conclusion that Rush has finally completed his journey from right wing punditry's doyen to its doofus. I guess the bailiffs must have come calling and repossessed that 'talent on loan from God'.

Limbaugh contends that because the Patriots Football Team market themselves to 'the soccer mom's season ticket base' as a team rather than by emphasising the individual players, then the Patriots are in fact 'socialist'. Never mind that it is just a capitalist marketing ploy, never mind that socialism is a system of mandatory collective organisation (unlike a voluntary football team of millionaire players).

And so there we have it: Rush Limbaugh and Edward Kennedy in agreement as to what the Patriots Football Team actually represents. Two of a kind: a brotherhood of absurdity, spouting fallacies that must surely reduce anyone who actually knows what the word socialist really means to either stunned silence or embarrassed laughter.

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Perry (below) makes reference to the idiotic comments of US Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) -- the folks at Best of the Web have also had some fun with this one -- see today's Stupidity Watch. But this is not the first time that Kennedy botched a sports analogy with an absurd malapropism. In 1998, he managed to refer to fellow Democrats Richard Gephardt and Tom Daschle as "the Sammy Sooser [sic] and Mike McGwire [sic!]" of politics during a campaign stump session. (For our European readers, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire play baseball, a distant cousin of cricket played by men in pajamas.)

Kennedy's staffers must hand him this stuff -- he probably didn't know his constituent team had won the Super Bowl until his interns told him -- but what is more disturbing is his suggestion that we are fighting against "individualism." I am still trying to think of a single aspect of OBL's ideology that favors individual rights over collectivism. And, as Perry astutely observes, the New England players honed their skills and negotiated their robust contracts in a spirit of self interest, not "sacrifice to a greater cause."

One word for you, Senator: O'Doul's!

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Honourless buffoon Senator Ted Kennedy read into the Congressional Record, as a result of a sports event, the following example of breathtaking absurdity.

''At a time when our entire country is banding together and facing down individualism, the Patriots set a wonderful example, showing us all what is possible when we work together, believe in each other, and sacrifice for the greater good.''

And so we are lead to believe that a voluntary collaboration of free individuals, working for personal profit, a great deal of profit at that, is a rejection of individualism and an affirmation of collectivism. And what exactly are these sportsmen supposed to have 'sacrificed' in the course of their highly paid jobs?

[Update: Mickey Kaus has also picked up on this nincompoopery]

[Updated update: I am glad to see everyone and their brother in the blogosphere has picked up on this floridly ludicrous rant by the dishonourable 'gentleman' from Massachusetts]