Morning:
8°c
If the BBC wishes to refresh the Sports Personality of the Year show that perennially rivals Her Majesty's speech as the electrifying highlight of the December schedules, I have a suggestion.
Jettison those excruciating interviews in which Gary Lineker elicits mumbling ineloquence from members of the audience, and fill the time with a new award for Most Phenomenally Cretinous Administrator of the Year.
Strictly speaking, this should be the show's climax, because while there is seldom a single worthy contender for Personality, any gong for cack-handed, clueless and fiascoid administration will always be hotly contested. On current form, needless to say, the warm ante-post favourite would be the Rugby Football Union, whose handling of Martin Johnson's appointment as England team manager brings to mind a coalition of the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges and the Keystone Kops trying to defuse a potentially catastrophic bout of India-Pakistan brinksmanship on the Kashmiri border.
That Johnson is probably the right man for the job is not the point. The fact that Juande Ramos is clearly a better football coach than Martin Jol never excused how the latter was maltreated by Tottenham, and the same goes for the inexcusably callous way in which Brian Ashton has been humiliated by the RFU. Ashton is pondering the offer to head an academy, we are told, but it shouldn't have taken him two seconds to demand the lavish pay-off to which this blatant constructive dismissal entitles him. He may not be the greatest coach ever to oversee the chasing of the egg, but leading England to a World Cup Final entitled to him a minimum of professional courtesy.
Although the RFU leads this year's 'Most Phenomenally' field, it faces serious challenges from the Premier League's Richard Scudamore, nominated for the 39th step, and from the British Olympic Association's Simon Clegg for his swiftly dropped plan to gag Olympians from criticising Chinese human rights. Of Max Mosley, enough has been written already.
Were there also a new Lifetime Incompetence award, it would be harder still to pick a winner. With an historic portfolio that includes the Phil Scolari cock up, the new Wembley debacle, the appointments of Graham Taylor, Kevin Keegan and Steve McClaren, and the Eriksson-Palios-Faria Alam double header, the claims of the Football Association speak for themselves.
The Lawn Tennis Association have a shot based on decades of having nothing to show from the colossal income it derives from Wimbledon. The in-bred halfwits collective still generally known as the Jockey Club demand consideration for their feckless cowardice in failing to address racing's endemic corruption. Athletics gave us the sublime embarrassment of Pickett's Lock and the loss of a World Championships, and it was the England and Wales Cricket Board's crowning achievement to permit live domestic Test coverage to go to Sky, where six people now watch it, at the moment the sport's popularity peaked following the Ashes of 2005.
Many of us are addicted to banging on about the failures of British sportsmen and women at world level, and with compelling reason.
But it seems to me that the problem devolves less from lack of individual talent and application than the absolute uselessness of those paid fortunes to organise their efforts. As state broadcaster, it is the BBC's duty to recognise the only sporting area in which we truly lead the world.
Calzaghe's timing is off by years as he faces lose-lose fight in Vegas
Mention of Sports Personality of the Year brings us to 2007 winner Joe Calzaghe, who received the statuette from Ricky Hatton in Las Vegas the day after the latter was mashed up by Floyd Mayweather.
Calzhage is back in Vegas to fight Bernard Hopkins in the early hours of Sunday (our time). The general feeling is he should prove too strong and relentless for the geriatric American, although even at 43 Hopkins, whose stellar career includes wins over Oscar de la Hoya and Felix Trinidad, will be cagey, clever and hard to hit.
This looks like a lose-lose fight for Calzaghe. A victory will be put down to Hopkins's senescence, and if he yields his unbeaten record to the Methuselah of the ring he'll look a proper klutz.
This is a fight he should have had years ago, because there is more glory in losing to a great fighter in his prime, as Hatton understands, than beating one way past his best. My prediction - and I am to punditry what Anthea Turner is to quantum mechanics - is that Calzaghe will wear Hopkins down late on, possibly stopping him in the 10th or 11th. If so it will be a Pyrrhic victory.
If not - and God help him fighting a Vegas legend in Vegas if it goes to the judges - his reputation will evaporate, and he will reflect on the folly of making the right match at the wrong time.
Forgive Cruyff for his Dutch courage
One of football's enduring mysteries is finally solved. The reason Johan Cruyff missed the 1978 World Cup in Argentina wasn't the usual internecine warfare that afflicts Holland squads or political distaste for General Galtieri's junta, but an attempted kidnap in Barcelona the previous year in which he and his family were tied up at gunpoint.
"It was the moment to leave football," he said. "And I couldn't play in the World Cup after this."
I hope the Dutch will now forgive his absenteeism, but given how agonisingly close they came without him - Robbie Rensenbrink hit the post with seconds of normal time left in the final - I doubt it. With Cruyff playing, their eventual 3-1 defeat to the hosts would surely have been reversed. And asked whether even their greatest player's life was worth risking for a World Cup, every true football supporter would say the same. Not half.
Cop strop unwise for Redknapp
Does anyone alive do synthetic indignation with the brio of Harry Redknapp who is suing City of London police over that recent arrest, in connection with the unending corruption investigation, which he insists cost him the job of England coach.
What chance he'd have had but for being nicked I cannot say.
Offered the choice between him and Fabio Capello, what could anyone do but suck a pencil and have a long, hard think?
But you have to love honest Arry's chutzpah.
"Attack is the best form of defence" is a battle plan that sometimes works in football (although not for the Arsenal).
Whether it is ever effective with the police, we will have to wait and see.
