Tonight:
4°c
The radio silence could shatter a titanium eardrum, the papers couldn't be less intrigued, and it's highly unlikely John Motson would have picked it for what will blessedly be his FA Cup Final finale. No one outside the two cities seems bothered about tomorrow's encounter between Portsmouth and Cardiff, in fact, and I can't understand why.
This, to me, is the most engaging pairing in memory, and exactly what a Cup final should be . . . not a consolation for whichever Big Four member needs to assuage a spoilt, complacent fan base after a duff season, but a meeting between two sets of supporters who will walk down Wembley Way suspecting, with compelling realism, that they will never again be involved in a game of equivalent stature.
Let us hope the meeting isn't quite as intimate as some of them might wish. These are two of our more opinionated supporterships, and any failure of policing could enable scenes to make central Manchester on Wednesday (of which more below) resemble the Batley and Spen Operatic Society's garden fete.
If there's one thing at which the Metropolitan Police are competent, however, it is the herding of rival fans and, on the assumption that tomorrow passes without unseemly exchanges of Anglo-Welsh pleasantries, I find myself anticipating the game with rare relish.
For this is a throwback to a distant age when the Cup was a barely less lustrous trophy than the League championship, and neutrals would affix themselves to the sofa at noon to luxuriate in such Cup final build-up delicacies as the Celebrity Fan Interview.
Extensive internet research reveals that each club has precisely three "famous fans". For Portsmouth, that excellent football and boxing commentator Ian Darke is joined by dear old Fred "How!" Dineage and erstwhile Magpie front man Tommy Boyd.
For Cardiff, it's arguably worse. Apart from the Super Furry Animals, all they have is the happily rehabilitated, onetime glove puppet-fiddler Philip Schofield and the ever preposterous Lord Neil Kinnock.
Any pre-match chatting will hardly echo the red carpet on Oscar night, then, and therein lies the essence of the fixture's charm - the reminder it offers that, for all the disdainful snobbery and indifference towards it in the media, football belongs at heart to those who trudge along fortnight after fortnight not to watch phalanxes of glamorous Croesuses (more correctly Croesi) performing for a global audience; but through the irrational, sometimes alarming love they have for their team despite (or even because of) its minimal prospects of ever reaching a Wembley showcase.
There are a couple of human interest stories, meanwhile, with Cardiff chairman Peter Ridsdale seeking phantasmal salvation for his ruination of Leeds United, and Harry Redknapp (not poised to leave Portsmouth after all, we're assured) and the family needing a lift after the death of his wife's twin sister, Frank Lampard's mum.
I hope and expect that Portsmouth will prevail by a single goal in what promises to be a cagey, disjointed, ugly, massively tense and riveting game. Either way, the disbelieving ecstasy of the victors guarantees the 2008 Cup final a place alongside the most emotional and memorable ones of my lifetime, all won by the least glitzy of finalists - Sunderland shocking Leeds in 1973, Ipswich humbling Arsenal in 1978, Coventry startling Spurs in 1987, and Wimbledon mugging Liverpool a year later.
I intend to make the most of it. Seldom have we seen its like before, and more than likely we never will again.
Dowie is a poor man's Zinedine Zidane
Here in Shepherds Bush, an air of mystification interrupts the tranquillity as we go about our business of mugging each other at knifepoint.
What on earth, we wonder, do Bernie Ecclestone and Flavio Briatore think they're doing?
A few days ago, word was that they wished to hire Zinedine Zidane to help return QPR to the Premier League.
This week, this newly plutocratic club unveiled Iain Dowie - yup, that one, the one who gets sacked more often than Paris Hilton - as the new manager.
I suppose it's an easy enough mistake. I once went out intending to buy my wife a white gold ring from Georg Jensen of Bond Street for the anniversary, and came home with some schmochna from Claire's Accessories.
I won't distress you with an account of what ensued, but if I were a billionaire QPR co-owner I'd be a little nervous about the reception this priceless gift to the fans might provoke.
Fans' migration was like watching a wildlife show
Regrettable as the scrapping between Rangers fans and police evidently was, any ritualistical blethering about football violence misses the point.
The important detail isn't that a few hundred chaps who'd had a drop of drink became irate when the jumbo screen packed up five minutes into the UEFA Cup Final they deservedly lost.
What's so fascinating is that an estimated 150,000 Glaswegians made the journey for a game they knew they couldn't possibly watch at the City of Manchester Stadium, partly because they didn't have tickets, and partly because the capacity is 48,000.
There's something profoundly moving about this mass exodus. This is purely a wildlife phenomenon - like the annual migration of emperor penguins - and the police, the Scottish FA and UEFA should leave well alone. It's a matter for David Attenborough, and nobody else.
Diminutive Henin was a giant in a game dominated by six-footers
Justine Henin's retirement at 25 deprives tennis of its most elegant female star and global sport of one its great anomalies. Just when the women's game was falling into the Amazonian clutches of the six-foot powerhouses, she emerged as a dominant force despite being only 5ft 5in.
Seeing her at the net shaking hands with one of the Williamses, Maria Sharapova or Lindsay Davenport reminded you of the old-class system sketch featuring John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett.
However, unlike the latter she never knew her place and, thanks primarily to the most exquisite onehanded backhand, she hogged the world No1 ranking. She was always easier to admire than to like, all those well-documented personal griefs (the death of her mother, the recentlyended estrangement from her father and siblings, the failure of her marriage) imbuing her with a distant aura that could look like superiority. Then again, she was superior to everyone else.
Other No1s who quit too young, such as Davenport, Jennifer Capriati and Martina Hingis, later realised they couldn't cope without the very pressure that drove them to retire, and returned.
A feeling in my bones says that, in a couple of years and still young enough to add to her seven Major titles, Henin will be back. But if not, she will be remembered as one of the most naturally gifted and ferociously competitive women who ever raised a racket.
