Morning:
6°c
What golden days these are for the sporting judicial intersect as British sport's top-ranked pariahs come together in the Strand. We are a little ahead of ourselves, in fact. But should Max Mosley's spirited privacy action against the News Of The World last until Wednesday, he may bump into Dwain Chambers in a High Court corridor as the latter arrives to challenge his lifetime Olympic ban.
Should this meeting take place, it's touching to picture an empathetic hug between the crimson-buttocked motorsport supremo and the shamed yet cocksure sprinter. For these two men, yoked as they are by the brazen refusal to buckle beneath the weight of public distaste, are kindred souls.
If anything might ruin this pretty scene, it is envy. Max has every right to be jealous of the younger man's capacity to satisfy any sadomasochistic craving for pain and humiliation without having to pay anyone a bean.
All Dwain needs do to sate that urge is turn up at a stadium, as on Saturday when winning the Olympic 100metres qualifier in Birmingham in a highly impressive 10.00 seconds.
I can't recall any British Olympian plastering a digital read-out with such a gorgeously round number since Torvill & Dean.
If the reaction to this perfect ten was a shade less ecstatic, precisely why his fellow athletes are so livid about Dwain's legal battle is open to debate.
They would no doubt reiterate the obvious point he is a cheat, an embarrassment to the sport, etc, etc. Yet you wonder whether their high-minded disdain for him is leavened by self-interest.
It isn't so much that Dwain's critics may have used outlawed substances themselves, even if logic and the law of averages suggest that some have.
It's more that his refusal to slink quietly away renders athletics a more laughably pointless spectator sport than ever. If he'd only accept the rules and bugger off into seclusion, his colleagues apparently believe, the public are more likely to turn a collective blind eye to the belief that many athletics medallists will have had some help from the lab.
Every time I try to take the moral high ground over this issue, I'm overcome with altitude sickness. The nausea stems from the certain knowledge that, were I a young athlete I would take anything to make me quicker so long as the odds favoured me over the testers.
And every time I hear an administrator or retired runner reiterate that "the overwhelming majority" of athletes are clean, I smile wanly and reflect that the vast majority of athletes don't reach Olympic finals, let alone the medal rostrum.
Last year, after confessing to taking no fewer than seven banned substances, Dwain was asked whether a clean athlete could beat a drugtaker in an Olympic final.
"It's possible," he replied.
"But the person that's taken drugs has to be having a real bad day." Doesn't that ring truer than the ritualistic reassurances about the cleanliness of athletics and the efficacy of the testing that failed to collar the newly-released Marion Jones on scores of occasions?
So I cannot blame Chambers for trying to get away with what the relentless lowering of the world 100m record suggests to some that other sprinters are still getting away with.
Indeed, I find myself rooting for him in his court case as strongly as for Mosley in his. The only genuine mistake each made was being caught for an offence, against overly-draconian sporting regulations ban in one case and petit bourgeois sexual mores in the other, that would have had less severe repercussions in a less shrill and hypocritical country than our own.
Tottenham should be gunning for Adebayor
The history of Tottenham-Arsenal transfer dealings is not a happy one for fans of the former. From Spurs, the Gunners took Pat Jennings for thruppence (what an error they made when he had only about 29 peak years left in him) and later Sol Campbell. In return they gave us Willie Young (better they'd given us cholera).
Of the legendary day on which Emmanuel Petit came to White Hart Lane to discuss terms, borrowed some cash for a taxi to the airport, took it straight to Highbury and signed there, we need never speak again. High time, then, to redress this imbalance. For reasons that may yet become apparent, Spurs appear determined to start the season with neither of their best strikers. Dimitar Berbatov is seemingly en route to Old Trafford and Robbie Keane to Anfield.
Meanwhile, according to reports, the number of bids Arsenal have received so far this summer for Emmanuel Adebayor is zero.
Must I spell this out? The alleged £30million fee for Adebayor may be steep, but after a little haggling he wouldn't cost too much more than United seem prepared to pay for the indolent Bulgar.
The last thing Spurs chairman Daniel Levy will want is to present himself as someone who'd rather pocket a profit than adequately replace a superstar. Of course it's questionable that Adebayor would countenance joining a much smaller club. But as Max Mosley would be the first to agree, nothing was ever lost by taking a crack.
Open field gives Rose a major incentive
A decade after he announced himself to the world in such spectacular fashion, Justin Rose is poised to play in a Royal Birkdale Open again. In 1998, as a 17-year-old amateur, Justin contrived to finish fourth - a miraculously precocious performance that only began to make sense once you noticed the faint South African twang in his voice.
His 10-year journey since has lacked the rich variety of Odysseus's return to Ithaca. Although Rose has risen into the world's top 10, the only siren song to which he's succumbed has been the melody of genteel defeat after brief challenges for major titles.
It's high time for something epic. If the memory of that staggering debut doesn't inspire him, perhaps the absence of Tiger Woods will. Without Woods and his domineering intensity, this is the most open Open in memory, and the best chance for a first major Rose may have for a very long time.
Lord's has become a pain game
Please God, Sir Allen Stanford and his chopper were nowhere near Lord's this weekend, because if the Texan Twenty20 baron found Test cricket boring before, after seeing yesterday's play, he would view it as belonging less on a grass field than a dock in The Hague.
It was torture. With South Africa scoring little over 200 in the day, for the loss of one wicket, what wouldn't Michael Vaughan have given for a fit Andrew Flintoff putting a bit of bite into a England attack?
For the purist, Test cricket's traditional right to stupefy with inactivity will have come as a blissful rebuke to the instant gratification of Twenty20. But then, as a certain High Court litigant of our acquaintance would confirm, the dividing line between pleasure and pain can be very narrow indeed.
