Afternoon:
8°c
How we can stop Ade's high-low silver whining
In a bid to resolve the dispute now threatening to sully Emannuel Adebayor's departure from Arsenal, I have been researching the value of rare coinage.
For some reason, Arsenal fans seem peeved that, despite signing such a lucrative contract with Manchester City, Emannuel is demanding a £2million loyalty payment on the technical grounds that he never asked for a transfer. It's almost as if they aren't convinced about the Togolese striker's fidelity to the badge.
The solution is easy, so long as Arsenal can round up enough 1878 US half dollars featuring the same flaw on the one purchased not long ago at auction by one Frank Zapushek of Bloomington, Indiana for $800, but then valued at a little over $100,000. According to my calculations, 30 pieces of this particular silver comes to exactly £2m, which should satisfy honour on all sides.
Golf's Olympic aim not ruined by golden oldie
A morose conclusion to The Open at Turnberry, with the usual celebratory procession replaced by a funeral cortege.
There have been noisier crowds in White Hart Lane's West Stand on Yom Kippur than that which sullenly accompanied poor Tom Watson over those four play-off holes. Yet however embarrassingly anticlimactic, his collapse must be a relief so far as golf's ambition to become an Olympic event in 2016 is concerned. Had the near 60-year-old lifted the Claret Jug, the pressure to bracket the game with snooker, darts and skittles as a leisure pursuit might have become irresistible.
Tell us a tale Ian, but just don't do it again
Speaking of senescence, what has happened to the mind of arguably Australia's greatest cricket captain?
During the first Test match, Ian Chappell treated Test Match Special to a tale about Dennis Lillee defying him, during the 1972 Ashes series, by insisting he would bowl as much as he chose.
On Saturday, Ian trotted out the identical story, without a hint of awareness of the previous recital. Even Peter Ustinov waited a year before repeating hilarious anecdotes on Parkinson. On the other hand, mild senility has never been a bar to appearing on TMS, so we wish him well.
Leave the knockout talk to champ Amir
Eccentricity also plagues The Times, where a malfunction in the automated subbing system has allowed the word “unpretentious” to appear, without irony-denoting italics, under the byline of Simon Barnes.
Writing, before Amir Khan's successful world title challenge, Simon observed that: “In an utterly unpretentious, unselfconscious way, Khan has demonstrated time and time again that British Muslim is not an oxymoron.”
Er, did anyone vaguely normal ever think it was? Before we bid farewell to unpretension, let us merrily recall that it was Simon who once observed that “Roger Federer is as myriad-minded as Shakespeare ever was.”
