Afternoon:
8°c
Murray, or not Murray? That's not a question
"Andy Murray or Rafael Nadal?" asks a poll on the Sun's website. "Who is the better tennis player?"
This enquiry, apparently designed to elicit personal details of commercial use to Tesco, calls itself a "one-minute poll", yet after hours of pondering I'm no nearer an answer.
On the one hand is the Scot, who has yet to win a major title and lost so fecklessly to Marin Cilic in New York. On the other is the Spaniard with six Grand Slam titles, and (dodgy knees permitting) potentially the greatest player ever.
There hasn't been a teaser like this since Anthea Turner asked TV-AM viewers to ring a premium rate phone line on the matter of whether the Academy Awards are known as the Olives, the Oscars or the Oswalds.
Oi ITV! Without Pleat it's all just common sense
Camels of the international footballing desert that we are, it ill behoves England fans to whinge about the Croat banquet that will sustain us through the barren sands that inevitably lie ahead.
Moaning is unavoidable, however, about ITV's coverage of the Wembley triumph. Without David Pleat, it just didn't feel right.
For an eon the network's purpose has been to act as a pressure cooker valve, allowing the viewer to release steam at the idiocy and so alleviate the tension. With Pleaty so cruelly sidelined in favour of the unnervingly sensible Jim Beglin, it now achieves a level of competence that betrays its raison d'etre.
I miss the old boy dreadfully — admittedly in much the way you imagine a patient misses a gangrenous amputated limb — and the prospect of England World Cup games without him is very hard to take.
In Caster's case, I'm a bit of a glam knocker
With the uncertainty about her gender still to be resolved (albeit she'll be allowed to keep her gold medal either way), South African 800m world champion Caster Semenya seizes the initiative.
Ms Semenya stars on the front of her country's top celeb magazine, You, in a glamourous slinky black dress, festooned with bling, and with her hair alluruingly frizzed. “Wow,” exclaims the headline. “Look At Caster Now!” Indeed.
Even before the results of medical tests are revealed, this settles it once and for all — it's the most persuasive piece of gender-related pictorial evidence since Frank Bruno played Juliet to Lenny Henry's Romeo in that Comic Relief sketch.
At least Robin's kept up his perfect record
As for the man who ended Rafa's unbeaten French Open record, Robin Soderling continues to struggle with Roger Federer.
The Swiss star, having beaten him in the Paris final and then at Wimbledon, repeated the trick in New York yesterday, and Soderling has now lost all 12 of his matches with the Fed.
For inspiration, he is directed to one of tennis's wittier quotes (not a crowded field).
“And let that be a lesson to you all,” the most flamboyant star of the late 1970s told the crowd on ending his run of 16 straight defeats to Jimmy Connors in 1979.
“Nobody beats Vitas Gerualitis 17 times in a row.”
