On The Sidelines

The 18-month feud between media moguls Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch took another bizarre twist this week with the American, in London for a lunch hosted by CNN, challenging his rival to get in the ring with him where they could sort out their differences once and for all.

"I'd like to meet him in the ring, I'll get the gloves out and face him," Turner told a bemused audience. "I'm more courageous than him and I'm younger but he's a pretty tough old codger and he might land a lucky punch."

The pair have been at each other's throats since Murdoch announced plans to launch a rival news network to CNN only to discover that Turner's alliance with Warners had deprived him of the cable outlets he needed to compete in the American market.

The dispute has been fairly entertaining since, with Murdoch reportedly instructing executives at Fox that Turner was not to be shown on screen during coverage of last year's World Series which featured his club, the Atlanta Braves.

Murdoch, whose New York paper ran a piece entitled "Is Ted Turner veering towards insanity", has since bought the LA Dodgers and the pair should have plenty of scope to target each other in baseball disputes over the coming year.

In the meantime, however, Turner is sticking to the old favourites. Asked in London whether it was true that he had compared the News International boss to Hitler, he replied "the phrase I used was: the former leader of the German Reich".

These, it is good to remember, are the people that are going to get to decide what we get to watch and when we see it over the next decade or so.

One of the sports organisations to do best out of its dealing with Murdoch is, of course, Manchester United. Apart from the millions they have made from the television deal with Sky directly, the club have been at the forefront of building their brand image on the back of the greatly increased exposure that the Premiership has received in recent years and while others struggle to play catch up, at Old Trafford they're already planning the next stage of the commercial empire's expansion.

Up to now English clubs have had a pretty straightforward attitude to sponsors with most receiving significant backing from just two major companies - a kit manufacturer and one other whose names goes on the shirts.

After finally mastering playing in the Champions League, though, United are now set to emulate the competition's commercial structure with the club currently looking to establish a "Manchester United family" of brands when their current deal with Sharp runs out at the end of the season.

Around eight areas will be targeted in much the same they are by UEFA with, perhaps, manufacturers of electronic goods, soft drinks, beer, cars, confectionary and suppliers of financial services all getting a chance to cut themselves in on the action - for a price.

"We want to develop a main sponsor, a technical sponsor and eight other sponsors," says Peter Kenyon, the Deputy Chief Executive at Old Trafford. Industry experts estimate that the move will mean a jump in revenue of this type increasing five fold from around £1.25 million for this season.

United also come out well from a report commissioned by UBS bank and carried out by Dr Bill Gerrard of Leeds University on the English transfer market over the last seven years.

According to Dr Gerrard the Reds did well when they signed Henning Berg and Teddy Sheringham for the fees they paid while Tottenham, often criticised over the past couple of years for putting commercial before footballing success, were done when they paid a total of £13.5 million for John Scales, Les Ferdinand and Ruel Fox.

According to the report, which valued players according to their age, career record and the timing of the transfer, Ferdinand should have cost the Londoners £4.3 million while Aston Villa should have paid no more than £5.5 million for Stan Collymore.

One of the best value buys of the summer according to the report, meanwhile, was that of Shay Given by Newcastle United.

Still on Manchester United, or more precisely, on Old Trafford, an under-11 team drawn from Schools Rugby league teams in the Dublin area will play against a side from Scotland this afternoon as a curtain raiser for the second test match between Great Britain and Australia.

Captained by Brian Cullen of Ballycragh in Tallaght, the squad of 16 includes three girls, Melissa Ryan, Sara Lawlor and Amanda Richardson. In addition to team officials a party of around 80 are travelling over to cheer them on.

David Hopkin, bought from Crystal Palace by Leeds over the summer was another player to be singled out by Dr Gerrard as being somewhat over-priced but having played in most of the club's games so far as well as scoring a couple of goals, the Scottish midfielder is already looking to be a better buy than Thomas Brolin who last week left the club with a substantial pay-off.

Between the initial fee, wages and the money he was given by George Graham simply to go away, the Swede ended up costing the Elland Road outfit £1.5 million per goal or £250,000 for every appearance.

Danny Kelly, presenter on Channel 4's Under The Moon and editor of Total Sport is part of a consortium attempting to raise £3 million in order to launch a new football daily on the internet.

It is hoped to launch the service in the new year when, for a limited period it will be available for free. The idea is that subscribers will be e-mailed general news, gossip and match reports every morning with customers able to specify which clubs they are particularly interested in reading about.

The Press Association, which supplies most of the run of the mill English soccer news contained in all of the Irish dailies as well as on the various television text services, is already signed up but Kelly hopes to improve on their coverage by recruiting local papers and fanzines as well.

It seemed that Colin Murphy's achievement in leading the Vietnamese to the semi-finals of the football tournament would be the whackiest story to emerge from the Southeast Asian games. However, the fast, and weird, talking ex-manager of Shelbourne hadn't reckoned on Ruwiyati, the blood sucking marathon runner from Indonesia.

Ruwiyati, she prefers to go by the one name, has a habit, whenever she finishes a race of running straight up to her coach, Alwi Mugiyanto, biting his finger and sucking the blood from the wound.

"The first time she bit my finger was in 1991," says Mugiyanto who is probably just glad that she didn't persist with the alternative source of fluids she decided to try at the Indonesian national championships in 1993 - his neck - when she won both the marathon and the 10 kilometre road race.

"I don't know why," says Ruwiyati herself, "but as soon as I reach the finish line, I suck my coach's blood and I feel refreshed."

While Ruwiyati's coach will probably need to bring along an extra supply of blood with him to Sydney in case the runner becomes dehydrated and has to give a sample, journalists attending the next Olympics may have somewhat more pressing health concerns.

Reports from Australia this week suggest that the proposed site for the media centre for the Games contains large deposits of dioxins which must be removed before any building work can begin.

Not that the problem could have come as much of a surprise to organisers, who must have known that the site's previous uses included: being used for the dumping of boiler ash, waste from incinerators, the construction of underground fuel tanks, the storage of highly flammable liquids and two rubbish tips.

It's not all bad news, however - the radioactive waste which had been stored there in air raid shelters, has apparently already been moved.

And on the subject of Australia, my thanks to John Loughrey who let me know about the disquiet Down Under concerning the performance of an Irish referee during last week's match between the Wallabies and Argentina in Buenos Aires.

Most complaints centred on the feeling that Bertie Smith failed to keep the game moving by making full use of the advantage rule. The fact that he gave 47 penalities during the match seems to support that argument.

Still, the headline in the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday which read "Time To Blow The Whistle: Postman Paddy Fails To Deliver" surely leaves something to be desired.

Tiger Woods, who was in Tokyo this week to star in a threeday golf tournament declared that "it feels great to be in Asia" upon being greeted by his hosts at the airport.

As soon as he was offered some sushi, however, the season's biggest earner on the US Tour confessed that "I'm not a big fish eater," adding that "I'll take a Japanese cheeseburger if you have one."

Please send any correspondence to On The Sidelines, Sports Dept, The Irish Times, 11-15 D'Olier Street, Dublin 2 or e-mail emalone@irish-times.ie