If you happened to find yourself in the west of Dublin on Wednesday afternoon you would have felt the earth move, both the rezoned and unzoned variety.

It was only later in the day that the source of the rumbling became known, and it was a distant source too - court number one at a south-west London tennis club.

The epicentre was in the press section, where the 973 attending photographers were stationed and whose tumbling tears and despairing foot-stomping set the seismic activity in motion.

The eruption was triggered by a largely unknown French tennis player, by the name of AnneGalle Sidot, winning a point in a singles match. Match point, to be exact.

The whole rumbly chain of events, which was probably also felt in Reykjavik, Turin and Oslo, was set off, not so much by Sidot's admirable performance, rather by the fact that her opponent's first serve wasn't working and her timing was a bit off. And, so, she lost.

Isn't it strange the effect Anna Kournikova's form has on this planet and its inner workings? For the photographers, the Russian's early Wimbledon exit was a catastrophe.

Such is the demand from the national newspapers, here and over there (particularly for those snaps of her at full stretch or those ones of her preparing for a smash in a teasing and highly provocative manner), they were banking on her surviving at least another couple of rounds so that they could earn enough before next weekend to take early retirement.

And, just to add to the woe of these, em, sports photographers, The Netherlands were eliminated from Euro 2000 on Thursday night, so there's no point in them heading off to Rotterdam for the final, because Patrick Kluivert's girlfriend won't be there.

And the word is that Fabien Barthez and Linda Evangelista have split up, so the French camp holds no interest. Nothing for it but to wait for the beach volleyball competition in Sydney.

Of course, it's bad news, too, for the women still hitting rasping volleys in Wimbledon. In Kournikova's absence the column inches devoted to their tournament, in your average newspaper, will now be cut by 73 per cent and, needless to say, most of the television cameras have already gone home.

A few of them will prowl around London in the hope that they'll spot Kournikova chilling out and doing a spot of shopping. Cue: "Kournikova Shops" (1,800 word article with four accompanying pictures), while "Lindsay Davenport Retains Her Wimbledon Crown" (no picture, see sports news in brief).

Okay, it's not that bad, but crikey, when are these lads going to grow up and start taking women athletes even a tenth as seriously as they take their sports? There's no law against them admiring their beauty, but admiring it at the expense of treating them as the driven, dedicated and talented athletes that most of them are is, well, becoming a bit boring.

Kournikova is a media obsession simply because she's beautiful. She doesn't merit even a fraction of the column inches devoted to her in the sports sections of our papers. If Kournikova wins a Grand Slam tournament, thus proving herself to be a great player, then, by all means, give her the space, but until then it would be nice to see Davenport, Martina Hingis, Monica Seles and the rest dominating the coverage of women's tennis, just as Sampras, Agassi and Kuerten dominate the men's.

Jan-Michael Gambill and Marat Safin are regarded as the "pin-up boys" of the men's circuit. Who? Exactly.

Women's hockey's equivalent of Kournikova is Mandy Smith. She played for New Zealand in an Olympic Qualifying tournament back in March.

She was good, but her teammate Tina Bell-Kake was brilliant. Whose picture appeared in the English newspapers day after day? Let's just say Bell-Kake had no snaps to cut out for her scrap book at the end of the tournament.

If Sonia O'Sullivan or Catherina McKiernan win gold in Sydney I trust we'll see a picture or two of them in the papers, but you can be fairly certain not half as many as we'll see of the beach volleyball brigade. Zzzz.