Hold the back page

JOHNNY WATTERSONdiscusses the week in sport

Federer's 'Tweener' steals the show

WHAT IS Roger up to? What's going on in the tennis world? Federer's second 'Tweener' at the US Open this week brought more people to their feet than two hours of the best tennis choreography. It was all polite clapping, more polite clapping and still more.

Then Federer hits a winner from between his legs while running away from his opponent and they’re spilling over the balconies, slush puppies everywhere. He did it last year too against Novak Djokovic in the semi-final.

It wasn’t only into broom closets Boris Becker used to dive and when he did it on the grass at Wimbledon it stirred Centre Court into a yahoo chorous of approval . McEnroe’s tantrums used embarrass the All England Club. But they loved that new sensation. Goran Ivanisevic once smashed one racquet too many and had to default because he’d none to play with. That was a riot.

It’s not easy pleasing the public. Not easy at all. This week we also saw Federer serve and hit a bottle off the head of an underling during a commercial shoot.

As if to prove it wasn’t lucky, he did it again, terrifying the grip, or sound man in the repeat. A bloody genius, he is.

Anger, tantrums, acrobatics, genius. We do love a bit of that.

Being a good sport playing the game

FOR YEARS you couldn’t play darts without a beer and a cigarette. In the world of the smoke-hazed oche, Jockey Wilson was king. But is darts a sport or a game? My rule of thumb is if you can do it after consuming 20 cigarettes and eight pints of Harp, you’re a real sport but it is a game. That makes ‘Pictureka’ and ‘What am I’ definite games.

Others argue if you can win the World Championships in a dickie bow, or be able to urinate in the middle of competing it’s definitely not a sport. Good bye snooker and the Tour de France cycling.

A cricketer who once played with Trinity used to smoke weed out on the College Park boundary when he was fielding, which was disconcerting and definitely nudges cricket towards a game.

Other people have said that if you kick, catch, or hit a moving object like a ball or puck it is a sport but if it’s stationary like snooker, poker, Tiddley Winks or golf, it’s a game-unless Ronnie O’Sullivan is playing. With certainty he has hit a moving white in the Crucible. And where does that definition leave rowing?

In sport surely you have to practice, do regular training and maybe require specialist nutrition, which brings golf back in as a sport and cricket too, or does it, do they? A friend reasonably argued that if you are good at sport you get shagged more often than if you are good at games. That definition is as good as it gets although it would make spending daddy’s money in Crystal a sport and not a game. The cavalier definition makes soccer, tennis and F1 Uber-sports, while bridge, sumo wrestling and curling, sadly remain games.

Ernest Hemmingway said something like ‘there are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.’ That sounds pig-headed, macho and we all know how Hemmingway liked killing things. Maybe if you might get killed doing it, it’s a sport and otherwise a game. So, taking up squash when you retire and shopping in Ikea are to-die-for sports. Ughh, letters in a postcard please.

Monty looks beyond the rankings

SO THE international agency Monty and Poors has degraded Paul Casey’s credit rating to somewhere outside the top 20. It is Pádraig Harrington, without a pot to his name for two years and ranked 18 to Casey’s nine, who has inadvertently unearthed a strength in the Scot that was buried beneath scowls and curmudgeon for many lucrative seasons.

Monty’s dominance of the European Order of Merit but major win famine subversively made him out to be lacking a certain big time streak, a lack of bottle to twist the knife down the home straight.

Picking the Irish man as the European player with the German currency has transformed the Ryder Cup captain as someone who can look beyond the FedEx index, the computer ranking system and one dimensional analysis.

As a guest at Monty’s wedding two years ago Casey may rightfully have felt he was intimate to the captain’s thinking last week.

Instead Monty demonstrated that, as in every Saturday in football’s Premiership, it is as much about who is left out as included in the team that determines an out come. Team selection is by its nature a series of acts of faith. In that a canny Montgomerie committed. You could expect golfers to find that a difficult concept.

Here's hoping for good sense

MOHAMMAD AMIR committed a venial sin. But in the cathedral of Lords and in the game of cricket he will be visited by the inquisition; the Maiden of Nuremburg; the head crusher; the ever popular Heretic’s Fork. Amir took a sixpence from the poor box and the inquisitors are in conclave. It wasn’t the amount but the infidelity.

At 18-years-old his fast left arm has already touched the stars and when he took four England wickets with eight balls in a recent Test match and won player of the series his dazzle caused hardened straight bats to swoon in the press box. Amir is the talent of his generation.

Just as quickly as his flop of black mane was being finger-combed back across his head the heavens were falling on it. Last week we witnessed an epiphany and an eclipse.

Three no-balls, two of which were his, are alleged to have been part of a spot-fixing scam. The News of The World has said so. That paper has fallen badly before when snooker’s John Higgins was inventively edited into appearing to say he was crooked as a cue seasoned in his Glasgow back yard. The News of The World may also need a little thumbscrew.

A rugby man, Sir Ronnie Flanagan is now in charge of the investigation into three Pakistani players including Amir. The former RUC chief understands how law operates in a dysfunctional system. After resigning as Chief Constable in 2002, the former Ulster front row took up the post of strategic adviser to the Abu Dhabi Police Force before succeeding Lord Condon as chairman of the International Cricket Council’s Soviet sounding anti-corruption security unit.

The youngest of seven children, Amir’s cricket began in a poverty-stricken slum outside the city of Gujar Khan, in the Punjab region. He learnt to bowl playing street cricket with a tennis ball wrapped in masking tape. At 13 his pace was spotted by talent scouts from nearby Rawalpindi cricket academy. At 15 he made his first-class cricket debut. At 17 he claimed a place in his national team. At 18 he may be crushed.

Being susceptible is probably no defense. But in today’s language of concern Amir would have been categorised as a teenager at risk. His life experience of a caste system told him to look on some people as inherently more important than he is. Amir is hotwired to the thinking of an occasionally feudal state. According to the News of the World the middleman in the scam woke him up on the eve of the fateful Test match and casually addressed him as F***er. Respect for the prodigy. We know that the figure of authority in the team, his captain Salma Butt, is also implicated. We know the £4,000 cheque Amir picked up for player of the series is three times his monthly retainer from the Pakistan Cricket Board. Sir Ronnie has shown how he can deal with complex issues and Belfast alone was more comprehensively rancid than Pakistan cricket. In this case his job may be to protect the cricket edifice. Hope is he will have the wisdom not to crush the butterfly on the wheel and to distinguish who is the cause of this problem and who is a pathetic consequence of it.

Rangers fans fail to help club's cause

A HEADLINE appeared this week that could have sparked off buried childhood trauma in the heads of any number of middle aged football watchers. ‘Rangers Fans Face Heightened Security.’ Baton down the hatches. Again. It seems that police have had to implement a series of tough security measures before Rangers pipe down to Old Trafford in the Champions League on September 14th. Fans will have to travel on official coaches organised by the club, where they will be taken to a holding station, before travelling to Manchester United’s ground. You may remember that in 2008 180,000 Rangers fans gifted Manchester with their tourist pound when they came to watch their Glasgow side face Zenit St Petersburg in the Uefa Cup final.

Alas most didn’t have tickets to see their team beaten 2-0 and when the giant screen in the city centre failed to work they believed the Manchester authorities were taking the ‘pish,’ which sparked off the traditional inner city blitzkrieg.

In that light, it seems a pity that Celtic boss Dermot Desmond chose this week to speak to BBC Radio Five. Desmond is one of those major shareholders who you listen to the rare time he speaks. Apart from saying that many clubs are in a perilous financial position and that salaries should be capped, he raised the issue of the under-extended Scottish giants Celtic and Rangers making a permanent home in the Premiership.

Both clubs have previously investigated the move, although a proposal from Bolton chairman Phil Garside to include them in a revamp was rejected as recently as last season. But Desmond seems undeterred and claims that the cash of media companies as much as clubs are determining Premier League policy.

We know that the Italian rugby teams reportedly had to cough up €3 million to jump on board the Magners League this season. The hello money for entry into the Premiership, if it is ever a realistic option, would be enough for every man, woman and child hooligan to undergo liposuction and get a new pair of trainers. Manchester 2008 didn’t help either club’s cause. The current girding of security loins won’t either.