It's the foreigners wot are the cheats, innit?

TV View: What else would you be doing on a Sunday morning but getting up at 6.45 to watch the Chinese Grand Prix live on Setanta, speedy car enthusiasts asked us. Eh, sleeping? No, they said, trying to convince us their beloved Formula One season had actually become a bit lively, largely because Fernando Alonso could now spot Michael Schumacher in his rear-view mirror, having been out of sight in the drivers' championship the last time we looked. It was, it seemed, getting very nearly exciting.

So, a 6.45 start it was. For our video, that is, not for us. Ah now.

Mind you, Setanta's team of Declan Quigley, David Kennedy and Gary Anderson at first made us wonder why we'd deprived our video of a Sunday morning lie-in, explaining to those of us who know nothing about these things Schumacher's tyres were so ineffective in wet conditions he might as well have got the bus.

Alonso's tyres, on the other hand, were so grippy - apologies for the technical lingo - he could probably have reversed around the wet Shanghai track and still finished ahead of our Schuie.

What nobody had bargained for was Alonso's mechanical people getting it all hopelessly wrong. Kennedy tried to explain that the lads in the Renault garage, in the first pit stop, had erred by putting "intermediates" on the front bit of Alonso's car, instead of "dries", which we took as being a bad thing.

Bad, too, was his second pit, when his team "cross-threaded a right-rear wheel-nut" - we've all been there - delaying his return to the track for so long he could have popped in to the garage shop for a hot sandwich and a cappuccino.

The net result of all this blundering was that Schuie won the race and Alonso can't spot him in his rear-view mirror anymore because he's in front.

It might have been his 91st win, but Schuie, our Setanta team noted, celebrated like it was his first. Alonso, meanwhile, looked so glum he attempted to drop his magnum of champagne, which he received for finishing second, down in to the hands of a member of his team.

"Well, that puts the tin hat on it, a day of errors for Renault," said Quigley, as the magnum smashed into smithereens.

"Who said Formula One was predictable?" asked Steve Rider on ITV's highlights later in the afternoon. Well, us, to be honest.

But this is getting very nearly exciting. Two races to go, we trust the lads in the Renault garage will be brushing up on their right-rear wheel-nuts between now and the next one.

We left Shanghai for Croke Park, not something you say every day, for the All-Ireland football final.

"OooooooOOOOGH, féach ar SIN," hollered Brian Tyers when Maireád Tennyson got Armagh's goal, to put them 1-3 to 0-1 up. Over and out for Cork? Na, made of steel. Back they came, the double double. And if any one calls them The Rebelettes again they'll need their right-rear wheel-nut surgically repaired.

Speaking of nuts, from Croke Park to White Hart Lane. Much and all as the RTÉ football panel might, on the odd occasion, leave some folk removing their hair, strand by strand, it's days like yesterday that make you realise the bulk of Sky Sports' pundits are simply beyond woeful.

Spurs v Portsmouth. Spurs' Didier Zokara turns Pedro Mendes in the box, Mendes has a think about tripping him, but withdraws his foot in plenty of time. Undeterred, Zokara dives, comically, as if sprayed by an Uzi sub-machine gun, the referee falls for it: penalty. Dismal.

"What he's done there is cheating, there's no two ways about it," says Jamie Redknapp at half-time, with Glenn Hoddle nodding furiously beside him. "That's not what we have in the Premiership, that's not what we do as players, that is embarrassing."

Grand. But. The referee was expecting Mendes to trip Zokara, Hoddle said, "he's probably pre-ordained it in his mind".

"But Mendes was cute, he's a foreigner as well, inne? He's a foreigner as well, so he understands that," he said.

Jamie nodded, somewhat passionately. "What are we coming to, that's not our culture," he said.

"We don't want that in our football," Hoddle agreed.

A consensus, then: it's the foreigners wot are the cheats, innit? They're poisoning "our culture".

Funny, in the last season or three, Wayne Rooney, Michael Owen, Steven Gerrard and Joe Cole, to name but four, have demonstrated how they have mastered the art of diving in the box, with Gerrard's spectacular, penalty-winning effort against Hungary before the World Cup the most recent highlight.

Are Jamie and Glenn certain it's just the foreigners wot are the cheats?