On The Sidelines

It's good to see that the gremlins can creep in anywhere. Couch potatoes who like to pit their knowledge of sport against celebrities on the BBC's Question of Sport this week might have been surprised to hear Jeremy Guscott answer "Dublin" to the question "Which city will stage the Ryder Cup at the K Club in 2005?"

To our knowledge the Ryder Cup has not been allocated to any golf club in Ireland and will not be until the Americans announce where the event will be staged in 2003.

It is deemed bad manners by the ethics police in golf to announce the venue of a Ryder Cup before the preceding event has been decided. We asked the BBC whether they knew something that we didn't know. And they didn't. So all secretaries from Druids Glen, Portmarnock, European Club, Ballybunion, Mount Juliet etc can relax.

It appears that the researcher who dug out the question found a reference to the K Club in the Daily Telegraph data base on September 26th 1997. It referred to Dublin, the K Club and the Ryder Cup. Put two and two together and what do you get . . . exactly . . . three.

The older brother of Springboks hero Pieter Rossouw was recently charged with armed robbery at a court in Cape Town. Gerhard Rossouw was released on bail of 2,000 rand (£290 approximately) after being accused of robbing 24,000 rand from the Village cafe on South Africa's historic and aptly named Robben Island.

The ill conceived hold-up by Rossouw (28) is alleged to have been carried out while clad in a wetsuit and knitted balaclava. A giveaway clue was that the shop was at least two kilometres from the sea. Clearly a pushover for PC Plod.

Pakistan's soccer ball industry is unlikely to meet a 2000 deadline to end their policy of `many little hands make cheap work' unless joint action is taken by the state, industry and international agencies to eliminate poverty, ball makers said on Tuesday. The issue is child labour and Pakistan's apparent addiction to it.

"If there are four or five members in a family, the family can't survive with just the father's earnings. They need funds," said Zahid Pervaiz, a partner of B.S.Zee Industries and one of the men who ensures that the whole family can't survive with just the father's earnings.

His company makes around 500,000 soccer balls a year in the Punjab city of Sialkot, the centre of Pakistan's sports goods industry. The city produces two-thirds of the world's hand-stitched soccer balls, many of them made by children, for an export market worth $1 billion a year in retail sales.

"At this stage, a child under 14 can't produce good quality balls. You need great strength to stitch." Pervaiz said.

Those kids. You really can't rely on them at all.

Benfica's captain Joao Pinto has undergone surgery for a fractured jaw after round two of his ongoing and massively unrewarding dispute with Porto's Paulinho Santos. Pinto is expected to be out of action for four weeks.

It is thought the fracture happened during a 65th-minute scuffle between Pinto and midfielder Santos in last Saturday's match, which league leaders Porto won 2-0 at home. Both players were sent off.

The two men, who both play for the national team, had an identical scuffle at Benfica's stadium in August 1994. Pinto was sent off and later underwent surgery for a fractured nose which he blamed on Santos.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC), chastened by the plastic shanty town that grew up alongside the Olympic Games as well as other unseemly sponsorship squabbles, have decided that they want to reel in the rampant commercialism that surrounds the event.

They have now established rules for advertising and promotion during the Olympics. The new rules are geared towards preventing the sort of ludicrous situation that developed in 1992 when Michael Jordan, Michael Johnson and other members of the US Basketball Dream Team objected to wearing Reebok warm-up suits because they all had personal sponsorship deals with Nike. The players then draped the American flag over the offending symbol which appalled IOC members.

The rules should also prevent the type of public row that occurred between Irish officials during the Atlanta Games when Sonia O'Sullivan was asked to strip in the tunnel before entering the Olympic track for one of her races.

The argument between BLE and the Olympic Council of Ireland centred around who had the final say in what brand of gear O'Sullivan could wear. The wounds inflicted in that row still fester today between the two organisations.

The IOC have adopted the new code, allowing individual national Olympic governing bodies to decide which uniforms their athletes wear. It is the national Olympic committees who outfit the delegations.

The US Olympic Committee (USOC) was the ground-breaker on this when they adopted rules requiring American athletes to wear USOC designated uniforms during the Olympics. Now it seems every nation will do the same. Can we see a dispute between the IAAF and the IOC on the horizon?

John Motson, Britain's favourite television commentator, was in cracking form on Radio Five's Live Interview last weekend.

"Are there any players you have difficulty in telling apart?" asked Eleanor Olroyd.

"There are indeed," Motson breezily replied. "Often more than two players in some cases. There are teams where you have got players, who, from a distance look almost identical. And with more black players coming into the game, they would not mind me saying that can be very confusing."

You just can't tell 'em apart, can you Motty? Those blacks sure look the same, don't they.

No, no, no. That's not what Motty meant at all. He went on to explain: if there are five or six black players on a pitch going for a ball at the same time it can, in certain circumstances, be difficult to tell them apart.

Well, that . . . er . . . clears things up. Clumsy phrasing or simply a racist opinion?

Australian golfers with the toxic habit won a reprieve on Wednesday when tournament officials relaxed a smoking ban for this weekend's Victorian Open.

Instead of an outright ban, the players were asked to exercise extreme caution in disposing of their cigarette butts because of the high fire danger in the Melbourne area. Recent hot weather has left the host Victoria Golf Club extremely dry, making the course vulnerable to grass fires.

But when first informed of the ban, several players protested. "They may as well disqualify me now," Neil Kerry was quoted as saying in The Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday. "There is no way I can play a round of golf without smoking." Such athletes.

The NBA's fashion police have struck again in the US. Three days after fining the Minnesota Timberwolves $25,000 and five of their players $2,500 each for wearing oversized uniform shorts, the NBA slapped a $25,000 fine on the Portland Trail Blazers and two of their players for the same violation. Any chance of sending them on the golf circuit ?

The Gulf between the haves and have-nots was pointedly illustrated last week at Durham at the international cross country event. While Catherina McKiernan grabbed the headlines with her win in the main women's event, Ireland also took both titles in the under-20s races.

To highlight the depth of talent available to Irish team manager Sean Kennedy, he put in an under-17 team to contest the underage events against British athletes who are preparing for this year's World Cross Country race in Morocco.

The difference is that the Irish team, clearly the future of athletics here, had to cough up £60 out of their own pockets to get them to Durham. Hardly inspirational for enthusiastic teenagers.

Hot on the heels of tennis player Richard Krajicek who denounced his female professionals at Wimbledon as fat ugly pigs and golfer Phil Mickelson, who when questioned at the Walker Cup at Portmarnock in 1991 as to why he did not venture near the boundary ropes answered "because Irish women are not all that attractive", comes Macedonian soccer star Georgi Hristov.

Hristov reportedly claimed that Barnsley girls were uglier than girls in his native country and that they were heavy drinkers. As a result a beauty contest has been hastily organised by two local barmaids to prove that the loose lipped star is quite mistaken.

"He's no oil painting himself," observed one of the barmaids.

As in all these cases, there are officials queueing up to claim that Hristov was misquoted and that if he did actually say it he didn't mean to be offensive.

John Dennis, chairman of the struggling Premiership club, insisted that the £1.5 million striker had been the victim of "exaggerated" reporting. Rather an exaggerated sense of his ego, we say.

A trust fund has been established in memory of the late Tom Rooney, the well known sports commentator for RTE, who died late last year aged 41.

A race night is being held on Wednesday (January 14th) in the Berkeley Court Hotel, Dublin, at 8.0 p.m. The entrance fee is £5 and all are welcome. If you would like to sponsor a horse or a race, please contact 01-6614055 or write to 22 Merrion Square, Dublin 2.