Special gems as Bumble and Player prove one of a kind

TV VIEW:A tempestuous old week, that. It started awkwardly enough, Barcelona v Real Madrid and Panorama v Fifa clashing hopelessly on Monday night, leaving viewers having to choose between beauty and a few footballing beasts.

A quick dash away from the Nou Camp and there was Fifa big-wig Jack Warner on our screens, telling BBC reporter Andrew Jennings “I would not dignify you with my spit, you’re garbage”.

At this point you sensed England’s World Cup bid might just be in a spot of bother.

As it proved, Barca put Madrid out with the garbage, too, leaving Jose Mourinho’s lower lip trembling so hard you feared he was on the cusp of bursting in to tears. He did, at least, receive a comforting phone call from Nelson Mandela later in the week, the statesman telling him that “the greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall”.

“Very nice, Nelson,” said an appreciative Jose, of the Special 1 TV kind, “a gem is not polished without rubbing, nor man perfected without trials”.

No offence at all, at all to the Sky Sports crew, but the only disappointment about the game was that we didn’t get to watch it on American channel GOL TV, where the incomparable Ray Hudson apparently likened Lionel Messi to “a squirrel on a telegraph wire”, a player who “could follow you into a revolving door and still come out first”.

How perfect is that?

Football of the celestial kind, then, and no amount of persuading from Richard Keys yesterday could convince us that West Brom and Newcastle were playing the same game.

Messi will be a mere 35 when the World Cup hits Qatar, so he’ll only be nearing his peak, and he’ll be but a boy when the show turns up in Russia.

But Alan Shearer doesn’t want to talk about it, apart from when he turned up on Football Focus on Saturday to express his guttedness at the whole miserable experience.

When John Motson suggested Sepp Blatter might now receive the Nobel prize for bringing the game to previously unchartered hosting territories, not even Nelson Mandela’s soothing words could have calmed Alan.

Odds on him chaining himself to the door of Oslo’s City Hall when/if the day comes?

Rather short.

As coincidence would have it, Thursday’s most aggrieved parties, England and Australia, who saw their World Cup hosting hopes end up in ashes, are in the middle of a cricketing ding-dong in Adelaide.

And a great time England are having of it too, Sky’s Ian Botham paying tribute to their free-scoring batsmen on Saturday night by describing the Australian bowling “attack” as the worst he’s ever seen. The implication being that even Sepp Blatter could score a ton against this lot.

True enough, they’re having a hard time of it, not helped by more than a few wayward deliveries, including a wide or eight.

And David “Bumble” Lloyd and Nasser Hussain had no sympathy for the bowlers’ complaints at these umpiring decisions, a wide’s a wide, after all.

Lloyd: “If you read the law, if you can’t play a proper cricket shot at it, it’s wide. Not something that you can only read through the yardbrush. Or a clothes prop.”

Hussain: “A what?” Lloyd: “Clothes prop. Where you hang your washing up on a line and your prop just pushes the line up so that you get more breeze on to your washing. You probably don’t have ’em in Essex.”

Hussain and us: Stony, confused silence.

Bumble is, of course, one of a kind, a bit like Gary Player, come to think of it.

He was on commentating duty, alongside Dale Hayes, at the Nedbank Golf Challenge at Sun City over the weekend, and was asked by our host to name his perfect golfing foursome.

We think he, quite possibly, had the likes of Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Jack Nicklaus and Byron Nelson in mind. But.

Player: “Very easy. I’d take Nelson Mandela, Lee Kuan Yew, Mahatma Gandhi and Billy Graham.”

Hayes: “I think it’d be quite cool to play with Winston Churchill. And I’d like to learn from Bill Clinton.”

Player: Naughty chuckle.

Hayes: “And definitely Elvis Presley. And I’d love to play a round of golf with Clint Eastwood.”

Host and us: Stony, confused silence.

Mandela, Yew, Gandhi, Graham, Churchill, Clinton, Presley and Eastwood?

Fore!

An interesting selection, though, you have to say. Eg, Gandhi and Clint v Elvis and Winston: “Go ahead punks, make our day,” Gandhi might say, to which Winston would reply: “A little less conversation, Mahatma.”