The Costa Crime

For just once, I'd like to write about something other than Chelsea. I'd like it to be about pig's head and posh knobs. But this is a sports blog. And there are no jokes left on the subject of pulled pork.

So I'll keep this brief. Diego Costa is dickhead. There. Done.

Dammit, there is more to say. I'm with Keown on this... and every time I see his ghoulish face, the eyes hidden beneath a brow that protrudes like the lip of some forbidding cliff, I think I'd never dare to disagree with Martin ... but it's the trying-to-get-others-in-trouble shit that really gets under your skin.

We've all been on school pitches or playgrounds when some infuriating twot bleats out "Sir, sir! Robson trod on my foot, sir!" (All right, pedants, your name might not be Robson, but you get my point.) And it'll be the same twot who's been wittering in your ear all morning about the dubious provenance of your family or the sexual orientation of your father. Costa is that. A friendless nark. A tick but with less of a moral compass.

There's another thing that irritates me too - the fact that pundits like to praise him as a player. As if we can somehow separate footballing ability from his propensity to dump fellow pros in it whenever he can. That 'orrible wiggle of the imaginary card at the referee... it makes me want to crush that hand in a vice.

If it were me - and let's hope one day that it is - I would be tying the snub-nosed conman to a chair and slapping him around the face with damp trout until he promises never to do it again. I'm sure there are some muppets around the football world who'll tell you that he'd be half the player without that bit of the devil in him. Good. Let's keep the good half and lob the rest of him into a wheelie bin.

Only his manager, of course, the overseer of all things and an apostle of the Law that states that We Win First and debate later, he, Mourinho, thinks the Brazilian-Spaniard bruiser was the man of the match. Yes. Pretty soon there'll be a category on your Premier League Top Trumps that says 'Nuisance Value'. 

Even teammate Kurt Zouma suggested Costa 'likes to cheat a lot'. Kurt has since put it down to English not being his first language. But I'd just like to reassure the lad that he's using it with great precision at the moment.

It may be the beautiful game but there sure are some ugly buggers thriving right now.

None of this is to let Wenger and his players off the hook. Clearly he's no angel, Gabriel. Just as Santi is no saint. But neither particularly deserved a red card and it made a big difference in a game that Chelsea were desperate to win, especially given their parlous position. Costa's needling was part of a slightly desperate gameplan. (I was reminded of the mendacious Ronaldo wink.) But Arsenal were fools to fall for it. Utter suckers. I've already sent half the first team an email telling them how I'm stuck in Ukraine and they've taken my passport. I expect the money will come pouring in any day.

But on to more ennobling subjects. Firstly, Japan 34 South Africa 32. (This is rugby union, by the way, a game played in this country (England) by steroidal public schoolboys. Not long ago they would entertain themselves by shouted abuse at young women, throwing small people around bars and jumping into the sea from slow-moving vessels but that's all changed now. They're really top chaps, don't you know?)

Japan is not a country noted for the bulkiness of its inhabitants. Every time someone tells me of the health benefits of sushi I can't help replying that the Japanese are always eating that stuff and most of em look like they're wasting away.

Well in order to get together a rugby team that can compete against the muscular mountain ranges that pass for rugby players these days they've drafted in a few blokes from other places to help. Fact is, though, that they have mustered together a side that plays beautiful stuff: the niftiest hands since the Artful Dodger retired; feet so fast they make Fred Astaire look clompy; and all the stamina of the winner of one of them horrible Endurance gameshows their nation loves.

Now it may well be that South Africa have a bunch of players so long in the tooth that half of them have tusks. But Japan won through their own brilliance. And courage. And I don't think I was this happy to see a team win a game of rugger when England won in 2003. Indeed so far the Rugby World Cup has looked good. When it comes to my favourite sports rugby union comes somewhere between the biathlon and synchronised swimming, but a result like Japan achieved can't help but peak even the most sour of sports fan's interests.

And another thing... if Nicola Sturgeon insists on Scots getting another pop at independence could they not extend that self-sufficiency to the Davis Cup tennis team? It's fascinating that the best players of this game that we've ever produced haven't dripped out of the white-clad bore-holes of the Establishment at Play but rather from some gritty geezers from Dunblane and, 70 or 80 years earlier, Stockport. Fascinating and not coincidental.

These days the weak link in Team GB is always the Englishman but it was another exceptional effort from Andy Murray, who gets more likeable with every passing shot.

I have a problem with the Davis Cup, mind you. It's the format. It's a team competition, right? So how come one bloke can win three matches and the team wins the tie? Surely a true test of the strength and depth of the team would be if no player could play more than twice, that way avoiding the predominance of one particular player in the tie as a whole?

Obviously we'd get nowhere pretty quick, but that's not the point. A team sport should be about the team, yet Murray has single-handedly wrestled that squad through to the final.

Right now GB just need Andy (and Jamie). They might as well have me as the other player for all the difference it makes. It does not make sense.