Bad Weather and Terrible Trousers

First of all, here's wishing Howard Webb a nice break somewhere before the onset of the Premier League 2010-11. Amsterdam's a great place to chill out. Mind the coffee shop cookies though, Howie, too many of them and you can get a right bad persecution complex.

Which suggest that maybe the Orange boys had some laced biccies at half-time in Jo'burg. It's amazing how they're bleating on about how Webb cost them the game and yet he saved them from annihilation by keeping the midfield assault troops on the pitch. Just exactly how much of a twat do you need to be before you seriously start to blame Webb for the defeat?



Answer: This much of a twat.

But that's done with now. As is the British Grand Prix. Motor racing is just a repository of testosterone for men who think a sleek speed machine is akin to a priddy lady. From the pit-lane totty to the post-race prattle I find myself wanting to stick every sodding one of them into a Nissan Micra and push em down Sutton Bank.

Apart from Mark Webber, who is refusing to play the Barrichello with the toy-tossing pramster Vettel. I always picture Rubens toddling into the Ferrari garage for his first day and Schumacher striding over, sticking out his lantern jaw another couple of feet and muttering 'Gutten tag mofo. Velcome to Ferrari. You is my bitch now. I own your Goddam ass.' (Although somehow I can't see Ving Rhames playing Schumi).

Webber's 'Not bad for a number 2 driver' is definitely my quote of the sporting year. I hope he's wins the Championship. Yes very unpatriotic of me not to back the Brits. Erm, that'll be the pocket-lining, popstar-banging, tax-dodging Brits. Dunno what I've got against them.


Vettel: 'That's right you traitorous Aussie shit, your new car vill be made out of sand!'

But today sports fans turn their attention to that four day festival of bad weather and terrible trousers that is the Open Golf Championship.

I enjoy this sport despite myself. First of all the sport itself is just downright weird. Legend has it that it was originated by Scottish shepherds who couldn't farm the land that lay between their pasture and the sea. So they picked up their crooks and started tonking the odd ram's testicle up and down the dunes.

This may explain the origins of the name 'golf' - it may be an acronym for 'grizzled old lamb-fuckers'.

Advocates of the game will tell you lots of stuff about how superior it is to other sports. I heard Ian Carter on 5Live saying that it allows the spectator to get closer to the pros than in any other event. Garbage. Tour de France?

There's also this etiquette that demands utter decency from all the protagonists. Which is fair enough, except I know for a fact that I've tapped a ball or six round a course with some cheating little shysters in my time, by Christ.

Plus there are plenty of greats of the game who have spent their latter days pouring their time and effort into converting more perfectly decent stretches of the countryside into manicured playgrounds for appallingly moneyed tosspots to thwack about in. And though Jack Nicklaus will forever be hailed in golfing circles he apparently couldn't get to the Old Course this week cos there wasn't enough moolah being dangled beside his Golden Bear-faced cheeks.

And as we all know, golf clubs are great bastions of Mail-reading middle-class muppets who think a Pringle logo is the height of sartorial elegance. The success of Peter Alliss is simple: there's a Peter Alliss on the nineteenth hole of every course in this country, gin in hand, muttering lightly about this n that and getting grimmer and more ungenerous by the putt.

I'd forcibly retire the bloke meself, but he is as unfireable as a standard issue British Army revolver.

And yet despite all this I do enjoy your Open Golf. St. Andrews always throws up that magnificent Seve celebration on the 17th all them years ago - a kind of hugely indulgent hand shandy of a gesture.

And last year, when kindly old Tortoise Tom almost waddled off with the prize, was wonderful drama. Though Cink winning it was as anticlimactic as an inflatable woman with a puncture. I pray - ironically - that some God-fearing Yank doesn't lift the jug this year. When I hear a sportsman thanking God for his achievements, there's a bit of me that hears him saying 'Yep, that's right, He chose me and not you... LOSER!'

Plus I hope Tiger has a wretched tournament cos I for one don't buy this whole 'oo, I need a new putter claptrap'. I can't quite remember the name of his new blade but I think it's called summat like the Nike CashCow. Woods's main job this week will be to stay out of the bits of rough and those perilous man-traps that line the fairways.

And I hope the pre-tournament chutzpah regarding the inevitability of a British winner doesn't founder on the last nine holes as one by one the young guns wilt like a pack of witless... invertebrate... erm... for want of a better word... FOOTBALLERS.

So here goes - as my predictions are going relatively well at the mo.



I'm opting for one of these two camp young men, even if they do look like they've entered themselves for the Weetabix Women's Open in these outfits.

Poulter, in fact. If he can keep his gob shut. Although I fear the great galumpher that is Mickelson.