The suspension needs to be checked on the bus after the pounding it’s had today, first Dallaglio and Catt have Ashton under it and then Fletcher chucks Flintoff under it. You might argue that Hamliton has lobbed the whole country under it as well by pissing off to the land of cuckoo clocks, exorbitantly priced chocolate, institutions sitting on huge funds of dubious provenance from WWII and an appealing tax regime, but that’s another story.

Why can’t these people just shut the fuck up? Ashton may not be the best coach England have ever had but he achieved something which was all but unthinkable even at the beginning of the tournament and within nine days of this feat he has to hear this shit from a couple of whores with books to pimp. Both made huge contributions to England rugby but regardless of their stature on the field, off it they’ve proved themselves to be minnows. If you don’t believe me then you need only refer to the comments of someone who never belittled the game, the people associated with it or himself, neither on or off the pitch; Dean Richards.

And now we come to Duncan Fletcher, the flip side of Dallalgio/Catt/Ashton scenario, kicking open the dressing room door and running his mouth about Flintoff turning up shit faced for a practice session, which was a bad job by Freddy and he should have had his arse kicked by Fletcher. And that should have been the last anyone heard of it. I stood up for Fletcher when I thought he was being treated shoddily by the media but maybe the genesis of the criticism was that the people close to the England camp could see he was losing the dressing room. But I still don’t believe that flak he received from some quarters was evidence based. Nevertheless his ‘revelations’ are more damaging to the England cricket than those of Dallalgio and Catt are to England rugby because they are making Peter Moores’ job all the more difficult; how can players interact uninhibitedly with their coach without having the thought in the back of their minds that he might he might trot off with a catalogue of nitty gritty at the first whiff of a book deal? All these people have had significant and lucrative careers, but this is not enough, they need to squeeze a few more shekels out of the game before, hopefully, disappearing into well deserved obscurity and doing it at the expense of other people.

So that’s that for the ’07 season. Seemed to go out with a bit of a whimper, unless you’re part of Red Sox nation, and reinforced the perceived discrepancy between AL & NL. There’s no question how the season will be remembered by Red Sox nation but how about the rest of us? Will we remember the streak that took the Rockies to the World Series, Bonds passing Hank Aaron, HR milestones for A-Rod, Frank Thomas and Jim Thome, 3000 hits and subsequent retirement of Craig Biggio, maybe A-Rod’s next Boras inspired contract? It could be that these will all recede in the memory if the Mitchell report turns the sport inside out. At the moment there seems to be no leakage of the content at all, Selig claims that he does not expect to see a copy much in advance of publication, maybe there is little to see or the security is impressively tight.

Whilst the off season hot stove lark has a certain appeal it’s no substitute for the real thing; roll on spring training ’08!

How strange was that? Did I miss a meeting? I know it’s a couple of months since I was down that way and there has been a rash of thefts of metals from buildings in recent times, but last time I checked Wembley had a roof available. I may have missed something in the pre-game, which I didn’t see, but I certainly don’t remember it being mentioned during the game, but why was it open? It’s all very well Roger Goodell being up in the booth saying that things had gone well, very welcomed, great fan support, blah, blah, blah but I’m sure both teams will feel that they were somewhat embarrassed by the conditions and that they were something that was within the control of the organisers. The construction of the playing surface in the U.S. is different even to the fibre sand structure which I guess is used in Wembley and there were concerns about how it would stand up even before the rain. Neither team looked prepared for the conditions, nor did they adapt to any significant degree, and whilst it was a learning process for all aggrieved, had this been a game between two contending teams then the loser would have been rightly concerned to have been asked to play in such circumstances as it could have cost them their season. It was not the spectacle I anticipated and I’m sure the viewing figures from back in the States will reflect this and put a damper on any future excursions outside of North America.

You don’t need to be Nostradamus, even on a bad day, with a head cold, gout and an unexplained itch behind his left shoulder blade, to predict that the Rockies are now done like dinner. I was convinced of this at the top or the 6th inning last night, they were down by 6 runs and their body language looked horrible, I didn’t have the sound on so couldn’t tell what it was like in the stadium but I imagine it was pretty quiet. But then the Rockies showed some life with 2 in the bottom of the 6th and 3 in the 7th. But then it all came unravelled when the Red Sox tacked 3 insurance runs in the top of the 8th and Papelbon put it to bed.

Such good news as there is for the Rockies is that the Red Sox website has Jon Lester starting game 4 tonight, and not Josh Beckett on short rest, so, in the unlikely event that it gets to game 7 Beckett won’t be starting that one either.

Sadly the good news looks a lot like clutching at straws for the Colorado Rockies and it’s this; in game 2 they were competitive and they’re heading back home where either Ortiz or Youkilis will have to sit as the DH will not be in effect. The bad news is that they’re down 0-2 and unless they can win the next four on the bounce they will have to beat Beckett twice. Whilst the Rockies were competitive their hitting was patchy to say the least, with Holliday having 4 of the 5 hits whereas Boston’s 6 hits were spread amongst five players with another two reaching base with walks.

Hopefully home field and a start from the dragon slayer, Josh Fogg, will get things going for the Rockies and show some prospect of extending the series beyond 4 games.

That’ll be the sound of the Colorado Rockies’ bubble bursting. The headline on MLB.com was that the Red Sox cooled the Rockies down but I believe it was MLB and the schedulers who contributed in large part and the bubble was significantly weakened by last weekend as players and coaches must have been struggling to find activities to keep them sharp. It was always going to be a tough ask against Beckett, who is as hot a post season pitcher as you are likely to see right now, and, hot as they may have been, allowing a three spot in the bottom of the first pretty much meant they were done.

The Rockies don’t have long to get over it and the Red Sox don’t have long to become complacent but a win tonight for the Red Sox could see it all over in 5 or maybe even 4.

The baseball World Series finally gets underway tonight at Fenway Park and we will see how robust the Colorado Rockies bubble really is. I suspect that they may well prove to be the victim of circumstance, an unprecedented circumstance in that they will have been inactive since Monday last week, and their own success. The longest break a baseball team encounters during the regular season is usually 3 and at most 4 days over the All Star break, in the post season it can be as much as four, maybe five days and this break has been nine days! This would not be quite so much of a problem had the Rockies not been so hot, unbeaten in the post season and 21 for their last 22 yet they have now had well over a week to consider the fact that they are in the World Series and the streak and for a team that has only been to the post season once before, maybe just get a little satisfied? And for a team that spends the majority of it’s time so far under the radar that it’s virtually subterranean the team will have received unprecedented media attention for a period that’s twice as long as might reasonably have been expected. Baseball is not the NFL or NHL, where players coming to the end of a season are always nicked up and benefit from an extended period for recuperation before playing the most important fixture of the season and maybe their sporting career. I suspect that baseball players are more prone to getting stale and maybe start to feel the effects of the long season and rather than their physical condition improving, may deteriorate.

I would still rather have seen the Rockies streak end in the NLCS and come to the World Series just having to play the Red Sox and not perpetuate the streak as well. Tonight’s game could set the tone, if the Rockies can’t beat Beckett then it could be a short series, if they can, then the Red Sox could be in trouble as the subsequent pitching match ups look a lot more finely balanced.

Was sad to see Tim Wakefield scratched from the World Series roster with a bum shoulder, always love to see knuckle ballers and Wakefield is one of the last of a dying breed it seems, but he has also been a great servant to the Red Sox and it would have been great to see him ply his trade on the biggest stage, and get Mirabelli a World Series start behind the plate.

I saw neither the Brazilian GP, where the F1 championship was resolved, nor the Rugby World Cup final but I understand that we acquired a couple of 2nd place finishers in each event, i.e. first losers. I’m a little trans-Atlantic on these matters, the American attitude in general is if you’re not in first place then no one’s counting and as a Brit I believe we can be a little too satisfied with coming second best. But I’m also a pragmatist and try to make an objective assessment of the effort that was put into the result, be it 1st, 2nd or 27th and I don’t think there is any room for dissatisfaction with either result. Hamilton has withstood the pressure cooker environment of F1 in unprecedented fashion, dealing with the friction with his teammate, the felonious activity of his team vis-a-vis Ferrari, some chicken shit squealing about his driving behind the pace car long after the event and all this in his F1 rookie year. I have no idea what Hamilton’s state of mind is right now but there does seem to be a general feeling that is now just a matter time before he becomes F1 champion, but I do seem to remember hearing a similar refrain concerning Jenson Button and Johnny Herbert and going back into the dim and distant past in another sport, I remember hearing of a similar attitude when Ken Rosewall reached a Wimbledon final, and lost, early in his career and no one was in any doubt that he would win it in subsequent years, but never did.

Not having seen any of the last three England games in the World Cup, which I’m happy to admit was solely down to not wanting to see us stuffed good and proper, I can’t comment too much on the performances but based purely on the scorelines I have to assume that the results came about due as much to grit and balls as absolute talent levels, allied to a game plan by Ashton that utilised the commitment he must have seen demonstrated in the squad and vies with the turnaround in Scottish football as the most startling event in British sport this year. And we did send the Aussies packing again!

I’ll take these two first losers. Until the next time.

I think I may be a closet Yankees fan, a bit of an odd thing to admit as the Yankees are usually viewed as a love ‘em/hate ‘em, bi-polar sort of an entity. But in large part my support for the Yankees was as a result of Joe Torre and the way he went about his business. As a manager of a baseball team you seem to have licence to swear at and kick dirt at umpires, salivate excessively whilst so close to them that you could still tell what aftershave they had used three days previously all whilst screaming abuse, and whilst this was all bad enough, so much of it seems to be contrived. Torre did none of this whilst putting up with the hot house environment of New York media and the frequent and ill considered interjections of George Steinbrenner, an owner of unparalleled interventionist inclinations, all whilst managing the team with the highest payroll in the game and with it the commensurate level of expectation. I can’t tell you how the relationship between salary, talent and team chemistry works but for Torre it always seemed to, he either made it work or managed round it. Some said that this past regular season may have been the best of his career in view of the many injuries to the starting rotation early in the year; not sure I necessarily agree with that assessment but that was some peoples opinion. So it is a particularly classless move on the part of the Steinbrenner family, either the indefatigable, or maybe not, George or sons Hank and Hal to show Torre the door. You might argue that being offered a contract of $5.5m (minimum) for a year’s work hardly constitutes the tin tack, however I would suggest that it’s a studied insult. Firstly it chisels off a meaningless (in terms of the Yankees budget) $1.5m off his contract for this year but probably worse, includes incentives. So how can the possibility of earning even more money be insulting? Because of the implication that he hasn’t been giving the job his best shot and is in need of a monetary cattle prod; yet another typically crass Steinbrenner ploy. Torre is sufficiently comfortable to be able to leave $5.5m on the table, and has done, not relishing a lame duck season and leaves clan Steinbrenner to spin the story as Torre walking away from a superficially reasonable offer. If the Steinbrenners imagine that this stratagem will convince Yankees fans that they are the good guys and that Torre wears the black hat, then they are severely underestimating them. But that’s nothing new.

News from the ‘No Shit Sherlock Gazette’, McLaren Watch down to 90 minutes! Haven’t seen anything of the game but that is irrelevant as we are at the results driven end of the qualifying campaign and England’s qualification, or otherwise, for the European Championship is now out of our hands. From what I hear it seems that Paul Robinson is not content with getting Jol run from Tottenham but is intent on doing the same for Minardi as well; there can be no greater sacrifice of an international career than that which gets an incompetent manager handed his walking papers I guess?! And it doesn’t look like I can jump on the Scotland bandwagon and become McWowbagger either. Shaping up to be an uninvolving summer of international football in ’08.

The Environment

Well I signed up so I suppose I had better blather on about ‘The Environment’, it sounds like some English Language project that you’d be given on returning to junior school after the summer holidays.

If we are considering the environment on a planetary scale then there appear to be huge problems, and on the most basic level they seem to be ‘what is it?’ and ‘what is it we want it to be?’, until you can answer these fundamental questions how much serious consideration should we be giving to attempting to tweak it? In general, the consensus on the science used to ‘measure’ what it is now and calculate the changes that, some suggest, need to be made appears to be eroding, in detail, every project on a significant scale is questioned; the underlying science, the social impact, the financial impact, the effect on wildlife habitat, the unabashed ‘not in my back yard’ objectors, the hectoring approach of many ‘environmentalists’, the contemporary ‘China Syndrome’ (what’s the point in anything we do when the Chinese are opening a new coal fired power station every week?) and many, many others. I would be the first to admit that I’m not the most informed guy when the topic is environmental issues so there may well be many others making significant contribution in this field but the characters that do come to my attention are woefully lacking in credibility, even after receiving part share of a Nobel Prize, in fact I would go as far as to say that the award diminishes the Nobel Foundation. Al Gore and the other talking head that comes to mind, Zac Goldsmith, appear to have ambiguous credentials in this field with both having business and political agendas which appear to be incompatible with an altruistic approach to global environmental reform.

From my limited knowledge of such things I would like to offer a couple of areas which seem to me to highlight our lack of certainty in dealing with the environment at a planetary scale. I read recently, in New Scientist I think, of a number of ocean seeding projects, some using iron compounds and others urea. Just the trials would require thousands of tonnes of material being dumped into the sea with the aim of initiating plankton blooms as a means to capture CO2 which would then be sequestered to the ocean floor when the bloom dies back. The best science we seem to have available at this time suggests that projects on this sort of scale are required to address the problems we face yet with this project, as with many others, there is little agreement that the, not fully understood, mechanism that is going to be manipulated is an effective method for sequestering CO2. Others have postulated that the whole affair is no more than an attempt to become a player in the carbon trading market. Yet it would appear that whatever sanction is required has been obtained and the trials will go ahead.

Clathrate hydrates is a term that I was blissfully unaware of until a few months ago, can’t remember where I heard about this one. These ice structures can contain various gases, one of which is methane and are found on deep ocean floors and permafrost. There is an inherent dichotomy here on a couple of levels; methane is a possible future energy source but also a greenhouse gas; the energy companies want to extract the methane from these hydrates which will inevitably require disturbing the structures and the concomitant risk of uncontrolled release of methane in significant quantities but these structures are also susceptible to disturbance by natural phenomena, particularly those in the permafrost due to global warming, which would once again result in uncontrolled release. Is this a reason to go ahead with the extraction as a cleanup exercise and development of an energy source or leave well alone and hope for the best? If the energy companies tell us that they have an engineering solution that would ensure no uncontrolled release, should we believe them?

Much of the above appears to be a mandate to do nothing yet the bulk of the science leads many to the conclusion that doing nothing is not an option commensurate with sustaining the environment, in the condition that we recognise today, over the long term. We seem to be rushing headlong to ‘solutions’ with no more than a vague grasp of the problem; we must stop any funding of piecemeal solutions to localised elements of a global issue and commit it instead to researching the totality of the problem whilst rebuilding the consensus around the results of such research by giving a platform to the scientists who undertake and understand the research. I acknowledge that this is no mean feat in communication terms as scientists are often not the most eloquent or charismatic of communicators and will be required to function effectively with scientists, politicians, businessmen and the general public, yet they are out there and must be found. I’m not proposing global government by a scientific elite, I rejoice in such democracy as we have and expect to continue to enjoy the right to cast my vote once every 4-5 years for whichever bunch of self-servers seems least obnoxious at the time, so there must remain political oversight but this must be of a form which requires the politicos to fully explain why, if they have chosen not to follow recommendations that have been forthcoming from environmental research which they have ensured has received an unbiased airing in the public domain.

But how much confidence should I take from it? I didn’t see the England game live this afternoon but caught the highlights on Sky, and they seemed to be having a real problem filling the allotted 24 minutes or so of air time with anything resembling ‘highlights’. I suppose that if I talk about winning ugly I will be referred to the England rugby team’s recent performances but I would counter that with the quality of the opposition each was facing. Whilst Estonia clearly didn’t offer much of a threat, the highlights I saw didn’t suggest that we laid siege to their goal either. The goals themselves were less than convincing, a deflection, an own goal and a goal the likes of which Wright-Phillips will be unlikely to ever score again in a match against anything resembling quality opposition. Certainly the job was well done by half time but that was not sufficient reason to mail it in for the second half when goal difference can still be a factor in determining the group. McLaren watch remains 180 mins.

Still intact and cosily surrounding the Colorado Rockies. Having won the start by Cy Young award candidate Jake Peavy to get into the post-season they’ve now rolled over Cole Hamels and, another Cy Young candidate, Brandon Webb, amongst others to take the streak to 18 wins in their last 19 games. In a game where winning 60% of your games represents a great season, a win tonight will take the Rockies to 95% hit rate for their last 3+ weeks of baseball! Is this all being done with smoke and mirrors? Well it’s certainly being done with a bunch of kids, in baseball terms, an unheralded manager and great pitching from the likes of Jeff ‘Franchise’ Francis. But the worry is that this is no more than a bubble and that is no more than a little prick away from being a mess of soap scum on the kitchen floor. If the Rockies are going to do what was unthinkable, as late as mid-September, and win it all, I think that they are going to have to lose a game before the World Series and show that they can deal with that and bounce back because either the Indians or Red Sox will be waiting and I can’t see them sweeping either of those and it would be better to deal with the soap scum in the NLDS than the World Series.

Hands up everyone who likes paying tax? OK, so if we ignore the village idiot at the back with one eyebrow, webbed feet and a hand in the air, that’ll be approximately none of us so how fortunate we are that we have the colossal intellect of taxation specialists and opposition politicians to point out to us the plethora of stealth taxes that are being heaped upon us. The strange thing is that they always seem to use the present tense, ‘this is a stealth tax’, well excuse me but you’ve just told me about it therefore it’s no longer very stealthy so, even in the event that it ever was (unlikely), it certainly isn’t now. Anyone who has even a passing interest in current affairs is unlikely to find significant changes to the tax structure much of a surprise, abolition of the 10% rate, increased fuel duty and inheritance tax, amongst many others, I have heard described as ‘stealth tax’. This is errant political bollockspeak. Just as the, supposed, broad spectrum appeal of ‘decent, hard working, law abiding people’ has a catchall positive cachet so the epithet ‘stealth tax’ has negative connotations well beyond those associated with mere ‘tax’. Both phrases represent towering condescension on the part of the politicians, who spout this bollocks, and those who uncritically report anything containing this phraseology. I understand the need for shorthand but these phrases are lazy and go far, far beyond what can be justified by lack of time or space restricting fuller examination of the concepts involved.

I’m not a huge believer in Toseland’s talent level in general and I believe he will struggle in Moto GP with uncertain levels of factory support from Yamaha and riding, what maybe, the third best make of machine on the grid. But all this being said, I’ve never seen a better weekend’s work than his performance so far at Magny Cours. After muscling it round in Superpole to get pole position, clearly lacking a satisfactory set up, he gets a very average start and then gets harpooned by Lanzi, smacking his front wheel all over the place. This wasn’t just a little kiss resulting in a brief puff of tyre smoke from the front of Toseland and rear of Lanzi but something that looked like it might remove the headstock from the frame. Lanzi and his Ducati go cart wheeling into the kitty litter and Toseland has little time to grab a fistful of front brake whilst he still has tarmac under him before heading off to join Lanzi in the gravel trap, somehow he manages to paddle it through the trap and rejoins dead last with everyone else still rubber down way up the road. Toseland gets it all the way back up to 7th and has, hopefully, done enough to regain the Championship with a result in race two, if not then Haga will get it and that would be no bad thing but would much prefer to see the dog’s borrocks take it from Bayliss and the 1200cc Ducati, who must be favourites, next year.

Well no. I would love to know what the odds on an England/France double today were but I really don’t think I would have had the confidence to take a piece of the action whatever they were. Must admit I was mentally preparing a piece along the lines ‘well what did you expect, the rankings predicted quarter finals and that’s what we got’ but that’s why we play/watch the games.

Well more that a bit behind but not had time to get anything posted on this one. For Mr Lewis Hamilton; a design for life – just shut up and drive, maybe there’s a song in there too? But running on at the mouth is not something unique to Hamilton, far too many people in sport nowadays seem to want to bolster their seemingly fragile intellectual egos by suggesting they have the capacity to play, the wildly overrated, ‘mind games’ with the opposition. My PC exercised it’s intermittent censorship of F1 and failed to record the Japan GP but I’m fairly confident that Alonso did not chuck it at the scenery due to having his psyche tweaked by Hamilton. I understand that ‘quotability’ is a trait much loved by lazy media hacks who have expended their capacity to produce a meaningful analysis of an event within a few lines and love to have lengthy direct quotes to fill the remaining column inches, but just what does it get you? The occasional free lunch from a 3rd rate hack, well I know paying for grub is a real drag but really?!? No, what it gets you is a reputation, and it’s rarely a flattering one, you end up looking like someone who is arrogant, conceited, stupid or suffering from a bout of the sour grapes, any or all of the above. And even if that’s your personality, how does it benefit you having it detailed on the printed page?

So just stop running your yap and drive, or box, play football or whatever else it is that the public pays money to see you do.