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A good week for ...
SuperSport stands ready to leap to the defence of Steve Walsh. The controversial whistle-blower was quot;not considered for selection at this point for the first four weeks of Super 14 due to a personal employment matter", says an NZRU statement on
referees for the early rounds of this year's Super 14.
The "personal employment matter" could relate to the Sanzar conference in Sydney last month which Walsh reportedly attended after a few drinks. But surely that's the only way to attend a Sanzar conference surrounded by referees. What else are you going to do? Listen to their pious blatherings sober?
>>Rugby: Referee Walsh snubbed by Sanzar
Hats off to the mayor of Pittsburgh, formerly Luke Ravenstahl. With the Pittsburgh Steelers squaring up against arch rivals the Baltimore Ravens for the right to go to the Super Bowl, the mayor changed his name to Luke Steelerstahl. "On behalf of the Steelers Nation, I've decided to remove the word 'Ravens' from my name just like the Steelers will remove them from the AFC Championship," he said. The change is good for one week. Beat that Banksy.
The main prize winner of last month's SuperSport/Nokia giveaway was Rachel Mann, who bagged herself the brilliant Nokia N96 with Fifa 09 on it, a football, a 1982 All Whites home strip and a Manchester United shirt signed by Wayne Rooney. Tom Davies scrapped in second to grab a phone and a football. We here at SuperSport Towers are very jealous.
The correct answers by the way: New Zealand's World Cup goalscorers are Steve Sumner and Steve Wooddin; and the number of players available to choose from in Fifa 09 is 4260. Thanks for all entries and watch out for more giveaways.
A bad week for ...
bFM's resident sports expert scratched his head on air on Monday and wondered aloud why it is that five-day cricket matches are played in whites and one-dayers in pyjamas. In the words of the teenager hosting the show: "Crazy." The answer, in case you're wondering: They just are.
Tiger Woods has always been staunchly apolitical - throughout his career he's refused to talk about Nike sweatshops and issues of race in America. But along comes Barack Obama and suddenly sport and politics do mix in Tiger's world. The unfortunate thing about Tiger jumping on the Barackwagon is that he draws attention away from a true sporting radical: Tommie Smith. His brave stand in Mexico City is part of the lineage that gave America its first black president.
>>Tommie Smith embraces the future
The most-enigmatic person in motorsport has revealed his identity ... again. The Stig, who anonymously handles the driving duties on Top Gear has been revealed as racing driver Ben Collins. The last Stig, Perry McCarthy, was sacked after revealing his identity in an autobiography. The latest one accidentally revealed himself in an art shop in Bristol where he hoped to to get a print of The Stig done.
Collins was Scott Dixon's teammate in the 1999 Indy Lights.
Pity those poor Manchester City fans: a week ago they were queueing up to buy pale blue shirts with "Kaka" written across the back. Now they'll be spending their money on ones reading "Craig Bellamy". City is the eighth club in nine years for soccer's premier carpet-bagging nutjob after spells at Norwich, Coventry, Newcastle, Celtic, Blackburn, Liverpool and West Ham.
Obscene? Maybe. A telling fact about the world in which we live? For sure. For the 100m ($262 million) Manchester City offered for Kaka, Unicef could fund 20 million family-sized mosquito nets for sub-Saharan Africans, who lose 800,000 children under age 5 to malaria each year.