While spectators are being urged to abandon their cars and embrace public transport, 4,000 brand new BMWs have been ordered to escort dignitaries and officials to events.

Their worst innings in a century.

But, umm, they’ve still a decent chance of winning the match.

Odd game, cricket.

“Playing in the World Cup was a dream and playing in New Zealand was special. What other time are you going to play in New Zealand? The five planes it took us to get there was worth the trip,” he said.

“The local people embraced us completely and made us feel at home. In Blenheim, our host town, they even put up the road signs in Cyrillic. They don’t get many Russian visitors there, they had done it for us.”

Yes, well done. Clap clap clap.

He was brought up in Zelonograd, a large town north-west of Moscow with a proud rugby history. He took up the sport at the age of nine but it took off when his parents sent him to Dublin to improve his English.

And that is amusing too. Zelenograd was built to be the Soviet version of Silicon Valley. All electronics and chip making. Must be the only place on the planet where the geeks play rugby.

The Olympic stadium fiasco laid bare

How did the saga begin, how has it gone wrong and how will it end?

It began with politicians spending other peoples’ money it went wrong as politicians spent other peoples’ money and it will end badly and expensively.

Because, y’know, politicians have been spending other peoples’ money.

But I think that Wales today would have walked through France today. So, Wales in the final and I sorta assume NZ will be there too (although, come on you Pumas!).

Actually, I wouldn’t want to bet against Wales today beating NZ sans Dan Carter.

Wisden looks at it all rather differently from many others.

Update: So it appears he is. Which is a bit of a blow.

Yes, I know, it’s a team game, nothing to do with the individual.

But, but, there is a part of what we’ve all been waiting for gone. Is he really as good as we all think? We’ve been (OK, in a minor manner but still) waiting for 4 years to see him, mature and in his pomp, bossing what is almost certainly the best rugby team in the world through the knockout stages of the World Cup.

And now we’re not going to. This isn’t to say “Boo hoo” for New Zealand or anything, rather to say that watching the very best perform at their peak is part of what this thing is all about.

And now we won’t, poor us.

And maybe the sad decline of Fiji and, to a lesser extent, Tonga as rugby powerhouses is not surprising. The sides these countries put out in this World Cup are third or fourth teams at best, the top players having long ago relocated to countries who can offer attractive wage packets.

There are eight Islanders in the All Black squad, seven in Wallaby colours, seven more representing America, another three turn out for Japan, Samoan Manu Tuilagi is England’s hottest property and Toby Faletau is an important asset for Wales.

In all, there are 120 players at this World Cup, 20 per cent of the playing population were born on the islands, or who consider themselves Pacific Islanders. And all that rugby talent from a combined population of around a million. Get the pick of them back to their countries of origin and this match might have been the final of Rugby World Cup 2011 rather than the washout it was.

Paul Ackford

I know we’re not supposed to talk about “race” as it’s not a concept which really translates into humans, we’re all the same species. Perhaps “genetic origin” or “genetic prevalence” is better?

But perhaps it is correct that whatever that gene mix is in those Pacific Islands is the one that is best for the unique demands of rugby? In the same way that West African is for sprinting (and definitively not for swimming), North and East African for long distance running?

Great upper body strength plus explosive acceleration?

All very strange, the aim of the game is that the big blokes in the white shirts grumble up and down the field, isn’t it?

But those who wanted football to carry on here acted admirably quickly, and launched the new Chester FC as a “phoenix club”. Crucially, it’s a mutual: owned by its supporters, who can pay a minimum of £5 a season to become active shareholders. And it is not alone: the night I watched them play, their opponents in the Evo-Stik League premier division were the fan-owned FC United Of Manchester, founded in protest against the debt-laden misrule of the Glazer family. There is also AFC Wimbledon – whose fans took similar umbrage at their old club’s move to Milton Keynes and are now back in the Football League – and, among others, Brentford, Exeter City, Cambridge City, and good old Runcorn Linnets.

If that’s the way you want to organise things then you go and organise things that way. Isn’t the freedom and liberty to do your own thing a glorious possession?

As soon as it becomes law, they want government and local authorities to aggressively use the provisions of the localism bill to identify football clubs as assets of community value, thus opening the way for mutualised local ownership. More generally, they’re pushing for a sports law that will recognise that clubs amount to much more than privately owned businesses, and toughen the regulation on who can own them.

No, fuck off. The freedom and liberty for you to do your own thing necessarily means that others have the limilar liberty and freedom to do their own thing. You don’t get to use the law to confiscate the property of others.

Francis Baron, the former chief executive of the Rugby Football Union, has called for the governing body’s acting chief executive, Martyn Thomas, and the five elected board members criticised in the Blackett report to be charged with bringing the game into disrepute.

I’ve seen occasional pieces but not one which explains what the basic problem is.

Is it the last lot snarling at the new? Handbags in the changeover in a bureaucracy?

An old management structure not up to the expansion of money and time and interest in the game?

A few timeserving committee men promoted above their competence levels?

Anyone actually know?

Startlingly good centre, playing for England against Wales?

Made a fool of?

Anyone remember Matthew Tait against Gavin Henson?

Ah, yes, The Guardian does:

It is six years since England named a young, trembling debutant called Mathew Tait to face Wales, an experiment that ended in conspicuous failure. Now they have picked another youthful centre with the same initials to wear the No13 jersey against the same opposition, fully expecting a happier outcome. It says everything about the potential impact of Manu Tuilagi, England’s new hunk of Samoan muscle, that those currently doing the trembling are likely to be the Wales midfield.

The mood was defiant, but a stirring musical expression of that defiance hadn’t yet appeared – until the fateful night at the Drury Lane theatre, when “God Save our King” was sung on stage by the company.

The audience was electrified. As the Daily Advertiser reported: “The universal applause it met with, being encored with repeated Huzzas, sufficiently denoted in how just an Abhorrence they hold the arbitrary schemes of our invidious Enemies, and detest the despotick Attempts of Papal power.”

Well, we don’t fear Papal power any more. But isn’t there a threat of despotic powers of a different kind being wielded just now, under the guise of “saving the euro”?

It’s surely time to stiffen British sinews, and the perfect musical encouragement lies ready to hand, in the anthem’s second verse. They’re not much sung these days, so you may have forgotten how the words go.

Here they are: “Lord, our God, arise /Scatter her enemies /And make them fall. /Confound their politics /Frustrate their knavish tricks /On Thee our hopes we fix, /God save us all.

Well, yes, but if we are to scatter her enemies, confound their politics and frustrate their knavish tricks, don’t we have to go and hang all the politicians?

Not that I’m against this as a general principle you understand, not even against it as a national rallying cry or something that should be sung before every national sporting occasion.

Actually, it would make international sporting occasions rather more fun, hanging a randomly selected Cabinet Minister from one of the two nations competing after the game. The only difficult question would be deciding whether it should be one from the losing or winning team that does the hemp fandango. If the losing side, would teams actually compete to win? Or would the incentive be greater if it were the winning team that lost one of its parasites?

But as has been pointed out about car seat belts: if we really want people to drive safely then ban seat belts and put a dagger on the steering wheel, aimed at the heart of the driver.

The solution to repeated concussion in football players leading to their being punch drunk is simply to ban helmets.

In fact, might as well go the whole hog and ban anything other than cloth padding.

The 2011 Tour de France, which flirted with madness last week, lost the plot altogether yesterday when an official French television car smashed into Sky’s Juan Antonio Flecha just as he and Johnny Hoogerland launched an attack off the front of a five-man break 35km from the finish.

Talking about the Tour de France and not mentioning drugs* is a step forward, isn’t it?

*See first comment

But Ferguson, a long-time critic of the academy system, insists that the changes cannot come quickly enough for English teams.

“We are only allowed to coach [schoolboys] for an hour and a half [each week].

An hour and a half each week?

Academy regulations state that young players can receive no more than 3,760 ‘contact time’ hours on the training pitch up to the age of 21.

What?

Yer average public schoolboy will have 4-6 hours of sport a week.

Anyone know why this academy limit is so ludicrously low?

It’s just about acceptable to point out that those of West African descent have a higher liklihood of sickle cell anaemia but carry on and point out that almost all modern sprinters share such ancestry and almost no modern competitive swimmers do and you’re getting close to saying unfashionable things.

But this is a point that rather made me sit up straight:

But the record books suggest ethnicity is far from superfluous. The subject may be taboo, but the fact remains that the last white man to win an Olympic 100m final was Scotsman Allan Wells in Moscow in 1980.

Even more astonishingly, in the seven Olympic Games since, not a single white athlete has reached the eight-man final. In Beijing in 2008, no white sprinter made it past the second round.

I think the use of the word “white” there isn’t quite right, for it’s obviously being used as the antonym for “black”, which isn’t right really. I’m pretty sure it should be “West African descent”, not skin colour, which is the point.

In much the same way, it’s not “blacks” which dominate (to a lesser extent) long distance running, rather East and North Africans, isn’t it?