Supposed to Make You Happy

Robbie Keane was very dignified on Sportsweek yesterday when he was being interviewed by Gary Richardson. I quite like Richardson, but he can be a real scandal monger and seems to want to make the news as much as report it. He asked Keane about his attitude towards Benitez and Keane neatly sidestepped the question, which didn't stop the interviewer persisting and reframing the question in a desperate effort to get Keane to say something untoward, which of course would have made every sports news bulletin for the rest of the day.

Another example of the BBC trying make a story out of nothing has happened today. All the sports bulletins have said that Dwain Chambers has said the he could beat Usain Bolt, but if you listen to the interview, he doesn't say that at all............he talks about the mechanics of sprinting and what he would need to do to be able to beat him, which isn't quite the braggadocio which the beeb has been presenting all day. Christ, it's not as if there isn't enough interesting stuff going on in the world of sport without the BBC trying manufacture stories out of nothing.

Very little of these interesting stories are happening down St Andrews way though, where our team of all the talents continue to play like a bunch of old bastards, has beens and never will be's. Predictably half of our fans won't rest until the head of Mcleish is being paraded around the streets of Small Heath on a stick. They either forget, or don't realise, that all our managers have been shit. Not one of them has a record to be proud of, with the honourable and notable exception of the legendary Bill Coldwell. Leave Eck alone, I say, he seems like a very nice man, is doing no worse than any other manager we have had and he doesn't take the fans for idiots. We may as well let him have the time to either succeed or screw it up royally.

I feel sorry for the increasingly gnomic Tony Adams, following his brutal sacking by Portsmouth. I like the way that he has recognised his faults and changed his life around and I admire his efforts to get himself educated and to increase his football knowledge, but there is something about him that just grates with me, I can't quite put my finger on it, but there you go. Still, I hope he finds another job soon, we could do with a few more iconoclasts in the game. Perhaps he'll come to us.

Andy Flower, the England batting coach and the man responsible for bringing the best out of Ian Bell, Andy Strauss, Paul Collingwood and Alasatair Cook has said we all need to calm down after Saturdays humiliation. Well, if I was him, I wouldn't my role to be scrutinised too carefully either.