Future is cloudy as Sky takes the reins

WITH Sol Campbell signing for Arsenal you've got to ask, was it all a game, all that stuff about Inter Milan, Barcelona, two hundred grand a week and free flights home? Maybe old Sol bottled it abroad. Or perhaps Arsenal chucking in a gratis bus pass from Hertfordshire as well as that 100,000 a week did it.

Whatever, I detect the hand of Campbell's agent Sky Andrew in a lot of this.

He was talking his client up, the way they do, and seemingly was not too bothered about the damage done to Campbell's reputation. Make no mistake, the image of Sol the rock-solid, gentle giant has taken a real pasting. He has come to sum up for many the naked greed that dominates today's game.

Deciding to move from Spurs to Arsenal was always going to be what Sir Humphrey called "courageous". To do so in this fashion leaves a nasty taste in everyone's mouth, including those of us who quite understand why he decided to abandon a club that seems to be going nowhere.

As for Arsenal's ambitions, only idiots - perhaps including Patrick Vieira's agent - will challenge the club's aspirations.

Indeed the signing of Campbell might persuade Vieira to stay.

Already Vieira has been denying the awful things he said despite being caught bang to rights in a first-person interview. Arsenal, for diplomatic reasons, will pretend to believe him. The rest of us won't.

It's amazing how greed turns even the finest footballers into naughty children. Except children usually have to say sorry. A footballer merely blames his agent.

I'm sure Vieira's representative was behind a lot of this. But if Vieira knew, he should feel ashamed of his ingratitude to the club that made him.

Meanwhile, football's inability to regulate its marketplace, discipline wrongdoers and ensure only fit and proper people get an agent's licence, continues to cost the game dear.

But why worry about reputation when there's still obviously loads of money floating around?

Zinedine Zidane going for 50 million and Campbell getting 5m-a- year- plus are both fresh milestones on football's road to glory. Or should that read ruin?

Why the women's game only serves as a sideshow

WIMBLEDON has been attracting record crowds, but have they been offered record entertainment?

From the men, certainly. But the women? Hardly. Martina Hingis, who committed tennis suicide on the first day, and Amelie Mauresmo, who no one much cares about anyway, failed to justify their top- eight seeding.

Otherwise, only when Jennifer Capriati came back from the dead on the second Wednesday did the women's competition spark into life.

Before then everything progressed with boring predictability. Most of the top women won every match in straight sets. Only two of 16 third-round matches went beyond two sets, and only two of the eight in the next round as well.

With the men, the figures are nine and five respectively. It's just a different world, as Wednesday's heroics by Henman and Ivanisevic showed.

Watching there on Saturday, it's clear even some straight-sets men's matches are thoroughly entertaining, as was Pat Rafter's victory over the subtle, but on grass underpowered, Hicham Arazi. That same afternoon I endured two shameful women's games, with Venus Williams and Lindsay Davenport contemptuously dismissing players who both ranked in the top 30, but couldn't begin to give them a game.

Davenport had her right knee and thigh strapped, and never bothered to chase anything out of reach on her right all afternoon, but she still ran away with the result. And of course it's a further cause for misery that the British girls can't even give Williams's and Davenport's cannonfodder a run for their money.

Where the women have done well is in their campaign for equality.

They're almost there; the winner now gets 462,500 to the men's 500,000.

But for most of us the women's competition could without loss be reduced to an invitation event for eight players. The rest seem nothing more than overpaid, underpowered lightweights.

Now little to look forward to when Saturday comes QUIETLY and without a squeak of protest, Saturday football has been bumped off, at least if you support a Premiership club.

Think about it. With Sky taking a Sunday and a Monday game - and now a pay-per-view match on Sunday lunchtimes - plus three UEFA Cup teams who will play on Sundays every time they have a European game the previous Thursday, all that will be left on many Saturdays is the dross.

Is there a mandate for this change from the fans?

Hardly, but who at the top of the game cares? They may do, though, if supporters start to vote with their feet, as they've begun doing at places like Aston Villa.

Then you have to ask, is there no limit to how much football can be put on the telly without damaging the product? I make a regular date with the Sunday game even if it's rubbish like Everton v Leicester, but am I going to watch two games on Sunday? I doubt it. And nor will you.

Maybe this is just a necessary staging post to the time when every Premier game will be on pay-per-view TV, and provided people are willing to pay enough it won't matter if audiences are fragmented.

But, then again, this could come to be seen in the future as the moment football lost the plot, and failed to realise that their audience can be a pretty fickle lot.

Sorry if I appear a bit snappy

WIMBLEDON crowds don't sing, "'Ere we go" or invade the pitch, but they do have one or two irritating habits, not least taking photos. And I don't mean a tiny Kodak. I mean long-barrelled jobs that wouldn't be out of place in the professional photographers' enclosure. And they wave them about across your eyeline without bothering in the slightest that somebody else's view is being obscured.

But when do these prats look at the photographs they take? I mean, life's too short, isn't it? And it's really rather sad as well as a bloody nuisance to get a seat for a big day and then spend the whole time peering through a lens.

The Games people play

ANOTHER 100 million has been tipped in to Manchester's Commonwealth Games, which means the local council have got away with their reckless claims that they could finance the thing.

They've relied, cynically, on the fact it's too late and too embarrassing to pull the plug.

But the problems aren't over yet, because who cares about the Commonwealth Games? If here at Standard Sport we gave away free tickets, I wouldn't expect to get killed in the rush, even if we threw in complimentary Virgin Train tickets to avoid the necessity of a second mortgage.

You've got a screw loose

GRAHAM POLL has been talking again. Always a mistake. He says top refs must abstain from sex on Friday nights in case it affects their performance.

So if wives go along they've got to have separate rooms! What's this guy on? He's a ref for Christ's sake, not some world-beating athlete.

Besides, some of them are so awful they couldn't get any worse if they screwed every woman on the planet in the run-up to the game.

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