Fergie's days numbered

What kind of hubristic nutter, do you imagine, would try to bluff such men with threats of court action? What kind of maniac, come to that, would dare play against them in the first place?

An old poker saying insists that if you cannot tell who the sucker is within 30 minutes of sitting down at the table . . . then it's you. Ferguson may have some leisure time to reflect on that one soon, because the Irishmen haven't merely raised the stakes beyond his means: they've threatened to buy the casino to bar him from the game.

So there, the tale of Sir Alex Ferguson has taken us from the Vatican, via ancient Greece, to the game of choice in the Wild West.

As ever, there is a truly epic quality to what he does: he has now become an epic embarrassment to English football, and, if he only knew it - but there's the essence of tragic irony - to himself. It will be an act of mercy on the grandest scale if the Irish assassins put him out of our misery and men have been made saints for much less.

I'm simply an idiot for having faith in Henman

Last week I announced that I would today be apologising for the optimism about Tim Henman's chances in the Australian Open.

So I'm very sorry. It was idiotic. Worse than that, it wasn't the first time this has happened. Being an idiot is one thing, but an idiot who cannot learn from his idiocy is another.

More humiliating still is this: At 4am on Saturday morning, I was up watching the bleeder play Argentine Guillermo Canas on Eurosport, wondering if this marked the point at which the love of sport straddled the borderline with full blown mental illness.

Soon after 6am, a tie-break gave him a two-set lead over a man who, due to injury, had barely lifted a racket in a year. Only once had even Tim contrived to blow a two-set lead, but that was in Paris to the Spanish clay court specialist Alberto Berasategui.

So what could possibly go wrong? It was midway through the third set that Eurosport, sensing the horrors to come, announced it was leaving the tennis to take in some crucial bobsleigh action.

Back I went to bed, and while chaps were trying to kill themselves down mountains on Eurosport, at Melbourne Park Tim was committing his own form of suicide. The news on waking was that he'd gone down in five marathon sets despite leading 4-1 in the decider.

Even Tim could find none of his usual positives to take from this one, and I can't see a silver lining either . . . except that maybe in future he could play all his tennis on Eurosport, the match ending the second they go off to the luge with whoever's ahead declared the winner.

Barring that, I hereby swear a solemn oath never to tip Tim again this side of Doomsday. Or until the first day of Wimbledon in June. Whichever comes first.

Beeb gets it wrong - we do need Don

On the eve of Lord Hutton's report, its promotional campaign for the FA Cup may not be a major worry for the BBC. Even so, the adverts for the FA Cup featuring Don King are a very minor fiasco. If the state broadcaster hiring a man who did time for manslaughter is mildly curious, that was long ago and he's paid his debt to society (if not perhaps to many of the fighters who emerged from his management almost penniless).

What is really odd is the nature of this advert, the gist being that the FA Cup "don't need Don" since it's thriving without his ranting hard sell.

Meanwhile, attendances at weekend games confirmed the depressing recent trend, with 14,000 empty seats at Manchester City's stadium for the meeting with Spurs. All over the ground, the cameras picked out swathes of empty seats.

But what is it that the erstwhile numbers racketeer does so brilliantly that the BBC hires him to parody himself doing it? He promotes sporting events in such a way that people actually buy seats at them. There could be no clearer sign of how the FA Cup's status has sunk, in fact, that Don King is exactly what it does need.

Welcome back Mr Davis

Having marked the emergence of 14-year-old female golf sensation Michelle Wie last week, today we celebrate a startling achievement at the other end of the life cycle.

Last night in Cardiff Steve Davis lost, by a heartbreaking score of 9-8, to the Muslim snooker star Rahquet Rahni Al-Sahli'vahn in the final of the Welsh Open, Steve's first ranking event final in memory.

For those of you who don't know the name, Steve Davis was once the finest player in the world.

My father says that, when a schoolboy, he read a paragraph in The Times, the day Mr Chamberlain returned from Munich, about a match he played with his nephew Joe. No one seems sure how old Steve is today, but if you practised a bit of dendrochronology - by cutting him open and counting the rings - I'd guess it at about 87.

Anyway, how marvellous to find him still thrilling the crowds with his devil-may-care attacking play. I watched the entire match on Ceefax (even British Eurosport couldn't be bothered), where the green numbers denoting the frame score changed once every 15-20 minutes. But then that was always much the best way to watch Steve Davis play snooker.

It's great to have him back.