The good, bad and ugly nosebleed

Paula Radcliffe

Hit: About time too. Of all the English golds, the indefatigable one's 5,000m triumph after all those years of near-misses, with one of the great runs ever seen on a British track, was the most delightful and well-earned.

Boxing officials

Miss: Potentially exciting fights being stopped because one of the boxers has a nosebleed? Good grief, they might as well have had the fighters' mums doing the refereeing.

Helen Karagounis

Hit: What ever else she achieves in athletics, an unsung 20- year- old quarter-miler from Nottingham will always have Manchester and the moment she sped past the great Cathy Freeman on the second leg of the 4 x 400m final.

Cathy Freeman

Miss: She just reckoned it was "bloody nice" to win gold and though it initially seemed splendid to have her back, ultimately it was quite depressing to see her looking quite so out of shape, overweight and such a shadow of her Sydney finest which made you realise we'll never see the best of her again.

Disabled athletes

Hit: Fantastic to hear a 38,000 full-house cheeringfor a blind Nigerian sprinter breaking a world record just as enthusiastically as they hailed the success of Radcliffe. They shared centre stage for the first time and were treated not as disabled athletes but just as bloody good athletes.

Sub-aqua lawn bowls

Miss: Sexagenarians in macs having to hurl their bowls with the effort of steroidpumped-shot putters just to get anywhere-near the jack once the torrential rain had turned Heaton Park into the Aquatics Centre.

Hazel and Steve

Miss: Great coverage, shame about the Beeb presenters. Hazel Irvine and Steve Rider doing their sugary but weirdly choreographed Carpenters' late-night double act. Steve says something anodyne, Hazel follows by trumping him for blandness, then Steve, then Hazel . . . good grief !

Informative ex-athletes

Hit: Steve Cram, Adrian Moorhouse, Michael Johnson and that funny bloke from the diving whose strangled tones suggest he's just been attacked by a pike. At least the BBC's obsession with using ex-athletes at the expense of journalists offered up some gems.

Luvvie ex-athletes

Miss: But why did we have to suffer the gushing poolside nonsense of Sharron Davies who seemed determined to tell us all how overcome and tearful she was when all we were thinking was 'Oh, for God's sake, woman, just ask a decent question'.

Niue Island

Hit: The rugby sevens team of this tiny Pacific Island gave us a haka which goes "We are cannibals, we are cannibals. We will catch you, catch you/We will tear you apart, rip you to pieces/ Then we're going to eat you". Er, and then we go and lose 66-0 to New Zealand.

Aussie cockiness

Miss: Their domination was such that one Aussie newspaper came up with the arrogant suggestion that at the next Games in Melbourne the country should be represented by separate competing states just to make it more interesting. Oh sure - and while we're at it, can Ian Thorpe, a lad from New South Wales who won more golds than Wales, be recognised as a separate dependency please?

Peter Nicol

Miss: In 1998, he won the squash title for Scotland but, now, in England colours after defecting in search of extra funding, he got beaten in the final. "I'm sure a few people in Scotland will be glad that I didn't win the gold," he reflected. A few? Even his Canadian conqueror, Jonathon Power, rubbed it in by revealing he'd watched Braveheart on the eve of the game as motivation.

The England team

Hit: Let's not get sniffy about the quality of Commonwealth golds. After the World Cup and Wimbledon, here was genuine success in Jubilee summer. England scooped a record 165 medals, with 54 golds, 51 silvers and 60 bronze. The Aussies won more, but you can't have everything.

Manchester

Hit: The perfect hosts. Tremendous organisation, enthusiastic support, friendly volunteers, some superb competition and an unprecedented 97 per cent take-up of tickets. It was all so splendid, we could even forgive and forget the three days of non-stop downpours which couldn't dampen their spirits. Follow that, London...