The sport of cricket gets an updated modus every two years; each moving further from the grit, grace and guile of the original game. The level of skill in the test match version is universally admired by EVERY serious sporty schoolboy; all players and managers and dedicated fans love this discipline, if they’re honest. But never mind all that as our marvellous media have co-opted the game. Tails wagging dogs all over the shop. Truncated versions pop up willy-nilly, tailored to fill advertising agendas. Can’t wait for the fifty-sided, six-ball-inning, transvestite bind-folded ice-skating bakers with the topless gogo girls, bottomless barmen, parachute commandos in skyrocket smokescreens, reanimations of W G Grace performing hip hop holograms live from the moon. Maybe next summer?
  And what about our long-beleaguered horse racing racket? Whose latest sticking plaster to mend a broken leg is the tag-team shootout; pick a lucky number; last whole foot. Furiously, desperately hoping to ‘include’ the distracted modern youth and their disposable, idly invested incomes; those lazy leisure quids are what we’re after. Tweets and twerks and twiddledeedee on podcast chatroom zoom boom bingo. Why stick with horses? Most of the presenters don’t know the fronts from backs of those big brown things running up and down that field? Try alpaca relays with meercat jockeys in colour-coded sets of flagstaff silks on Ladies-only Day with its fashion catwalk queues and makeup wigwams, hen party hooters in conga-line tangos by your bouncy castles for the Abba tribute band. The ultimate delusion – to avoid the bleeding obvious – that horse racing needs a big boot up the arse. As the infrastructural true providers of money to the sport are PUNTERS and HORSE OWNERS while EVERYONE else is subtracting at the trough, with bookmaker bullies first snouts in. Until THAT basic accounting equation is reconfigured, racing will continue to bumble and blather and stagger along.
  Then there's the utter disgrace of professional women’s football as a prime time option. Has to be the most dishonest over-blown modus in the hustle-heavy history of televised sport. Media moguls brazenly exploit the packet patriotism and new wave ethics of your current hoi polloi to promote appreciation of low grade action that no one but the players’ families could enjoy. Denying all proof that post-covid hysteria has boosted viewing figures and fattened up the pot, they promote the women’s game as the centred symbol of a leading moral code. A possible sop to excuse the previous twenty thousand years of genderist abuse cannot be denied; but why is it on my fucking telly… every fucking night? And now we have the full throttle PR juggernaut jingo jangling a bantered barrage of bleached, botoxed, face-lifted, skin-scraped, fake-tanned, wig aware, double drilled, press-precious, multi-madeover female midfielders commentating, joshing, stridently spouting the latest clichés in locker room slang. All to publicise the coming biography, cookbook, graphic novel, yoga sessions, panto placement, panel presentation, one woman Q&A national tour… It’s like a gigantic, perpetually rotating reality rodeo where averagely talented, brass-necked nobodies get to pretend they’re in the real world… ubiquitous, invidious, never ending… God help us all… but mostly me.