Roger Alton

This weekend is the final round of the southern hemisphere’s Rugby Championship, the best tournament outside the World Cup and wildly better than the Six Nations. The most eye-catching fixture is South Africa v. The All Blacks in Jo’burg, but the more important fixture for British Isles rugby is the 11.40 p.m. kick-off in Rosario. If Argentina beat Australia — and they only lost by a point in Perth — then the Wallabies will finish bottom of the table. For all our crowing about the Lions in the summer, it might be that the cream of the British Isles squeaked past the worst side in the southern hemisphere 2-1.

Golf has reached the eye-watering end of the season in the United States. By Sunday night, one man in a baseball cap will walk off the 18th green in Atlanta $10 million richer. This week is the final event in the FedEx Cup play-offs, a four-week season-within-a-season on the American Tour in which a total of $67 million is up for grabs for the top 125 players. Not a bad reward for a sunny afternoon trying to put a white ball in a hole in fewer strokes than everyone else. Being a golfer is one of the few jobs where the less work you do the richer you become. As Alan Partridge in his sports interviewing days put it to one of the world’s finest players, ‘So, Seve Ballesteros, only 63. Not very good is it? Everyone else has got a lot more.

Were you still up, as they used to say about Portillo in the 1997 election, for Hedwall? It was well past midnight on Sunday, the sort of hour when all good Spectator readers should be tucked up in bed — or when the really good ones are thinking about heading home — that Caroline Hedwall, a young Swedish golfer, made a birdie at the 18th hole of Colorado Golf Club that meant two unprecedented things. For the first time on American soil, Europe could not lose the Solheim Cup, the women’s version of the Ryder Cup, and Hedwall had become the first player to win five matches out of five in the competition. Never mind the Ashes or the Lions tour, which were both against fairly weak Australian opposition, this was the outstanding team performance of the year.

It’s been a long, hot, soccerless holiday. There has been football about — the women’s European Championship, for example, and various age-group tournaments, all of which England departed with undue haste — but not the proper stuff. There hasn’t been a tournament where players can ‘put themselves in the shop window’ or prove that they have what it takes ‘at the highest level’ for any club with a fat chequebook and a friendly press. Youth football, even women’s, is all very well but it doesn’t pay the bills. Men’s professional football is, sadly, the big kid in the playground of sport.

There’s nothing we old folk like more than a chat about how poorly all our friends and acquaintances are. This is because, as anyone who understands the complex workings of the universe knows, there is only a certain amount of ill health to go round and the more it lands on someone else, the better our chances of dodging a bullet. It’s the same with tennis: there’s only a certain number of classic matches available for any one tournament. At this year’s Wimbledon the tennis gods poured all the juice into the wondrous Djokovich/Del Potro semi-final, which was one of most thrilling, athletic and noble sporting contests I have ever seen.

Many years ago, when I used to work for the Guardian, Germaine Greer, who was then a columnist for the paper, wrote a vicious little piece for the op-ed pages slagging off Suzanne Moore, who was also a columnist. Even in the shell-shocked state that goes with the territory of trying to handle egos like that, I realised this could be a problem, so I rang up Ms Greer to wonder whether she felt like toning it down a tad, dropping the reference to ‘fuck-me shoes’ and suchlike. She snorted with laughter: ‘Stay out of this, dear; this is a mud fight.’ Happy days, and a nice fore-runner of the current spat between Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova, who have been cheerfully knocking seven bells out of each other. Prepare to duck if you see them in the same Wimbledon bar.

Even if you don’t have a head for petrol, you can’t have failed to have noticed that the Formula 1 season thus far has been somewhat unsatisfactory. ‘Degradation’ and even ‘delamination’ (no, me neither but it does exist) have been the key words in Grand Prix chatter as tyres with a working life that can be measured in yards rather than miles have virtually eliminated the word ‘racing’ from the sport. But if you have two minutes and 31 seconds free — a Sunday afternoon just after a Grand Prix has started is as good a time as any — access YouTube and take a look at the trailer for Ron Howard’s new film, Rush, and your F1 blues will be swept away as quickly as the smile disappears from the face of the freshly goosed grid girl.

Lords laid on a nifty do the other day for the British Sports Book Awards, which was a great reminder of the quality of so much sports writing here. The best books duly won — Gideon Haigh’s perfectly pitched On Warne (Simon and Schuster), and the Sunday Times journalist David Walsh’s biblical Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (Walsh must by now have an Armstrong-themed trophy cabinet the size of Sir Alex Ferguson’s). But if you want a tip for next year, keep an eye on my former colleague Jon Henderson’s staggeringly well-researched life of Stanley Matthews, The Wizard (Yellow Jersey Press). It’s the first unauthorised biography of a man who was a global celebrity, and the most famous footballer in the world for a time.

Sachin Tendulkar did not have the happiest of 40th birthdays last week. The man who has been worshipped as a god in India for most of his career lasted only six balls, playing for Mumbai in the Indian Premier League, before being clean bowled by a young West Indian off-spinner who was only a year old when Tendulkar made his international debut. His dismissal silenced the huge crowd who had turned out for him in Calcutta, disappointed the TV executives who know that Tendulkar at the wicket means higher ratings, and left him plenty of time to eat some of the 40lb chocolate birthday cake presented to him before the match. His longevity is remarkable.

David Beckham’s elegant but pointless cameo role for Paris Saint-Germain in their Champions League defeat to Barcelona the other day got plenty of play in the British press, despite his ineffectiveness. We love Becks — who doesn’t? — but he’s no longer the player he was, let alone the one he was hyped up to be. He will always have a role, whether it’s as a football ambassador, or simply as an agreeable figure who gets wheeled out to front anything from marital stability to handing out the canapés at a G8 summit. Becks himself has no doubt about his ability to contribute on the pitch, it’s just the rest of us, and he has never really paid too much attention to what we think.

Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It listed an unusual character in the credits, a swearing consultant. And no wonder, for he must have been one of the busiest people on set. Lively on-screen swearing has been largely absent recently — until mid-afternoon on Easter Sunday, that is. Commentators Andrew Cotter and Dan Topolski were amiably rhubarbing away on the radio about this year’s Boat Race being a masterpiece of unbelievable tension (though anyone could see, even on the radio, that only a torpedo attack would prevent an Oxford victory) when Oxford’s diminutive cox, the Colombian Oskar Zorrilla, made his pitch for immortality. A shrieked order, ‘Don’t fucking sit’, came crystal clear over the airwaves.