HOLD THE BACK PAGE:TEN YEARS after the 9/11 atrocity former British prime minister Tony Blair has said, apparently with a straight face, he backs regime change in Iran. Blair, an international peace envoy for the Middle East and the man who brought Britain into an unwinnable war, added that the west should be wary and that a long and hard struggle will be required to defeat terrorism and the flawed ideology that supports it.
Continuing at a canter, Blair blamed Tehran for helping to prolong the conflicts in Iraq, which is where he went to war following the attacks on the Twin Towers by a group who largely came from the oil rich friends of the west, Saudi Arabia.
So then, what better time than in the wake of the big Blair interview and around the 10th anniversary of the attacks in New York and The Pentagon for Iran to let it be known that their intention is to build a Formula One track?
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ('Agh, my dinner jacket' comes close to the correct pronunciation of his surname), variously described as a "hard line" president, has drawn the ire of Human Rights Watch who says that the "government routinely tortures and mistreats detained dissidents, including through prolonged solitary confinement". He's definitely a chancy character. But then again The Kingdom of Bahrain, during the recent uprising, allegedly used terror to knock its own citizens into shape. This year's race was removed from the schedule after the civil unrest prompted teams into deciding they just didn't want to race there.
In early 2007 Ahmadinejad proclaimed (without consulting the clerics beforehand), that women be allowed into football stadiums to watch male football clubs compete. This proclamation was overruled as fast as you could say 'Agh My Dinner Jacket' by clerical authorities, one of whom, Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Fazel Lankarani, took the supreme hump and wouldn't meet with the President for some weeks.
It is so far unknown whether women will be allowed in to watch the cars go around, while it's highly unlikely they will have models holding umbrellas to shade the drivers.
Officials in the President's Alliance of Builders of Islamic Iran may be hard on the girls but are dead soft on vroom, vroom and have decided to build the circuit 35km south of the capital, with Apex Circuit Design, a British company indeed, assigned the contract.
Apex's Martin Baerschmidt told the Iranian news agency Mehr they would be following F1 rules and procedures in terms of building the circuit, which should begin within six months at a cost of €62 million.
F1 currently has a waiting list for countries who are hoping to get onto the already full calendar and even the United States had to be wedged in for next season. But it seems the Iranians are hell bent on the concept of "build it and they will come". Far from standing at the back of the queue and deferentially providing the governing body of the sport, the FIA, with reasons to come to Iran, they have barrelled away on their own in much the same way as they have done with their, eh, nuclear energy programme.
As in Iran, regime change in F1 is anathema and in Monza this week Bernie Ecclestone seemed bemused. Blair, meanwhile, well he prefers football.
Howlett bemused by switcheroo
IT WAS a sunny day in Marseille four years ago in the 2007 Rugby World Cup when New Zealand played Italy. Doug Howlett, the then All Black winger, was doing what he did better than anyone else at the time. He was scoring tries. This time his team was ripping through Italy for a final score of 76-14.
After pocketing three tries Howlett had drawn level with the record of the legendary New Zealand fullback Christian Cullen and he would later score in the 15th minute against Scotland a few weeks later to give him the record of 49 tries in 62 Test matches. He is currently the fifth-highest try scorer in Rugby Union history and first on the all-time highest try scorers for the All Blacks.
His hat-trick was a big noise and when he arrived back to the media area after the match there was close to mass hysteria as camera crews and print press journalists fought to have questions answered.
At that moment Howlett had become the biggest name in world rugby, with French, New Zealand and Australian outlets all chaotically vying for his time.
In the crowd were at least two Irishmen. One of them had a ginger moustache. More determined than the others, he fought his way to the front.
“Dougie, Dougie, Dougie . . . Dougie,” he shouted over the scrum of competing global networks and international agencies. “Dougie, Dougie, Dougie . . . Dougie.” The great bobbing mop of black hair turned around and nodded to the moustache.
“Dougie . . .” he said. “Would ya givus your thoughts on playing for Munster this season?”
Howlett opened his mouth and was for a moment speechless. The world stopped as his brain tried to change gear, to assimilate the move from World Cup on the Cote d’Azure and an All Black record to the Magners League in Limerick. He was bemused, addled as if he had just fallen into Alice’s Wonderland.
We saw that look again this week. It was on Tuesday in Moscow, on the face of Russian coach Dick Advocaat.
Ireland’s fall is just a nice way of letting off steam
AS THE Ireland team discovered in Bordeaux, where they were billeted on the edge of town and away from the cafés and restaurants of a nifty little city, boredom is a constant enemy for a team on tour.
Consequently on New Zealand’s south island near Queenstown Ireland rugby coach Declan Kidney has to balance the players’ work/play schedule so that it doesn’t interfere with or wreck the buzz. That’s preferably achieved without any of them inviting harm upon themselves prior to tomorrow’s opening match against the USA.
With the injury list running from long term David Wallace and Felix Jones to hope-to-be-fit-soon Seán O’Brien, and maybe Rob Kearney, Kidney doesn’t wish to lose any more players to extra curricular romps. And so the squad enjoyed a pleasant day out this week leaping into a canyon from a cable car suspended from high tension wires that spanned two mountain peaks.
Want an outdoor adventure, beautiful scenery and 8.5 seconds of a breathtaking ground rush, the time it takes a prop to run half a pitch? The Nevis Bungee, 134m above the rugged and very far away Nevis River was the pastime of choice for the boys in green.
Apparently even just getting there is fun. The experience kicks off with a rugged 35 minute 4x4 drive through the back country. Once you arrive, you are harnessed up and board a six-person shuttle that takes you out to the glass bottomed “Bungee Pod”. There you face your fear and you dive towards the ground at 128 kmph.
They say Nevis Bungee is not for the nervous or faint-hearted and so Andrew Trimble, Jamie Heaslip, Jerry Flannery, Paddy Wallace, Keith Earls, Paul O’Connell, Stephen Ferris, Fergus McFadden and Donnacha Ryan all faced down their faint hearts and took the plunge. It’s good to know they’re minding themselves.
No mention of the other side up north
BELFAST'S Irish Newsand Newsletterclearly cater for different sides of the Northern Ireland political divide and this week brought clarity to what their reader tastes appear to be in sport.
On Monday the Unionist leaning Newsletterwent big on the Limavady cricket boys but didn't carry any mention of a certain All-Ireland hurling final between Tipperary and Kilkenny, watched by over 80,000 in Croke Park and by a million people on television.
On Tuesday the Nationalist Irish Newshad soccer on the front page of the paper and also as the lead story on the back page. Northern Ireland were playing Estonia in their Euro 2012 qualifier in Tallinn. The thing is the big noise in the Irish News was about the Republic of Ireland's prospects and their mission in Moscow, while Nigel Worthington and his Northern Ireland team were neatly placed inside.
Rooney weighs up decision to train
The Final Straw:THERE is a side to Wayne Rooney that you just have to respect. It obviously doesn't involve any introspection from the player. His life may be lived out on the front and back pages of the British red tops but there are aspects of this tabloid existence that seem to teeter permanently on the brink of catastrophe that you have to grudgingly admire.
During the summer break Rooney was given a schedule by the Manchester United fitness coach to keep him ticking over until pre-season training. As you do when you are a professional footballer, you then take off to your holiday home in Barbados for five weeks. Rooney took the schedule home and left it there while he jetted off with the swimming trunks.
“I just wanted to do nothing,” he said in his first interview as a member of the England team since June 2010. “So I made a decision to do no training what-so-ever. I honestly didn’t lift any weights or run. Nothing. The fitness coach gave me the programme to follow but I left it behind. I was a couple of kilos over.”
Yeah, bet he was too.
