Bowled over by BBC's remedy

Therapy. Indoor bowls in the afternoon. It's a BBC palliative, a tonic, an elixir, a restorative, a remedy. For what? Well, over-exposure to Sky Sports for a start. The BUPA Care Home Open. Was there ever a better placed sponsorship? Just look at Friday's audience. Bleachers festooned with folk who's middle-aged sons could easily be the championship contenders.

If Sky Premiership football is tequila slammers and a Clash number on the karaoke machine, the BUPA Home Care Championship is slippers and Inspector Morse. The BUPA Home Care championship is dimming the lights and inserting your most enchanting CD. Whale Songs From The Great Oceans, perhaps.

Decrepid? Hardly. Old even? Nope. It's the pace of the sport that is noteworthy rather than the age of those who people it. It's the atmosphere. It doesn't fizz and crackle, nor is it occasionally riotous. It massages and offers a lullaby. If Paul Gascoigne was force-fed cocaine and then ordered to play an end, it wouldn't change the tempo of the game. The BUPA Home Care Championship is by its nature reflective, understated, lordly.

Fancy this. Mark Sandford playing Noel Kennedy for a place in the quarter-finals on Friday. The set is poised at 2-2 in the best-of-five match. Kennedy has the jack looking like Custer at the Little Big Horn. The bowls are the Sioux. The contest is in his hand. Sandford is desperate and has only one thing left in his armoury - brute force.

He winds for his last-stand delivery and knuckles a ball at the tight pile at the other end of the astroturf rink. He misses by a yard. That's quite a bit in bowls.

We hear an off-camera thump, presumably the bowl embedding itself into something inanimate someplace off the rink. You get the impression that Sandford will need the type of hydraulic levers the rescue services occasionally employ to retrieve his ball.

"Overshot a little," comes the hushed commentary. No kidding.

Kennedy is definitely rugby union front row and a bit more. A splicing together of John Daly's rotundity, David Duval's wraparound shades and a bandana which is very David Beckham arriving at Stringfellows. Okay, it's not that bad but Kennedy, clearly a stand-out-from-thecrowd man, rolls a good end. Occasionally lifting the beat by chasing his curving ball down the rink until it comes to a halt and falls on it's side like a drunk, he's the unpredictable chap . . . Zzzzzz. Waddaya know it's Saturday morning. Is that Kennedy at Old Trafford ? Lordy, no it's the superfluous Manchester United goalkeeper Mark Bosnich. Today he's not on the team as United's rivalry is renewed against Manchester neighbours, City, on Sky Sports.

It's a "derby" at Maine Road. "Derby's" in the Premiership are always miscast as friendly rivalry. Metaphorically, (and when you think about it literally too) a "derby" is the chance for frenzied fans to engage in a re-affirmation of who they are, or rather who they hate. They look at each other in the same way Sandford looked at the pack of bowls he failed to atomise.

The coins that curled past and finally hit the head of the corner-kicking Manchester United icon David Beckham told their own story and prompted commentator Martyn Tyler to recall soccer's sordid past.

"This is not supposed to happen anymore in football," he said as Beckham hunkered down checking his shaven head for blood. For the style-conscious, Beckham's skull doesn't have the trace scars that fashionably line Roy Keane's skinned dome.

Beckham's 32-yard 68.5-m.p.h. curving free kick after 90 seconds ensured he was attended more closely than most for spicy treatment by the City fans, who had to wait for four years and promotion for an opportunity to lower the tone against their rivals.

In studio, Denis Tueart and Steve Bruce would have remembered the old days. City wide-man Tueart, in particular, would have run the gauntlet. Spending considerable time dodging everything from beer bottles to sharpened fifty pence pieces (Beckham was pelted with pound coins which clearly puts the prawns of the corporate sector in the frame), Tueart's career spanned English soccer's calamitous days when the sport was hijacked by various groups set on unconditional violence and mayhem.

By those standards the Beckham incident was trivial and, given the 11.30 a.m. kick-off time, drink was the unlikely cause. City can expect a fine.

Few things are more ugly than crowd violence - England front row Phil Greening's ears are one of the exceptions. Another is Eamon Darcy's golf swing and a third, of which we're not entirely sure because Sky don't yet have cameras in the players' changing room, could be Matthew Burke's feet.

Burke, according to SKY Sports commentator Miles Harrison, wears a pair of boots that are a size too small. He likes the tight feel because it helps his place-kicking. Most mothers work on the principle that if you don't wear comfortably fitting footwear you will have to endure highly unfashionable corrective shoes in later life. Burke doesn't appear to wince his way through matches and scored all of the Aussies' points, with four penalties, a conversion and a try.

Bound-foot Burke still couldn't win the match on his own. That came down to Ireland's Brian Stirling. Stirling was the video referee who had to decide if Dan Luger got a legitimate hand to Iain Balshaw's deft kick over the Australian defence in injury time and thus end John Eales' record of never having lost a Test match in Europe. Stirling took his time, the delay adding tension and drama to the finish. For England and Northern Hemisphere rugby Stirling's decision was therapy, a palliative, a tonic, an elixir, a restorative, a remedy.