Compiled by JOHNNY WATTERSON

Uefa call shots on Lansdowne Road

EUROPE IS not just telling us now how to run the country but also how to name our stadiums. Remember it’s not a bailout by Europe but a partnership with Europe. All is not what you think. That means Aviva (left), or Lansdowne Road is now neither one nor the other because Uefa says so.

Uefa does not have sponsorship with Aviva so they want the FAI to call Lansdowne Road the Dublin Arena. They wish to change the name of Ireland’s newest stadium and oldest rugby ground because it doesn’t suit their commercial purposes for the Europa League final next May.

We are asked to accept this royal football decree because we are now virtually shoeless and the match will apparently bring in €30 million to the economy. There are enough people around who have resisted calling Lansdowne Road Aviva and there will be many more sickened by the pompous request of Uefa to “make disappear” a name because it doesn’t please them but does confuse the identity of an historical rugby ground. Then again once you sell out, you sell out. You reap what you sow. What goes around comes around. At the risk of being a codger, it will always be Lansdowne Road.

Harrison's efforts to fight on makes it easier to knock him 

AS WITH motor bike road racers, knocking a boxer, especially one who has won an Olympic gold medal, feels instinctively taboo. Too much danger. Too much pain. Too other worldly for mortals to step through the ropes or twist the throttle. But Audley Harrison keeps inviting us to bring it on with him.

Encouragingly, Harrison is probably the least frightening heavyweight in world boxing. Comprehensively beaten by David Haye in the recent Battle of Britain, Harrison has vowed to keep fighting despite landing just a single punch before the WBA champion put him on the canvas.

Harrison nicknamed himself A-Force which was quickly changed to A-Farce, while Audley was flipped to Audrey and Fraudley. But it hasn’t deterred the 39-year-old who feels the referee had a poor night.

After Haye, the British and Commonwealth champion Dereck Chisora stated, “I’d never show my face again if I fought like that. It was pathetic. He disgraced himself and he disgraced British heavyweights. He shouldn’t get paid the reported million pounds he is earning after that shambles.”

Others said he should retire, while the BBBC are considering withholding some or all of the purse. But Harrison knows there are too many rich pickings, especially among those in retirement, where he refuses to tread. In fact in 2003 that’s exactly where he looked for an opponent and found 41-year-old Frank Bruno, who had then been in retirement for seven years.

The fight collapsed when in September of that year Bruno was taken from his home in Essex by medical staff assisted by police officers, under the provisions of Britain’s Mental Health Act 1983.

He was taken to Goodmayes Hospital in Ilford, where he underwent psychological and psychiatric tests, prompting the Sun to run a crass headline “Bonkers Bruno Locked Up”.

He had been suffering from depression for several months beforehand and was diagnosed as having bipolar disorder.

Harrison might be more cunning than most to keep a career and a money stream alive. But he challenges the virtue most boxers prize most. Respect.

Europe the loser as Venter vacates stage

THOSE FEELING mission accomplished must be rugby’s disciplinarians and law lords. Brendan Venter is going. There will no longer be any dandruff dislodged from official blazers by his booming opinions. Twice last season Venter was invited before a RFU tribunal. The first time was for criticising a refereeing performance and the second for engaging with a group of Leicester supporters at Welford Road. After that Venter stood, among other things, accused of shameless sarcasm, which earned him a vindictive ban from Twickenham on Premiership final day where his club Saracens were playing.

Recently, his Nostradamus episode in the Heineken Cup was proven accurate after he warned of impending chaos due to refereeing inconsistencies. Leinster’s match against Saracens at Wembley turned out the way he had predicted and being Venter he reinforced the point by criticising French referee Christophe Berdos for his handling at the breakdown.

That cost him €25,000 with €15,000 suspended until June 2012. Since then he has been sullenly hermetic. Now he’s off to South Africa to practise as a medical doctor, an individual spirit crushed, the Heineken Cup suitably sanitised and duller for it.

Shameless Fifa shrug shoulders

IS NOT Fifa made for lampooning. Have they not learned anything from the IOC’s faltering path from corruption to sporting watchdog, from hilarious, self-regarding pseudo monarchs to the organisation that this week immediately sought the high moral ground with a prompt declaration of investigation into money matters and kickbacks. This week contagion was everywhere in Europe.

Ireland, Portugal, Fifa, the IOC.

The grandees of football, whose reaction to deep-rooted misbehaviour by their own particularly shameless brand of oligarchs has been a shrug of the the shoulder, have not begun to understand that since the IOC share a bed with many top sports administrations, the nefarious romps of some infect all.

That’s how nasty transmitted diseases work.

Fifa president – no blazer more fragrant – Sepp Blatter is an IOC member as is Issa Hayatou, who comes from Cameroon and is head of the Confederation of African Football, a position he has held for more than 20 years. Aged 64, Hayatou is the son of a Sultan and several members of his family hold senior positions in Cameroon society. So, of course he’s an IOC member.

Despite Hayatou’s insouciance at the allegations levelled against him and Blatter’s disinterest in pursuing them, you would expect the elderly pair to remember the fallout from the Salt Lake scandal of 12 years ago when the IOC found that several of their members had taken bribes to secure them the 2002 Winter Olympics. While no criminal charges were brought, the IOC members were expelled and another 10 sanctioned.

Self-regarding they may be but since then the IOC under president Jacques Rogge has taken a righteous path and, initially under Canadian lawyer Dick Pound, the organisation also confronted the world of drug taking in sport.

There has been some success in both fields although the chronic inclination of top athletes to tell the biggest and best of lies has been a cultural revelation of Olympic proportions.

Fifa, though – with the tax-free bubble they insist upon for any staging of the World Cup, for the debts nations feel are imperative to build up in a frenzied attempt to outdo their competitors – feel compelled to act like a little battleship-nation replete with the self-importance, the limousines and the stacked heels.

Who believes the Beijing Olympic Games rehabilitated China from being cast as a serial abuser of human rights?

How absurd to feel that the South African World Cup was a celebration of the promise of a country that less than 20 years ago broke free from the shackles of apartheid and not the cause of a crippling millstone of billions of dollars of debt.

This week the full soulless machinery of politics and sport paraded itself on the BBC, in London and in Zurich as Russia (2018) and Qatar (2022) were selected to host the next two World Cup competitions.

Fifa’s arrogance, barely ruffled after two of their classy executive members were recently banned and fined for selling their votes, triggered a feeling of opprobrium, the whiff of which reached IOC nostrils, although evidently not those of the England bidding team.

Their political imperative before the votes were cast was to accuse their national broadcaster of behaving in an “unpatriotic” manner for screening the critical Panorama programme.

Where have we heard that before?

The fear Fifa should have is that their credibility has fallen through the floor and although most members are respectable people, there seems to be a paralysis in fixing it.

Only when Juan Samaranch left and Rogge arrived did the IOC find itself moving towards solutions.

Individuals make a difference during times when the power of shame and derision, the prospect of dishonour, infamy or humiliation no longer bears weight.

Mourinho targets drop zone

WHAT GAME other than golf induces a fear of the rules in players? That Ian Poulter should incur a penalty shot for accidentally dropping his ball on his marker and making it flip is arcane and wilfully perverse. In a court of law if you mistakenly and remorsefully kill your golfing partner, you can still walk away without sanction. But the Royal and Ancient are more exacting than any hanging judge.

Dustin Johnson crashed and burned at the hands of the rulebook when he grounded his club at this year’s USPGA and incurred a two-shot penalty. The 26-year-old was oblivious to the fact he had been in a bunker in which the gallery had been standing.

At this year’s Honda Classic Graeme McDowell called a penalty on himself when he felt he had grounded his club on his back swing, when hitting out of a water hazard. Television replays at the end of his round and before he had signed his card proved he was correct. Rule 13-4 violation, two- shot penalty.

Thankfully the PGA provides a non-playing referee who knows these things and can inform the players, who sometimes have little idea of having broken a rule. Conversely the referee himself is often ignorant of an infringement unless the player tells him. Poulter sucked it up and McDowell kept the tradition of self-flagellation by rulebook alive.

But that doesn’t mean all golfers are paragons of virtue. Hitting the ball into a grandstand behind the green in the knowledge there’s a fresh sward of drop zone available can be said to be cynically using the rules. Golf knows this happens but so far has not found out a way of reading a player’s mind.

Real Madrid’s Jose Mourinho used the rules recently and has been branded a cheat. Telling two of his players to draw yellow cards and take a match ban before the Champions League knockout stages began was exploiting the rules too. Football is demonstrably less ethical than golf.

But who is to say Mourinho was not simply carving a four iron into the gallery to earn a favourable drop?