Pitch-rusty Aldo triggers chaos in box

TV View: Just what you don't need on the eve of a new Premiership season: problems with your telly. They took it away a week ago after being told deeply disturbing sounds were coming from it, sort of a cross between the whine of a house alarm and someone being violently ill.

Having checked it out, they insisted it was fine. It was only when they pinpointed the exact time the problem reared its ugly head that they gave it a clean bill of health. "John Aldridge," they promised, "won't be singing on your telly any more."

No more ears like burning rings of fire, then. He's a star, is Aldo, but Lily the Pink will haunt us forever and beyond.

Aldo, we pray, will return to punditry duty now, just as Graeme Souness has done after resting following his summer loan spell with RTÉ. He was particularly scathing about Manchester City at half-time yesterday, we noted, leaving Richard Keyes wondering if he'd fallen into bad company during the summer. As we know, he had.

"It's the biggest! It's the best! And it's back," Richard had hyperventilated on Saturday as he welcomed us to Sky's opening game of the season: Sheffield United v Liverpool. That's what we've always loved about Richard - he just calls a spade a forklift and gets on with it.

"We've brought you 15 glorious seasons of Premiership football and I can promise we'll bring you many more," he panted. "Fifteen weeks Premiership football has been idle. I can't tell you how good it feels to be back."

Richard? Calm down.

So, a big hello to Sheffield United and their manager, Neil Warnock.

"Will you try to take them on at football or will you stick to your style?" the Sky reporter asked Neil before the game. We don't think he meant to be offensive, it just came out wrong.

"Well, I think our style is football," said Neil, who was offended. Still, he was a happy man, and determined to enjoy his Premiership debut.

"We're not going to let a little thing like Liverpool put us off, we'll enjoy the day," he said.

They did too.

Over on Setanta Pat Dolan was interviewing Kevin Doyle, asking him what was special about his Reading manager, Steve Coppell. Kevin was careful not to say Coppell was light years ahead of his previous manager, largely because that was Pat Dolan, but complimented both men.

Doyle nervously hoped for a decent start to life in the Premiership for a club, incidentally, whose owner, John Madejski is "seeing" Cilla Black. Two-nil down, Reading won 3-0, it was a lorra lorra fun.

The real fun, though, over the weekend took place at The Oval. "There's no doubt about it, it's a mess, a huge mess, an enormous mess," said David Gower.

"It's a very, very farcical situation," Ian Botham agreed.

A huge, enormous, very farcical mess, then.

A quick recap: the umpires had a look at the ball and reckoned someone had been sharpening fingernails on it so they punished Pakistan by awarding England five penalty runs. Pakistan protested by staying in their dressing-room after tea while the umpires and English batsmen waited for them in the middle. So the umpires and English batsmen returned to their dressing-rooms, at which point Pakistan came out and waited for the umpires and English batsmen, but the umpires refused to leave their dressing-rooms, so Pakistan went back to theirs. Follow that?

What we couldn't follow were the bits where David Lloyd insisted on reading out the laws of cricket, laws, we suspect, not even the authors understood.

"It's quite long, is this," said Lloydie as he took us through Law 21 and sub-sections.

"Oooooh, me microphone's gone," he said when he'd reached sub-section 967, but alas it hadn't - we could still hear him.

Botham and Nasser Hussein reckoned Pakistan had been accused of cheating without proof, while the former Pakistan player Ramiz Raja said some things about umpire Darrell Hair which we'd half guess will result in him consulting his lawyer.

Back in the commentary box Lloydie was still reading out the laws. Pakistan, it seemed, had been accused of "altering the condition of the ball". In layman's language this is called cheating, a bit like "simulation" in football. It's like calling a forklift a spade.

"It's the most politically dangerous event I've seen at a cricket ground in some years," said Gower, worrying for relations between Pakistan and England. "For God's sake, it's a cricket match," declared Lloydie.

Indeed, except it wasn't because everyone was in the pavilion. And according to Law 21, sub-section 96, clause 15, part 236b that's just not cricket.