So the artificial thrill of the closure of the transfer window has come and gone. There were, of course, countless shots of reporters standing outside stadia or training complexes desperately filling as, as far as we could tell, absolutely nothing happened for hours at a time. And then the usual rash of last-minute deals going through, either dashing or perhaps in Stoke City's case exceeding the inflated expectations of fans. I always wonder why these deals couldn't have gone through sooner - all the top flight managers must have had some idea of the composition of the bulk of their 25-man squads for this season, for example, so why all the frantic wheeler-dealing at the last minute? It almost seems as if the whole system was concocted by the authorities to give the media another set of scaffolding to construct yet more temporary and rickety 'drama'.
Anyway, in the end Albion signed a speed-merchant with no final ball who's well known to us already from an earlier loan, a completely unkown to us teenager from Scandanavia and a striker from the Scottish Premier League. A mixed bag if ever there were one, time will tell if the increasingly polyglot squad has what it takes.
More genuinely newsworthy and infinitely more depressing was yet another scandal surrounding the Pakistani cricket team, I'm sure you're all aware of the details. It's a depressing fact that a sport that was once seen as a bastion of fair play and good sportsmanship is increasingly seeing that coda erroded by the malicious influence of money. No longer is it immune from the same ravages which afflict football in various parts of the world, all spawned out of money, be they greed, corruption, match-fixing, whatever it is.
My natural bleeding-heart liberal tendency is to feel some sympathy for the young players involved, thrust from poverty into a very, very different world and doubtless taken advantage of with the promise of more money than they'd seen in their young lives, but the fact is that the book absolutely has to be thrown at anybody who besmirches sport in this way. Pakistani cricket has a long, ignoble and entirely regrettable history of seeming to punish such wrongdoing to the fullest possible extent in the past, only to then soften or entirely retract those punishments when later circumstances made it desirable to do so. If it happens again this time, Pakistani cricket may as well lose their Test-playing status. Bad enough that their own country cannot host cricket due to the security situation, their cricket board appears beset by internicine strife and corruption, and their players are dismally failing to represent the honour of millions of people suffering desperately from the floods by underperforming so spectacularly. If it turns out that underperformance was even partly deliberate, they'll have spat in the faces of a loyal fan base and deserve never to play Test cricket again.
And a brief comment on the unmasking of the Stig. Speaking as an only occasional viewer of Top Gear, it really doesn't matter to me who's under that mask - it's only a TV conceit for Christ's sake. But if the bloke exposed as Stig signed a confidentiality agreement, how has he been allowed by a court to tear up that agreement? Surely he was in breach of contract? I don't understand the decision, as it seems that even in court, as on the cricket fields, honour counts for less and less these days.
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