From ARFOPEDIA

Extremely pompous (not in a good way) journalist who tries and fails to be profound about sport. Thinks, like most idiots, that animals have human emotions, motives, characteristics and personalities.

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"But one question will have dominated Knight’s heart and mind before racing him yesterday: does the horse want to race? Not a silly question, as it happens. A horse can’t be forced to race, can’t be forced to jump, can’t be forced to give his all. He can only be given the opportunity.

Knight has that remarkable blend of gentleness and toughness that marks the English horsewoman. And she will have pondered that question in depth — and will certainly be agonising about the decision now. But if the horse told her — for training horses is also about the process of information exchange — that he was up for it, she would have taken that as decisive. Provided the vet agreed, of course.

If Best Mate had trained and run and jumped at home with all his former appetite for life and strife, then there was only one decision to make. Give him his chance, he seems to want it. Or demand it. And Best Mate set off yesterday full of swash and swagger and running, full of the joys of autumn: cut in the ground, a touch of sun, and the fences gay and inviting before you. The horse sent out his unambiguous messages: I still like this, I still want to do this, I still want to race.

Generosity. That is what horse-people call it, anthropomorphically if you like. Best Mate was a horse of almost bottomless generosity. That is why he wanted to race again, and that is what did for him. You would have thought that if there was anything wrong with his heart, it can have been only that it was too big."

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"But what is the true meaning of the fake sheikh? My colleague, Matt Dickinson, very properly noted in these pages that it was a great pity that the energy and financial resources of a massive newspaper were used not to chase crooked agents and football’s eternal bungs controversy, but instead to make Eriksson look like an eejit.

A pity indeed, but the more frivolous story sells more newspapers at much less trouble and expense. With a bungs story, you must deal with liars and cheats seeking to cover themselves. Eriksson delivered himself bound, naked and willing to the tempter. It is always much easier when the victim himself is on your side . . . and that was the case with both Dallaglio and Eriksson.

The fake sheikh has become something more than a tabloid device. With the successful entrapment of Eriksson, he has become, like the man who paints the Forth Bridge, a national archetype, the man whose job it is to demonstrate the endless greed, folly and vanity of the world. He tells us that the great, the famous, the high achievers, are also fools. And, we like to think, greater fools than us.

Which of us is immune to the combination of flattery and money? What would have you or me cooing, fawning, accepting £900 champagne, and in return casually offering louche indiscretions and minor betrayals of trust? But perhaps it is best not to ask that question. If we do, we might see that we are no better than the Dallaglio of 1999, the Eriksson of last week.

And if we ask ourselves the sheikh question a second time, there is another matter even less easy to deal with. For perhaps we have already met our fake sheikh. And perhaps we failed to recognise him. "

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The top ten beautiful sports

1 Horse racing
2 Pole vault / high jump
3 Cricket
4 Swimming
5 Tennis
6 Eventing
7 Snooker
8 Greyhound racing
9 Fencing
10 Football

1 The most beautiful game of all is horse racing and to prove it, it has by far the best art (did Dufy do it best?) Humans cannot compare to a thoroughbred racehorse in beauty of appearance or of movement. Add to that the green of the grass and the harlequin shirts of the jockeys and you have a spectacle that is a joy to the beholder’s eye at the lowliest race meeting in the world. Tomorrow we have the best: the Derby will be run at Epsom and the most beautiful horse will win, because the winning post lends every horse a beauty that no other can rival. Horse racing: o jogo mais bellissimo de todos.

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This week, I spoke to John Woodcock, Cricket Correspondent of this parish 1954-88, and received the first words of sense I have heard on the subject of jellybeans: “They should be forced to play their next game in short trousers.” Absolutely. The whole business is childish beyond description. The taunting of an opponent by leaving sweets on the pitch is pathetic. It destroys a spectator’s pleasure in the game. It certainly made me switch my allegiance to India. I thought England deserved what they got. And I don’t think I was alone in that.

And yet the England cricket team defend such idiocy. More, they take pride in it. The whole business of taunting, putting off, insulting – all the things that go under the name of sledging – has become a battleground in which ugliness and inanity struggle for supremacy.

The stump microphone picked up a classic piece of sledging wit during that second Test between England and India. “I’m driving a Porsche Carrera; what’s your car?” Thus the exquisite Wildean wit of the modern England cricketer is laid bare.

It is, of course, the sort of remark you would expect from a Porsche driver, a Porsche being the naffest car ever manufactured. But is it a suitable remark to make to a man from a Third World nation who is a guest in your country? The combination of vulgarity and insensitivity is mind-numbing.

But the thing that really gets to me is that England cricketers seriously believe that sledging makes them better players. They prink and preen because they say bad things to people when they cannot fight back. Hard men, eh?

“It comes with the territory,” Matt Prior, the England wicketkeeper, said. “It’s international cricket, it’s a hard game. We all want to win, we’re all playing to win, so you’re going to have banter.” Prior is simply telling the world: “I’m well ’ard.”

As a point of information, people who need to tell the world that they are well ’ard are not, in fact, ’ard at all. They are just mouthy gits. Real hard man don’t need to tell you.

The England cricket team are suffering from confusion. The players believe to a man that behaving like an arsehole makes you a better cricketer. The fact is that it doesn’t. It only makes you an arsehole.

Peter Moores, the England head coach and team director, has talked up his belief that his team should be more aggressive. That is interpreted by all – perhaps even intended by him – as charter to drop all reasonable standards of behaviour, as if serious sport can only ever take place in an atmosphere of festering playground antipathy.

This is not only untrue, it is not what we spectators want. One of the many great things about the Ashes series of 2005 was the respect between the players. The ultimate image of the series was Andrew Flintoff’s moment of commiseration with Brett Lee after England’s narrow win at Edgbaston in the second Test. We liked that – that’s how we want cricket played.

So what is Moores’s response to the present outbreak of nonsense? “There is an issue about whether the stump mike should be so loud.” No there is not, there is an issue about whether the England players should make such prats of themselves.

It’s not as if it did them any good. Zaheer Khan, the man insulted by means of jellybeans, responded by taking five second-innings wickets as England slithered to defeat, leaving Michael Vaughan, the home team’s captain, feebly trying to explain that, although Zaheer had played awfully well, it wasn’t the jellybeans that had inspired him. Zaheer took the opposite view.

England didn’t look well ’ard, they looked well pathetic. These people are supposed to be playing for England, they are supposed to be representing me.

How has it come about, then, this belief that bad manners and good cricket are inseparable? Australia, obviously. For years, England have believed that everything good in cricket is Australian and that the more Australian the England team can be, the more cricket matches they will win.

So England have copied the boasting and the taunting while failing to produce a Shane Warne or a Glenn McGrath. And it’s contentious, I know, but I think Warne and McGrath did more to win cricket matches for Australia than any amount of mental disintegration inspired by Steve Waugh’s sledging. England may lack the talent of Warne and McGrath, but they can certainly behave in an infantile and boorish fashion, and that’s almost as good, isn’t it?

Cricket is a game in which people talk. There’s plenty of opportunity for it, after all. And I’ve played it. As a lapsed wicketkeeper, I’d say the strongest part of my game was the ability to suck my teeth loudly enough for the batsman to hear it 15 yards away after the ball had passed the bat.

Banter, seldom terribly edifying, is a part of cricket, on the village green and elsewhere. No one expects cricket to take place in a reverential hush and, amid the general din, no one is sure whether he is trying to encourage the bowler or disturb the batsman.

So there is a line to be drawn. I’d be inclined to draw it on purely aesthetic grounds: if it’s ugly, childish and pathetic, it’s time for the umpires to step in, as they are empowered to do. As Christopher Martin-Jenkins has pointed out on these pages before, a five-run penalty for an illegal attempt to put the batsman off is within the laws of the game.

The ICC should encourage umpires to take this on. It would be the direct opposite of what happened in tennis, when John McEnroe was making an idiot of himself. Then, tennis umpires let him throw his tantrums because they feared that defaulting him would make too much trouble. The ICC needs to grasp the nettle on this one because the players – and coaches such as Moores – don’t even think they are behaving badly. No, they think they are being cool, they think they are being Real Men.

Me. I’d like to watch an England team who played good, aggressive cricket, rather than merely pretending to do so. Cricket is supposed to be aggressive: the increased aggression in the bowling of Ryan Sidebottom and Chris Tremlett this season has been good, not bad.

But these improvements are not dependent on throwing sweeties at batsmen or boasting about what kind of penis substitute you happen to drive. All the cult of sledging does is spoil the game for the spectators, who want to see a good match contested in a forthright, full-on, flat-out, aggressive, honourable, decent, grown-up way. If we don’t get that, perhaps we will start to look elsewhere for our sporting pleasures.

I shall leave the last word to King Lune of Archenland, from The Chronicles of Narnia. His impetuous son insults an enemy who is brought before the court in chains. “Shame, Corin. Never taunt a man, save when he is stronger than you: then as you please.”

[edit] Some commentary on Simon Barnes's thoughts

tl;dr