The Circus

High five!
Sports officials have been giving sportspeople a bit of a hand recently – we present as Exhibit One referee Martin Hansson and his French buddy Thierry Henry. But none has done so quite as blatantly as NFL referee Jerome Boger, who exchanged a cheery high five with Tennessee Titans quarterback Vince Young after the team's win over the Houston Texans.

But apparently it was all a terrible misunderstanding.

"It was not Jerome Boger's intent to exchange a high-five with the player," explained a po-faced anonymous PR plonker. "It began with the referee making the proper administrative signal and resulted in the appearance of an inappropriate action."

Boger, it is claimed, was trying to signal the end of the game, but Young misinterpreted his action and thought – for some peculiar reason – that the referee wanted to give him a high-five … so he gave him one. Boger is probably lucky that Young didn't give him one of those silly chest bumps, or, worse still, the Moss Moon.

This was invented by the Minnesota Vikings' Randy Moss and involved him pretending to pull down his pants and mooning the crowd before rubbing his bum up against the end zone uprights. The Moss Moon and other unique celebrations are right here.



Gimme an 'O', gimme a 'U', gimme a 'C', gimme an 'H'!
Cheerleading is a hard business. Just ask that Debbie girl from Dallas. And ask the lovely and talented Katelynn Johnson, a cheerleader for the mighty Oregon Ducks, who copped a full water bottle on the scone after her team's exciting double-overtime win against the Arizona Wildcats.

Poor Katelynn was minding her own business doing various Bring It On style splits and cartwheels and … well, cheerleading stuff, when some dill in the crowd chucked a bottle that whacked her fair on the head. Katelynn – whose ambition, as revealed in an interview with Sports Illustrated, is to be in a Victoria's Secret magazine, and who would like to share a dinner table with Jesus Christ, Barack Obama, Beyonce, Jay-Z, her grandfather and her brother and sister (now that would be a doozy of a conversation) – was knocked unconscious and carted off to hospital.'

The good news is that her mother reported the brave little trooper was "doing a lot better, eating a little bit (possibly with Jesus et al), drinking some" and was expected to make a return to the cheerleading field after being cleared by the college's athletic department doctors.

Becks breathes easily
David Beckham can do anything … anything, we tell you! He can style his hair a thousand different ways, get Chinese, Hindi and Latin tattoos whose profound meaning he doesn't understand etched on his perfect body, marry the least talented Spice Girl, play for footballing colossi such as LA Galaxy (it represents a whole galaxy!), model for various houses of fashion and makers of perfume, and stop boots thrown by Sir Alex Ferguson with his face.

And, miracle of miracles, he can play football despite suffering from asthma!. Surely a turn with loaves and fishes can't be too far away.

As the first sportsperson ever to play professionally with asth … pardon? What was that? Paula Radcliff? Who's she? Tony Greig? Never heard of him. Greg Louganis? Pfft. Dennis Rodman? Paul Scholes? Mark Spitz? Amy Van Dyken? Jackie Joyner-Kersee? Justine Henin? Ian Botham? Jan Ulrich? OK, you're just showing off now.

The numbers game
583,000 – US dollars a Canadian firm will pay to buy the Pontiac Silverdome, former home of the Detroit Lions and venue of Super Bowl XVI in 1982
16 – what XVI means
55.7 – million US dollars. The cost to build the stadium in 1975
8 – years since Manchester United last lost a Champions League group stage match at home before last night's reverse to Besiktas

Quote of the day
"The comments were perhaps over the top and I apologise to any supporter I might have offended. I'm 38 years of age and I'm going to make mistakes."
- Ageing, mistake-ridden Roy Keane says sorry for his unsympathetic remarks about Ireland's departure from the World Cup at the hand of Thierry Henry. Keane's Ipswich Town team is second last in the Championship.

Headline we'd like to read
Brave Beckham plays with headache