The Circus

Diddy onto a duddy
Quick! Would someone please explain to Sean Combs, aka P-Diddy, that buying Crystal Palace football club doesn't mean he gets a real crystal palace to live in? For a man who is a bling-loving rapper and is American and therefore totally unaware of anything happening outside that country's borders, it is an easy mistake to make.

Mr Diddy, once aka Puff Daddy, has apparently decided to splash a small chunk of his immense private fortune on the financially cactus English Championship outfit, mainly because he likes the name. He also reportedly considered and then rejected even more financially cactus Portsmouth, but living in a port or a mouth clearly didn't have the same appeal.

One of his advisors, perhaps one of the bikini-clad gyrators who seem to appear in all his videos, might point out to him that the actual Crystal Palace, which was built for London's Great Exhibition of 1851, was in fact made of cast-iron and glass and burned down in 1936.

Crystal Palace the footy club was established in 1905 by workers from the Cast-iron and Glass Palace. It is now under administration and pottering along one place above the relegation zone after incurring a 10-point penalty for being so carless as to go broke. Mr Diddy can probably pick the club up for a few million and an autographed copy of his latest album, given that administrator Brendan Guilfoyle has conveniently declared himself "a big hip-hop fan".

Glass half empty
Roman Abramovich is a hands-on kind of guy. Not in the sense that he works in the wells producing the oil that has helped make him a multi-squillionaire or that he hammered in a few nails on his $US1.2 billion 170m "yacht" Eclipse (complete with submarine and anti-paparazzi shield ... truly).

We mean in the sense that if he says jump at Chelsea FC, people jump. In the wake of Chelsea's abject departure from the Champions League at the hands of Inter Milan, the team's owner didn't sit in the corner and sob quietly into a Didier Drogba replica shirt. No. For two hours he ripped into the useless buggers who play for and manage the team.

Abramovich reportedly confronted the players, asking them if they were "good players" or "well-paid players", given that those two things are obviously mutually exclusive. He also apparently suggested to manager Carlo Ancelotti that he could clear out his desk if Chelsea doesn't win the Premier League title. Given that Abramovich has averaged a manager a season since taking over the club in 2003, Ancelotti would be a dill if he's so much as bought a Chelsea-branded cup for his morning coffee.

A wag of a WAG
Sporting WAGs, on the whole, are supposed to shut up, look really hot and at least pretend to watch and enjoy the game. Lara Bingle failed badly on point three, and look where it got her, fishing about in the S-bend for a lost engagement ring. Allegedly.

Donna O'Neil, wife of Middlesbrough captain Gary, also seems to have difficulties with that one. After a 1-0 defeat at Cardiff put Middlesbrough's play-off chances in jeopardy, she left a message on her Facebook page: "holidays soon ... please keep losing no play-offs xxx."

The London Sun, naturally, was outraged, noting that poor Mr O'Neil returned to football just 13 days after a hernia operation left him with 38 staples in his groinal region, enough to bind together a copy of War and Peace and illustrative of the passion with which he was chasing promotion to the Premier League.

O'Neil's agent Eric Walters, no Max Markson it seems, was impressively po-faced. "It was a light-hearted comment on an internet site. It was not meant to be taken seriously and in no way reflects Gary's commitment to Middlesbrough's promotion push." Really?

On the ball
Steve Nash looks like a young Iggy Pop and plays basketball for the Phoenix Suns. And he has produced a small video about a big part of his life.



Americans are strange people, especially when they're Canadian.

The numbers game
20,000,000 – the number of supporters Manchester United claims to have in India
1.15 billion – the number of Indian homes into which Man U claims to have had its matches broadcast
267,000,000 – the number of Indians Man U claims watched the team's Champions League final victory over Chelsea in 2008
1 – the number of Manchester United-branded cafes open in India

Quote of the day
"I did make a mistake and I regret that I did it. I am really embarrassed and I am really sorry. Any attempt to try to explain it is going to sound like excuses. There is no right way to explain something wrong, and I did wrong. Was it tension? Maybe. Anxiety?''
- Ron Washington, manager of the Texas Rangers MLB team, explains why he used cocaine during the 2009 season while not explaining why he used cocaine.

Headline we'd like to see
I'm staying out of it, says Abramovich


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