Down with Brown! Here comes- oh God it's the Tories...

The world, built partially out of rock, but mostly out of money, is melting. The ice-caps are bleeding away, swamping our lands with a flood that will take with it most of our capital.

Banks are tumbling down, their foundations shattered, and it's all down to dodgy mortgages. It makes many of us happy to see rich people lose their city bonus. It makes us less happy to see hundreds of jobs being cut at Northern Rock.

In this climate of bad debts and worse decisions, it seems painfully obvious that a Labour government, obsessed as it is with throwing millions of pounds at problems without planning how to fix them, maybe isn't what we need. Gordon Brown sold off millions of our gold reserves at the bottom of the market, and now criticises the Tories for advocating some spending cuts.

Has he looked out of his window? The mortgage market is tightening up to such an extent it is strangling even the most frugal of fledgling homeowners. Spend spend spend was the way of the 1990s, and now in a debt-laden demographic riddles with bad credit, we're saddled with the aftermath.

Of course some tax cuts would be nice, too. The Tories aren't committing to them yet, waiting to see whether the economic conditions suit tax cuts if and when they gain power. To an extent, they're missing the point too- because it's those very tax cuts that would stimulate the economy into behaving as they'd like in the first place. It seems to make sense; less outlay from government requires less tax. Less tax from the householder is less outlay; the nation tightens its belt and rides out the storm.

There is a time and a place for complex economic forecasting. There surely also must be a time and a place for some simple common sense. The Tories shouldnt be acting as though tax cuts are an act of benevolance; it is giving people back their own money. Labour, meanwhile, need to stop carping on about how the Tories would cut public spending- because for all their outlay, and with little to show for it, in this climate, they sound a bit silly.

Blade Runner

Greatness is not quantifiable, but it has something to do with the capacity to inspire awe in competitors and spectators alike. Lots of people attain "great success", but far fewer can genuinely be described as "great" themselves.

Far fewer still get to deserve this accolade at the age of 21.Yet there is something- the unmistakable hallmark of greatness- about South Africa's double-amputee, treble-World Record holding Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius.

Pistorius, fitted with controversial carbon-fibre prosthetics which lend him the nickname "blade runner" is a clear distance ahead of any of his competitors in the Paralympic field, and as such, has sought to make the switch to able-bodied races. He did so with some success; he came second in the 400m B-race at Rome's Golden Gala last Summer, with a time of 46.90s. To put that in context, Pistorius' World Record is 46.56s, and the able-bodied record 43.18s.

That record is held by another true, undisputed great- Michael Johnson. What the two athletes share is that quality of inspiring awe. Watching Johnson was like watching a machine- he had an unconventional running style which only added to the impression of relentless intensity.
Pistorius is still almost three seconds behind Johnson's World Record, but his success has shocked the International Association of Athletic Federations into amending their competition rules to prevent him from competing in able-bodied competitions under their jurisdiction- including the Olympics, which had been Pistorius' goal. This at first seems a jarring decision, which doesn't sit well with our sentimental streak, which pervades much discussion of Pistorius' astonishing success.

This is how we view disabled athletics' great successes. There is a comparison to be made between able-bodied athletes, who make us think of what we could have done had we had their genetic good luck, and disabled athletes, who make us think of what is possible when fortune and fate conspire against an individual. It is altogether more humbling spectacle.
Yet such sentiment is dangerous, and though it offends our best wishes and heartfelt thoughts on the matter, the IAAF has made the correct decision to introduce the clause banning "any technical device that incorporates springs, wheels or any other element that provides a user with an advantage over another athlete not using such a device".

However much we want to see Pistorius competing at the Olympics, the precedent cannot safely be made to allow him to do so. In the days of Roger Bannister's four-minute mile, perhaps, it would have been unthinkable that someone would take a decision detrimental to their own health in order to win a medal. However, decades of athletes abusing steroids have shown us that athletes will not let genetic shortcomings stand in their way, no matter how detrimental the effects. It is far-fetched, and the IAAF no doubt recognise the flippancy of the notion, but they cannot risk the possibility of an athlete literally giving their right leg (or rather, both legs) to win a medal.

As for Pistorius, he must have had his doubts as to whether he'd be allowed to compete. But what a statement he has made by attempting the cross-over. He is a great in whichever field he competes.

A Sports-Eye View of Life and Death

"Some people believe football is a matter of life and death," said Bill Shankly. "I'm very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you, it's much, much more important than that."

Never has a falser word been spoken. And as should be acknowledged, Shankly didn't actually believe it.

Yet as we line the terraces at weekends, singing and shouting and screaming as though our lives depended on it, one would be forgiven for thinking that this is a universal truth; a mantra followed up and down the land. And tragically, we know there are people who really do believe it, in other countries as much (if not more) than our own. In very recent times, two Leeds United fans lost their lives in Istanbul after an away match against Galatasaray. A Middlesbrough fan was stabbed to death in Amsterdam after a UEFA Cup match against AZ Alkmaar. And we, the sporting public, wonder about the fans of our own teams, and which club will next feel the weight of such a tragedy.

We are conditioned to do so, but it exacerbates a very real problem when we think of such tragedies in these terms. They were, for the record, not "two Leeds fans", or "a Middlesbrough fan". They were Christopher Loftus, Kevin Speight, and Brendan O'Connor.

Sport simply does not do real life; it does not understand or have the means to comprehend real, human tragedy. A case in point has been the enduring, excruciating debacle of former Pakistan Cricket coach Bob Woolmer's murder. Reduced to a caption on the Sky Sports News ticker, the world looks on through its sport-shaped lens and therefore is wilfully blind to the human side of the story- Woolmer's wife, Gill, looking forward to spending time with her husband at their home in South Africa. Woolmer's two children, hoping to see their father on the other side of the World Cup during which he died. That isn't to say that the sports media didn't present such news as sensitively as was possible. But there remained something troubling about seeing such human tragedy squeezed inbetween stories about contract negotiations and transfer rumours.

The inquest into Woolmer's death has been one of the grisliest spectacles in sporting history. At length, an open verdict was returned, and Gill Woolmer remains in the dark as to what claimed her husband's life. His death was initially thought to be foul play- and even then, with the horror of murder staring us in the face, we wrestled with the event trying to fit that squarest of pegs into the round hole of sporting familiarity. It seems that we look to sport as our escapism, which is fine. But when tragedy occurs, there's a bit of us which wonders how to ignore it.

Sport and cliche go hand in hand, and an alarming number of those cliches encourage the view of sport as a microcosm of life itself, rather than a tiny, individual component. A passage of play can now routinely described as "do or die". The end of the game is "at the death". The sound of a cricketer's stumps being shattered is "the death rattle." We love to talk sport up, to make a game into a battle. But all this serves to do is further alienate sport from real life, paradoxically by veiling sport in the guise of real, human drama.

It was John Doherty, one of the most promising of Manchester United's Busby Babes, who had perhaps the best perspective on sport's problematic relationship with truth and reality. Arguably the most outrageously talented of the lot, an horrendous knee injury meant he retired aged 23. Had he not suffered that injury, he would almost certainly have been on the plane which crashed in Munich in 1958, killing eight of his former team-mates."I grew up making my living by playing a game, then I went on to a gloriously happy family life, while lots of my mates were dead before their time. What's to complain about?"

A Tale of Two Imperfect Tens

Two sporting heroes who have made the number ten synonymous with their name. Two twenty-eight year olds who made their England debuts in 1998. Two prolific scorers who ply their trade in black and white, in the North-East of England. Two players who should be at their peak.

The players in question are Michael Owen and Jonny Wilkinson, both of whom, you could argue, are past their peak. Both were given debuts young, aged eighteen, and in both cases it seems their best form is behind them; in Wilkinson’s case one need look no further than World Cup 2003. In Owen’s case, perhaps we look as far back as his hat-trick in England’s 5-1 victory over Germany in 2001.

Wilkinson has undergone a lengthy catalogue of injuries, to his knee ligaments, arm, shoulder (both a dislocation and a nerve problem) and even to his kidney. Owen has endured one catastrophic knee injury during the 2006 World Cup, but also has been troubled by problems with his hamstring and a broken metatarsal.

England has relied on these two men as much as it has relied on any player in any sport in recent times. From their debuts, rarely has anything other than injury precluded them a starting berth in international competition, and still that is the case. Yet now we are faced with the prospect of a Michael Owen robbed of the searing pace that made him so dangerous to play against. When allied with his finisher’s instinct, he had all the qualities that led the England fans to feel that, no matter how badly their team were playing, Michael would pop up with a goal. We may never feel that reassurance again.

Wilkinson, meanwhile, has lost some of the imperious presence he once brought to the rugby field. His length of kicking from hand is shortening, and a row about illegitimate match balls at the France World Cup aside, even his metronomic goal kicking looks less than inscrutable.

It is illustrative that before he re-committed himself to the North-East, Wilkinson’s possible departure from the Falcons was widely discussed. His motivation for leaving, so we were told, would be that his personal fitness and rehabilitation guru Steve Black had departed. No-one worried that Wilkinson might leave when Rob Andrew, who brought Wilkinson on from an 18-year-old playing alongside him and then oversaw his meteoric rise under him as head coach at the Falcons, left to assume his role as Director of Elite Performance at the RFU. Such is the scale of Wilkinson’s preoccupation with injury.

Wayne Rooney took Owen’s crown as the youngest player ever to score for England. Yet even he, aged just twenty-two, has been regularly suffering with injuries of his own. Perhaps we should only expect to have the Rooney we know and love for another four or five years; it seems that while our national sides and top clubs are willing to use the “if they’re good enough, they’re old enough” mantra, they are unwilling to consider the long term implications of too much, too soon.