As the week winds up...

(observation: one can't say 'week winds up' to mean the opposite of 'week winds down')

The rate at which umpires are being suspended in the IPL, the final will probably have to lapse into a convention that informal matches use: asking for the batting side to loan a player as umpire. That could enable the talismanic Shane Warne to add 'umpire' to his list of roles (yes, I'm hoping the Royals will be in the final :-))

Thanks to John Arne Riise, I know which team I'll be supporting for in the final of the 2007-08 Champions League. More specifically, to his almost phantom right leg which in of even lesser use than the phrase "hard luck" is to Harbhajan Singh. Still, it was a fabulous match (as was the Man Utd v Barca game, where Messi purred without gaining any milk or mice), and so my dream football season continues. There's two nervous legs of EPL to go, the FA Cup final without the toffs to spoil it, and the Champions League. Like everyone, let me make the joke about Chelsea playing that final at home. Wonder what The Special One thinks about this late injection of luck in Chelsea fortunes despite his absence.

Description of the year: "Silky Sloth" (Ted Corbett about Inzamam ul-Haq).

Last week's Sportstar reports that the recently concluded Asian Beach Volleyball championships used 'blonde cheerleaders' (sans the outrage, of course). If, like the American Dialect Society, we voted words of the year, 'cheerleader' would be heading the leaderboard for the 2008 contest. (A good indication of the lexical zeitgeist comes from team names at quizzes, and I'm sure 'cheerleaders' will feature in some of them this year).