THAT Was The Weekend That Was - riveting if you like golf; dramatic if cricket is your game; spectacular if bikes are your thing.

Open Golf champions come and go. They hug the Claret Jug, pocket their enormous cheque and then move on to their next 72 holes. Not many of them go away leaving behind the sort of memory served up by Jordan Spieth at Royal Birkdale.

It is too early to decide whether the young Texan has the personality to be remembered as a popular champion but after wandering halfway across Merseyside looking for a place to drop his ball after burying it in the rough at the 13th he gave the record crowd a grand finale to remember.

It was spectacular stuff and broke the spirit of the admirable Matt Kuchar – Koooooch to his army of fans – who summed up his runner-up finish with the words: “It’s crushing. It hurts.”

That’ll teach followers of Mark Twain and all that nonsense about golf being a good walk spoiled.

It is unlikely that the name of Anya Shrubsole was the name on many cricket fans’ lips on Sunday morning. Hours later she was the toast of the English game after a thrilling Women’s World Cup Final at a packed house at Lord’s. England had struggled to reach a modest 228 for seven and India were strolling it at 191 for three. Yet another case of plucky losers. Time to switch back to the golf?

Then, with all the style of an England men’s innings, India collapsed to finish nine runs short and Anya Shrubsole had bagged six wickets to take the Player of the Match award.

Women’s cricket is well down the list in spectator appeal and hiding it away on Sky doesn’t help but if the BBC sports executives were watching maybe they would like to consider Anya and her colleagues for the Sports Personality Team of the Year Award.

Chris Froome held on to the yellow jersey to win the Tour de France for the fourth time, becoming only the fifth cyclist to win three in arrow. Now that Lance Armstrong’s very existence has been deleted from the race’s history Froome is up there with the finest names in the tour’s history, just one behind some of the names even I have heard of such as Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain.

His overall time was 86 hours 20 minutes 55 seconds – just 54 seconds ahead of the second placed rider. I don’t pretend to know how it all works - too technical for my simple mind – but cycling can justifiably claim to be one of our boom sports as shown on ITV4.

So there it was … the nerve-tingling walk up to the Open Golf’s 18th green for Spieth; the ride along the Champs Elysees for Froome; and a World Cup in the hands of Heather Knight and her team.

A wonderful weekend of sport brought to your front room. And not a football in sight.

ARSENAL were beaten 3-0 by Chelsea in a pre-season friendly out in Beijing.

But don’t worry you Gunners fans, Arsene Wenger knew the reason. His players were tired. The Arsenal boss made 10 substitutions because an exhausting two-week tour of Australia and China had taken its toll leaving the players looking “tired and leggy.”

The new Premier League season is still 17 days away and Manchester United (in US) and Liverpool (in Hong Kong) have already won trophies. But clearly these money spinning tours of the world are not all they are cracked up to be – especially if you are an Arsenal player.


FOR those Lancastrians among us who have followed cricket since long before the coming of coloured kit, white balls, Big Bashes and Blasts it was a question we thought would never be asked.

But there it was on the back page: Why doesn’t anyone play like Boycott any more?

It was the man of many nicknames – among them Boycs and GLY (Greatest Living Yorkshireman) who ripped into England after the second Test batting calamity against South Africa with the view that “if you waft in 20-20 you’ll waft in Test cricket.”

‘Sir’ Geoffrey was not renowned for his love of the limited overs game but with more than 8,000 Test and 48,000 First class runs to his name he knew how to stick it out with the best of them.

He could be stubborn, cantankerous and a positive pain for anyone who wasn’t a Yorkshireman and the sight of England’s batsmen trying to hit their way out of trouble was the signal for a Boycott rant.

Not many five day Tests would finish with a day to spare when Boycott was at the crease but it would be interesting to see how he would cope with the game today – that is if they ever let him anywhere near the England team.