Brian Viner: For my money, Harrington is Europe's best on merit

The Volvo Masters currently unfolding on the manicured fairways of Valderrama in southern Spain ought to mark one of the most exciting denouements to the European golf season. It began with four men each in with a shout, of varying volume, of winning the coveted Order of Merit. And yet that in itself is a nonsense, because Padraig Harrington, winner of the last two major championships, is the only man entitled to call himself Europe's leading golfer of 2008.

Much as I admire Lee Westwood, and the way he has clambered back to the brink of the world's top 10 after several years careering in apparent freefall through the rankings, it will be an absurdity all too emblematic of modern-day sport if, without a single win to his name, Worksop's finest wins the Order of Merit – less decorously but more honestly known as the money list.

Robert Karlsson, the giant Swede who arrived on the Costa del Sol as the hot favourite to end up on top of the pile, was gracious enough to draw attention to this daft anomaly the other day, pointing out that he has played almost twice as many events as Harrington this year. A comparable situation, he suggested, would be Manchester United or Arsenal winning the Premier League with one having played 22 matches and the other 13.

It certainly seemed likely after the first round at Valderrama, in which Harrington could only muster a 76, that the Irishman will not prevail, which would make a mockery of achievements unparalled in recent European golfing history. Before Harrington, no man from this side of the Atlantic had won the PGA Championship since Tommy Armour in 1930, and no European had successfully defended the Open Championship since James Braid more than a century ago. What more does a fellow need to be officially proclaimed the finest golfer on his continent? The answer, dispiritingly, is money. And just to heap further ridicule on the lustre accorded to the Order of Merit, the last (and so far only) year in which Harrington won the thing was also the last year he failed to win a major: 2006.

All that said, to top the money list seven years in succession, as Colin Montgomerie did between 1993 and 1999, is by any standards a remarkable feat, which is why I was sorry to read this week of his humiliation by his countryman Jack Vettriano, who has refused a commission from Scotland's National Gallery to paint Monty.

If I'm truly honest, a snigger passed my lips when I learnt what Vettriano had so cruelly and disingenuously remarked – "I don't do men with breasts and I don't mean that as unkind to Colin Montgomerie" – but it was replaced pretty quickly by indignation on dear old Monty's behalf.

Heaven knows, his bursts of scowling petulance on golf courses around the world have not earned him this observer's unfettered admiration, but with a following wind he seems like a decent man, and when he is in good cheer the smile could light up Loch Lomond on a dark night. He didn't deserve Vettriano's cheap slur. Moreover, and while I'd hate to do any further damage to Monty's feelings, if Vettriano had any mettle as an artist he surely would not shirk the challenge of capturing a face famously described by the commentator David Feherty as capable of looking "like a bulldog licking piss off a nettle".

Someone should show Stanford the bottom line

How odd that the one word that springs repeatedly to mind when one thinks of the $20m Stanford extravaganza due to culminate today in Antigua, is "cheap". If Sir Allen Stanford has achieved anything, it is the deft trick of enriching cricket at the same time as cheapening it, and would that someone in cricketing officialdom had metaphorically done to him what that mischievous Arsenal left-back of the 1970s, Sammy Nelson (below), did to the North Bank crowd after equalising the own goal he had himself scored in a 1-1 draw against Coventry City in 1979: he dropped his shorts and bared his bum. Nelson, I should add, is the father of Emily Prior, the pregnant wife of the England wicketkeeper Matt Prior, who found her own bum on Sir Allen's knee in one of the more undignified episodes yet of what to many of us has looked like a carefully orchestrated exercise in indignity.

Sporting idols worlds apart

The two most revered sportsmen currently on the planet, meaning reverence in its religious sense, are surely Sachin Tendulkar, who recently became the most prolific run scorer in Test cricketing history, and Diego Maradona (below), confirmed this week as the new coach of Argentina. There are two other points worth making about this extraordinary pair of sporting icons. They both stand precisely 5ft 5in in their stockinged feet. And the vast majority of those who worship one have probably never even heard of the other, which shows why sport, for all its foibles, remains the most captivating of all human enthusiasms.

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