Outside Edge

Turmoil at Chelsea, where one of the football coaches has been charged with embezzling a five-figure sum. No need for alarm in London SW6, though, as the club in question are the Chelsea High School gridiron team of Boston, Massachusetts. The coach is accused of, among other things, withdrawing $500 on a school credit card at 1am from an ATM next to a strip club, so obviously his lifestyle is totally at odds with the clean-living Stamford Bridge ethos. Financial transactions of a saintlier kind in Croatia, where 19 nuns have forked out £2,500 for 50 shares in the Hajduk Split football team. Why? We haven't a clue. Attempts to contact the convent's mother superior have been unsuccessful; she's not answering her cellphone.

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Number of competitors in the Jamaican national ski team. Errol Kerr plans to compete at the 2010 Winter Olympics, but due to lack of snow is doing his initial training on grass.

Football clubs of the week

We don't approve of dirty play, a sentiment obviously shared by the Total Clean Football Club, a second-division team from Peru founded by a laundry firm. They feature in the website midfielddynamo.com's Best Club Names Ever listing, and certainly sound more wholesome than another Peruvian outfit, Deportivo Wanka, though suggestions that the latter struggle to find anyone else to play with are thought to be wide of the mark. As are rumours that two Nigerian clubs, Shooting Stars and Wikki Tourists, plan to merge to form Shooting Tourists FC, or that Deportivo Moron of Argentina want to sign Joey Barton if things don't work out for him at St James' Park.

Good week for

Andy Murray, won in Madrid to become the first Briton to take two Masters series titles... Scotland, won golf's World Amateur Team Championship for the first time... John Higgins, the double world snooker champion, won Royal London Watches Grand Prix, his first ranking title for 18 months... and Salim Malik, the former Pakistan captain, had his lifetime ban from cricket lifted.

Bad week for

Scott Macleod, the Scotland rugby union forward, tested positive for banned levels of testosterone... Dean McKeown, the veteran Flat jockey, banned from racing for four years after being found guilty of corruption... Geoff Lawson, the former Australian fast bowler, sacked as Pakistan's coach with immediate effect... Brands Hatch, left off the calendar for the 2009 World Superbike Championship... and Charlton Athletic, their future uncertain after a Dubai-based bid for the club fell through.

Race meeting of the week

The sun was shining last Saturday as the crowd gathered at Hamilton racetrack in Australia. What could go wrong? A few things, actually. Starting the eventual winner of the third race from the wrong stall was a minor glitch, but no sooner had Megan McDonough won the subsequent fashion parade than she was bitten by a venomous tiger snake and had to be rushed to hospital. By race five the jockeys seemed to have had enough, too, and refused to mount up until they had finished watching the big race from Melbourne, the Caulfield Cup, on television. If anyone plans a remake of the Marx Brothers' chaotic 'A Day at the Races', they know which location to choose.

s.redfern@independent.co.uk