Sports Quotes of the Year: Weird and wonderful: Verbal volleys, wars of words

Our national sport is not doing very well. We may be under the wrong star sign. Venus may be in juxtaposition with somewhere else. Ted Dexter, England cricket chairman.

I blessed the boys with my exorcising iron which I use to cast out the devil. From that moment on they scored goals as they never had before. Don Palmo Righi, exorcist, whose skills appeared to work on Juventus's Roberto and Dino Baggio.

You get players from other teams peeing on your goal-lines to put a curse on you. Bruce Grobbelaar on his World Cup qualifying campaign in Africa with Zimbabwe.

Italy cost us two world wars. Now they have cost us the Ryder Cup. German spectator on Costantino Rocca's defeat at The Belfry.

The home of belching smokestacks, derelict cotton mills and skinheads. Video issued by Sydney's Olympic committee, on Manchester, their rivals for award of the 2000 Olympic Games.

We used to have a sort of natural culling of drivers. We used to lose one or two a year and if Prost or Mansell had been killed it would have been forgotten after a couple of races. Bernie Ecclestone, Formula One chief.