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Brian Viner: Rusedski wins world ranking for rashness

How Greg must wish he had said: 'Could anyone point me in the direction of the gents?'

Monday 16 September 2002 00:00 BST
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While I yield to nobody in my admiration for Sir Trevor McDonald, it has to be said that the great man is sometimes inclined to muddle his words.

Indeed, I once received a letter from someone high up at ITV admonishing me for pointing out that on Terry Waite's return from captivity in Beirut, Sir Trev – then plain Trev – stood on the airport tarmac explaining that Waite was being brought home by the RAC.

It was a completely excusable slip of the tongue in difficult circumstances, said the ITV top brass, and so it was, and one should certainly not make light of the suffering endured by the hostages, yet I confess to enjoying the image of Waite pacing up and down beside an overheated Ford Cortina at a Lebanese roadside for five years, saying: "Where on earth is that man from the RAC?"

Now, you might be wondering what any of this has to do with sport, and I'm beginning to wonder myself, but the point of all this, like the RAC repair man, should be with you within the next 45 minutes.

Because another of Sir Trevor's minor verbal cock-ups occurs, from time to time, at the point on News at Ten when he means to say "and now for the day's other news". More than once I have heard him say "and now for the other day's news". Which is not the same thing at all, but did get me thinking that it would be perfectly possible to watch a bulletin supplying news from the other day, or the week before last, or even a couple of years ago, and not to notice.

Bong! US President throws down the gauntlet over Middle East! Bong! Conservative back-bencher defects! Bong! French lorry-drivers refuse to stop blockade! And the sports headlines! Manchester United given special dispensation to move fixture and anything else that takes their fancy! Ryder Cup row escalates! And Rusedski crashes out in straight sets to 11-year-old Armenian ranked 800,000 places below him.

It's all perennial stuff, especially the bit about Greg Rusedski, which may finally offer a hint about where I'm heading here. Poor old Greg has been widely pilloried for his rash comments about Pete Sampras, and it is probably time to give the guy a break, but I wouldn't want to miss out entirely on the pillorying, and I'd also like to consider whether Rusedski now ranks among the hapless utterers of sport's top five Famous Last Words.

First, the facts. After Rusedski lost to Sampras in five sets in the third round of the US Open earlier this month, he ventured that Sampras was "great player from the past... a step and a half slow coming to the net... still a good player but not a great player... I showed him too much respect".

As we now know, Sampras then powered on to the final, where he beat Andre Agassi to win his 14th Grand Slam title, thereby confirming his stature as the greatest tennis player ever to wield a racket, and emphatically not past it.

If Rusedski could travel back in time – which seems an unlikely prospect given his relative inability in the simpler matter of winning tennis matches – then he would surely travel back to the second before he uttered those words, and say something different, like "could anyone point me in the direction of the gents'?" Still, he has at least booked himself a place in future collections of sporting quotations, and belongs right up there in the annals of Famous Last Words.

The question is, has he displaced such legends as Brian Clough, who called the Polish goalkeeper Jan Tomaszewski "a clown" shortly before Tomaszewski played a blinder to deny England a place in the 1974 World Cup finals, and Tony Greig, who said in 1976 that he and his England cricketers intended to make the West Indies "grovel", only to be hammered in the ensuing Test series.

Then there's Kevin Keegan – "there's only one team going to win this now and that's England" – seconds before Romania scored to beat England 2-1 in the 1998 World Cup. And an obscure favourite of mine, uttered by the excited mayor of Dover in 1875, just after Captain Matthew Webb had become the first person to swim the English Channel. "I make so bold to say that I don't believe that in the future history of the world any such feat will be performed by anybody else," he said (getting on for 3,000 people have since performed the feat).

Anyway, my top five, and feel free to take issue, are:

1 Tony Greig
2 Brian Clough
3 Greg Rusedski
4 Kevin Keegan
5 The Mayor of Dover, jointly with the 1998 World Cup adidas advert featuring David Beckham, which was brightly captioned "After tonight England v Argentina will be remembered for what a player did with his feet".

b.viner@independent.co.uk

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