Hats off to Travis, winner of Coke Zero Presents: Wayne Rooney's Street Striker, the all-new, utterly Roo-tastic, urban football skills challenge. When it comes to pinging a football off a parked car and into a moving delivery van, Travis is your man.

Note well that title. Television sponsorship is nothing new but the prominence of the branding here represents an especially bold melding of ad break and programme. We look forward to The Ten O'Clock News Brought To You By Cillit Bang Bathroom Cleanser - Bang And The News Is On. Meanwhile, note how, under the present wording, Wazza - the big draw here, surely - ends up playing second fiddle to a tin of fizz. I'd have a word with my agent, if I were him.

But at least Wazza turned up. Not for him the Vinnie Jones route. The former Wimbledon hard man recently presented a documentary series on policing the world's most notorious trouble spots without, by all appearances, leaving Hertfordshire. Wazza, by contrast, was a frequent presence in his own show, encouraging the contestants, offering tips and voicing the now familiar reality show lines (“Only three of yous is gonna make it to the final,” etc).

True, at this relatively early stage in his television career, the Manchester United front man could be said to lack the natural ease and nation-melting charm before the cameras of, say, Cheryl Cole. But the important thing is, he was there, smiling a lot and putting his unique stamp on the programme. As it were. He was even game enough to demonstrate some of the challenges, such as the one where you had to control a football tossed off the balcony of a high-rise building.

Some cynics have suggested that, this being the Greater Manchester area, you were less likely to see a ball dropped out of a block of flats than an unwanted television set. And without doubt, in some urban areas, the ability to chest down a 36-inch Toshiba, spin and volley it into a waiting skip would be a skill worth having. But that's another programme, for another footballer. Perhaps Vinnie Jones.

This one was about tricks with footballs, and it offered the exuberance of Rio de Janeiro strained through a commandeered multistorey car park in Stockport. In the past, there was the nutmeg, and that was it. Now there's an ever-expanding catalogue of flicks and nudges, to the point where “skill” is now, among young people, a verb (as in, “He skilled him”). Heed the words of Mo, one of the final three. “On the street, no one's really looking at scoring goals. They're looking at embarrassing other players.”

The contest climaxed with “the ramp challenge”. They had one of those on the BBC Sports Personality of the Year show last weekend and it proved the undoing of some of the nation's leading sportspeople, not least Rebecca Adlington, who must even now be ruing the decision to select high heels rather than a short stud.

Most of the street strikers, too, lost control on the ramp. It was a ramp too far. Our impression is that television should stay away from ramps for a while. No good seems to come of them.

Eventually Wazza picked Travis to walk away with (of course) the silver Coke bottle. Mo was devastated, but, as he told the cameras: “That's football, isn't it?” Well, Mo, actually ... oh, never mind.

The all-seeing eye of Tommo saves the day

Commentator of the week is Derek “Tommo” Thompson, whose efforts to call an entirely fog-bound horse race at Folkestone were rightly given heavy rotation on Sky Sports News. Indeed, “fog-bound” doesn't begin to describe the conditions that prevailed on this memorable afternoon for outside broadcasting. This was a pea-souper with extra peas and the decision to go ahead with racing in circumstances where even the jockey would have been hard pressed to tell one end of his horse from the other continues to evade simple analysis. The only explanation we can think of (and we emphasise that this is pure conjecture) is that the person who gave the all-clear thought he was looking out of the window when in fact he was looking at a painting of a racing scene on the wall.

The screen at home filled with what appeared to be a blurred close-up of an aluminium saucepan. About halfway up this image there was a slight darkening that experts hesitatingly suggested was the final fence. Thompson's ensuing descriptions were remarkable for their careful application of the non-specific “they”. (“There they are ... They're heading for the line ...”)

The judges also commended him for his use, rare in sports commentary, of the word “must”. (“They must be coming now ... They must have jumped it ...”)

All in all, this was work of high quality in a testing situation, although it must be added that Thompson could have described pretty much anything, up to and including a stampede of circus animals, and we would have been obliged to believe him, being none the wiser.