The turning point in human evolution came when people began to use their hands. When humans first walked upright on the African savannahs, they found themselves in the position of having two limbs freed from the drudgery of locomotion.

Having two hands and two feet, instead of four feet, changed everything. It brought the brain into play, because with hands, a brain had something to work with. Everything followed from this: humans became more dexterous and more clever and, as a result, more dexterous and more clever again.

Hands, as much as brain, define humanity: our nearest relations among the apes must use forelimbs for locomotion; none is fully bipedal. Hands that work as hands 100 per cent of the time define humanity.

Which is, of course why goalkeepers are the most highly evolved creatures in football. “Goalkeepers have reached a standard of excellence in what they do, far superior to outfield players,” Francis Hodgson wrote in his seminal Only the Goalkeeper to Beat. “They have had to, and they have responded magnificently to the demands the game has placed upon them.”

I was, then, thrilled to find out that Manchester City are proposing to break the world transfer record for Gianluigi Buffon, the Juventus goalkeeper. Get the goalkeeper right and the rest will follow. You have only to look at Brian Clough, who had Peter Shilton, Sir Alex Ferguson, who had Peter Schmeichel, José Mourinho, who had Petr Cech.

But goalkeepers have always been in the bargain basement, the cheapest of all players. Shilton cost £250,000 in 1977; Schmeichel £530,000 in 1991; Cech still a bargain at £7million in 2004. Goalkeepers are traditionally misunderstood and unappreciated, and no doubt they wouldn't have it any other way. But with this devastating flourish of sheer cash, City and the egregious Sheikh Mansour have stood that ancient tradition on its head.

Now, if this all goes through, the last shall be first, and the most talented players in the game will be treated as such for the first time. Soon all the fat kids will be forced to play as outfielders, while the cool guys fight for the most thrilling, challenging and difficult position that the game can offer.

- I always thought that the idea of a bonus payment was to concentrate the mind: if you hit the target, you get it. If you don’t, you don’t. A bit like sport. But for the past two years, the Lawn Tennis Association has paid Carl Maes, the head of women’s tennis, a bonus of £25,000 for not hitting his targets. The bonus, then, is not an incentive to Maes, it’s not an incentive to junior coaches, it’s not an incentive to players. It is merely, as the great George Graham once remarked, a great Christmas present.

As for the players, the top woman, Anne Keothavong, says she prefers to be pretty well independent of the LTA, while Andy Murray walked away from the LTA coaching set-up when he was 16. Both succeeded despite, not because of the LTA; in contrast to Maes

Sexy modern pentathlon is turn-off

I have to report a sad thing. They have made the modern pentathlon sexy. Or to put it another way, they have buggered it up. A meeting held last weekend in Guatemala has come up with a conclusion: we want more power, so let’s mess it up for the athletes and the spectators.

The mod-pen is one of my favourite days at the Olympic Games. A pistol shoot is followed by a massed brawl with swords. When the fencing is done, they swim; after that, there is a show-jumping ride on a horse drawn by lot. Finally, they set out on a handicapped run: and the winner is the one who crosses the line first.

This format provides 12 hours of beauty and intensity with a stunning climax: a brilliant re-organising of a sport that used to last five days. That’s what modernisation should be about: to make sport a profounder thing for both spectators and participants.

But now they have voted to change all this. The event will start with the fencing, go on to the swimming and then move to a stadium for the showjumping, which will be followed by a new run-and-shoot event with flipping targets like the ones in biathlon.

The main benefit is that this will permit more participants — the mod-pen at the Olympic Games starts with 36, this format would increase that to 48 — and therefore gave the sport’s international organisation, the Union Internationale de Pentathlon Moderne, more clout. The disadvantage is that the sport will be undermined, and be impossible to follow — or do you find the biathlon un-look-away-able?

It is a wrong move, carried out for wrong reasons, and the sport, the athletes and the viewers will be the poorer. But who cares about them?

Serial losers who have no place in the Test arena

So let’s have a moan about terrible results in cricket. No, nothing to do with England; we can always give them a kicking next week if they seem to deserve it. Let’s talk about teams that shouldn’t be playing top-flight international cricket at all, and yet they do, and there is no stopping them.

Bangladesh lost a Test match again last week. Bangladesh are the Polly Garter of international cricket. Polly, the loose woman in Under Milk Wood, was regarded by some as a saint: “She was martyred again last night.” Bangladesh were martyred again last week, this time at the hands of South Africa, who won by an innings and 129 runs. Now this sort of bad result happens to all teams at some time or another, but it happens to Bangladesh every time. They have won one Test match out of 56. Against whom do you think that was?

All right, put your hands down, it was indeed Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe’s cricket has already gone from bad to worse; now it’s progressing smoothly to shatteringly inept. Sri Lanka beat them by six wickets in a one-day international last week and then in the second match bowled them out for 67, knocking off the runs in 18 overs.

And any side can have a bad trot, as Kevin Pietersen will be the first to agree, but these two processions of calamity do no good to anybody. There is no joy for the winners, only embarrassment. There is nothing to be learnt by the losers, other than that humiliation tastes bitter.

The first rule of any governing body is to provide the most compelling sport it possibly can. But cricket has neglected that, because of the power game at the heart, and the splitting of the game on colour lines. Bangladesh play Test cricket because they vote for India whenever asked.

It’s a win every way you look at it for India. Those who lose are those that matter least in sport: the audience and the athletes.

- Perhaps the only journalist I envy is Brough Scott, former presenter of Channel 4 Racing and so forth. He is not only a very good writer, crime enough in my book, but he is also a much, much better horseman than me. He had ridden 100 winners under rules and he has been invited by great trainers to ride great racehorses, an area beyond my competence. It gives me great pain, then, to point out that his latest work, Of Horses and Heroes, is a wonderful racing book.

The chapter on the great Dancing Brave — “then suddenly those sinewy legs bit deep into the Longchamp turf and propelled this gleaming bay wonder towards the others with a momentum which made victory certain long before he knifed past at the death” is worth the admission money alone.