Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me

It is the last day of the Barclays Premier League season tomorrow and the conspiracy theorists are in book-depository mode. You see, Phil Brown says that Sir Alex Ferguson helped to get him a job at Derby County, so the Taggart-Tango tag team will lead Manchester United to field a weakened side away to Hull City tomorrow. That and the Champions League final.

It is a wonderfully dramatic denouement that will result in grown men weeping at the prospect of having to go to West Brom instead of Wolves, forgetting that they did that this season, too, but it now costs half the price.

Whoever loses must react sensibly. Footballers do not cheat. Hans Segers may have evaded Graham Stuart’s back-pass as Everton survived in 1994, but he was cleared of match-fixing in Winchester Crown Court. And Juventus do not fix games any more, not after being relegated for it three years ago.

So, a conspiracy? You could lock United’s reserves in a room with Dan Brown, David Icke and the Elders of Zion, make them wear turquoise jodhpurs and threaten them with having to clean Cristiano Ronaldo’s boots for a year, and it is hard to see them conspiring to lose to Hull.

Can Blade Runner threaten elite?

Oscar Pistorius thinks that everyone has it in for him and it is easy to sympathise as he prepares for the BT Paralympic World Cup tomorrow. How can having no legs be an unfair advantage? It is a sophistic argument because it is a question of what you replace them with, evinced by the fact that Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson could beat Paula Radcliffe by 40 minutes in a marathon. In terms of moving from one place to another in the optimum time, a wheelchair is pretty handy.

The South African double amputee is fighting for the right to run at the Olympic Games. The Court of Arbitration for Sport has given him the green light. Lamine Diack, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) president, says that he is an inspirational man. Previously, the governing body suggested that he affected “the purity of the sport”, while Pistorius damned it for operating like the FBI.

Last year there were more than 100 men who ran the 400 metres quicker, so the real intrigue will be in seeing if the IAAF goes on the attack if Pistorius threatens the elite.

Tigers change their stripes

It is the Heineken Cup final today, featuring Leicester Tigers and Leinster No Nickname. I cannot watch Leicester without thinking about some of their past crimes. It started in 1996, when they lost the Pilkington Cup final to a last-minute penalty try. Neil Back, below, pushed the referee in the aftermath, claiming that he had mistaken a man with a tumble-dried ferret for a moustache and a black-and-white shirt for Andy Robinson, a balding pitbull. It was a bit like Mark Chapman saying that he had meant to shoot the drummer.

Nobody liked Leicester back then. They were Millwall with bad ears. Then, in the 2002 Heineken Cup final against Munster, Back knocked the ball out of a rival’s hands at the last scrum. “I am not a cheat and I would be very upset if anyone accused me of being one,” he said. All he wanted was a legitimate unfair advantage. Like Hull want via Gary Neville. Like some think Pistorius wants via his Cheetah blades.

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