ONE OF THOSE DAYS..

Yesterday was one of those days.  Now, I don`t watch television that much, especially now that programmes such as`Mrs. Brown`s Boys` - the banal masquerading as comedy - apparently attract an unthinking audience and so my choice of viewing these days is restricted to BBC4, News and, inevitably, sport.   And yesterday I was confronted by the impossibility of being able to watch everything I wanted to watch, all of which was on at the same time.

On BBC 2 there was the enthralling coverage of the European Athletics Championships in Zurich.   On Sky Sports 3 there was the unfolding drama of the final test match between England and India from the Oval.  And on Sky Sports 2 the Premier League`s Sunday Special between Liverpool and Southampton, a game full of promise, expectation and not a little heartache - a game I imagined would be risky to sit through.

It seemed a bit pointless to tune in to the test match because it`s a five-day game and there would surely be enough of the game left for me to watch before it reached its conclusion.   And my heart whispered that I should give the athletics a try, as I could record the football and watch it later.   So I did and I was rewarded with the Great Britain team producing outstanding performances to finish top of the medal table, on the bounce from England doing the same at the recent Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.  It`s always nice to come out of Europe in top - if you can`t leave `em, beat `em.

When that coverage ended at 5.00pm I turned over to catch up with the cricket only to discover that the game had ended in a flurry of tumbling Indian wickets to provide England with the spectacular series win that we had been hoping for so long.   In between, I had kept tabs on events at Anfield, which saw Liverpool win 2-1 against the Saints but I knew I would have a late night catching up with the recording.

But there was more to it than all that.   I had almost sub-consciously plumped for the summer sports as it`s supposed still to be summer and I kind of resent the fact that football has already begun and it`s still August.   Besides which, there is a deep and widening cultural divide between the heroics of track and field, the timeless charm of cricket and the increasingly commercial parallel universe of the Premier League in particular.   And, as football belongs to the dark, cold depths of winter it really should bide its time and allow the summer sports to drift peacefully away until the return of the sun in the Spring of next year.