Nobody can fail to have been shocked and saddened last week by the tragic death of Australian cricketer Phil Hughes who, in a freak accident, lost his life when, during the course of a match, a cricket ball missed his safety helmet and struck him on the head. There will undoubtedly continue to be calls for increased safety measures in cricket and for a ball, bowled at the batsman, commonly referred to as a “bouncer”, to be banned. This is highly unlikely since statistics show that this was a one in a million accident. Fair enough, but what if you happen to be that one in a million?

Put very simply (and cricket is far from being a simple game) the job of the batsman is to score runs and the job of the bowler is to prevent him from so doing usually by bowling his ball on to the wicket, thus removing him from the game. The battle (isn’t it funny how sport is always described in terms of warfare?)between bowler and batsman is at the heart of cricket and their duel (see above)is pivotal to the result of the game. The bowler will use every bit of his power, skill, aggression and guile to beat the batsman and either strike his wicket or force him to make an unwise shot leading to a catch and dismissal.

It is fascinating to watch the bowler’s attempts to deceive the batsman with the ball bowled to the left or to the right, bowled short, bowled long, bowled slow, bowled with spin or bowled fast at speeds around 100mph. Sometimes the bowler will not attempt to hit the wicket at all but will instead bowl deliberately hard and fast at the batsman, not with the intention of inflicting bodily harm (so you would hope) but with the aim of unsettling and intimidating the batsman. It was such a ball that struck Phil Hughes.

There can be no blame attributed to the poor bowler since he was only doing what bowlers in all teams do throughout the cricket world. However, putting aside questions of morality, perhaps a simple question needs to be asked – Is it really necessary to bowl a cricket ball, not at the wicket, but deliberately at the batsman?

Amidst all the gloom of wars,  oppression and killer epidemics came an uplifting and heart-warming story in the weekend’s news. Appropriately enough, it concerned a heart surgeon who, on Saturday, completed the 21 mile cross English Channel swim.

Cross Channel swims are always impressive but rarely newsworthy since, whilst it is not an everyday event, several gifted athletes and enthusiastic amateurs seem to manage to do it each year. However, the reason this particular swim caught the world’s attention was that the swimmer, a South African called Otto Thaning, became, at the age of 73, the oldest person to complete it.

It must be hard enough to manage such a swim at any time and at any age enduring cold waters, fighting strong currents and dodging super-sized freighters plying their trade in one of the world’s busiest shipping channels. To do it at that age is truly mind-blowing.

Mr Thaning, who trained as a heart surgeon under  Dr Christian Barnard (the man who completed the world’s first successful human to human heart transplant in 1967), actually completed the swim back in 1994 so he knew what to expect but that hardly diminishes his achievement.

When interviewed, Mr Thaning said “My wish was basically to promote the idea that people over the age of 70 can do things like this if they look after themselves and work hard”.

What a man and what a great philosophy for life.

So one of the best football world cups in recent memory has finally come to an end and few will disagree that the trophy was won by the best team in the competition as well as probably the best prepared.

As just a small example of the German team’s meticulous planning and attention to detail, consider their choice of base for the tournament.

The north of Brazil is a lot hotter and more humid than the south in the tournament months of June and July, so most teams chose to base themselves in the more comfortable south even though this meant that they would have to travel hundreds of miles to compete in games scheduled to take place in the north.

The Germans, knowing that all their group games were in the north, decided to base themselves there and save on the disruption that travel would undoubtedly bring. They even went so far as to construct their own exclusive training complex – the only World Cup building project to be completed on time.

The German victory in last night’s final should have surprised nobody. As Alexander Graham Bell once said, “Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.”

There were two news stories in the weekend’s press regarding our national game and neither made for particularly good reading.

The first concerned one of the most corrupt stories in the history of what worldwide appears to be anything but a “beautiful game”. It was hardly a new story – more like an old one reheated – but still shocking enough to cause a sharp intake of breath.

I imagine that most football fans were at least a little suspicious on hearing, a couple of years ago, that football’s ruling body (Fifa) had awarded Qatar the 2022 World Cup. Qatar, though exceedingly wealthy, is a small desert country with no history of football and a summer climate hot enough at 50C to exhaust the average bloke walking the couple of hundred yards to his local camel store.  Suspicions of skulduggery were vindicated when it was subsequently revealed that a number of men on the committee responsible for awarding the World Cup had somehow accumulated several million dollars via bank accounts linked to the Qatari multi-millionaire Mohamed Bin Hammam.

The news this week that the FBI, rather than the inept, self-serving and self-congratulatory Fifa  are now conducting a thorough investigation into the affair following the discovery that at least some of the bribe money was linked to a New York bank account ratchets the story up another couple of levels. Perhaps it will result in Qatar being stripped of its award and the World Cup being given to a true footballing nation but somehow I doubt it. Money trumps fans any day of the week.

The second story concerned Saturday’s Premier League game between Chelsea and Arsenal where the referee, aided by two assistants and the fourth official, sent off the wrong player for deliberate handball. Television replays showed clearly who the culprit was and even if, somehow, the referee wasn’t to know that (though the incident took place right in front of him) the fourth official, aided by technology, certainly was. Even when the culprit himself came up to the referee and said “It was me ref” the referee ignored him. Aside from the clear incompetence of the officials who, as one leading ex-referee stated this weekend, should not officiate again this season (why just this season?)is there any reason why football cannot avail itself of the technology used by other sports?

Every year this question is raised but the arrogant authorities (in the case of Fifa no doubt too busy enjoying their Qatar bonuses) say that football doesn’t need it. Well it obviously does and until football drags itself into the 21^st century and uses the instant replays and transparent fairness of other sports, such as American Football for example, the “beautiful game” will remain stuck in a murky dank time warp of corruption and incompetence.