The sporting weekend from hell!!

By Luke Wilkins on Sep 30, 08 12:19 PM

It's not often that I manage to go a whole weekend without having something to cheer, this may be due to the fact that I have, from a young age, supported Arsenal at football, Leicester Tigers in rugby, and Surrey in Cricket, but this weekend was about as bad as it can get!

Surrey managed to get them relegated from County Cricket's first division, a result which although it was written on the cards a few weeks ago, is a huge shock, as they only won the 1st Division championship back in 2002, and romped to the Division 2 title two years ago, and have perennially been one of the major forces in the domestic scene.

Ah well, at least it was an exciting end to a tournament that is constantly getting stick from the powers that bad to be reformed, as it has no relevance today, something that seemed complete nonsense as with the final round of games being played, the title could have gone to no less than 5 teams, although trying to keep track of which team needed which bonus points, who was going to win, and what that would do to the table was about as easy as juggling chainsaws, blindfolded, while walking across the grand canyon on a tightrope - in slippers - you get the point!

A huge congrats must go the Durham players, who deservedly celebrated winning the league for the first time in their history at the weekend, when there combination of bonus points, runs, cucumbers sandwiches and top notch seam bowling saw them lift the title for the first time in their history.

What's more incredible is that you have to remember that Durham has only been around as a county side for 17 years, and even more amazing is the amount of home grown talent they have managed to develop in that time, look at Steve and Ben Harmison, Collingwood, Colonel Mustard, Liam Plunkett etc to name but a few, not bad when they have been going for less than two decades!

Ah well, with Surrey out of the equation, I knew I could trust the mighty Leicester Tigers to get a win, at home against a wasps side who had lost their first three games in a row, and without Dallaglio, were looking less like wasps, and more like daddy long legs! But alas, this was also not meant to be, as although the Tigers seemed to be cruising after the first half, Wasp's finally showed some fighting spirit and came back to win 28-19, and handed Leicester their first loss of the season.

Sure there is a long way to go and to be fair, in rugby you do seem to get a lot more upsets than you do in football, but I was genuinely annoyed by our inability to win in this big game, especially as Wasps were under so much pressure. Oh well, at least I had one "Banker" to look forward to, when the Mighty Arsenal welcomed newly promoted Hull to the Emirates Stadium on Saturday afternoon............ or so I thought!

I was lucky, as after my show I had planned to go and meet my colleagues Dan and Alana from Kerrang (who are Hull season ticket holders, although to be fair I think they give them out free with every guided tour you take of the Humber Bridge) and watch the game, but a friend called and his sister had just given birth in Coventry, would it be alright if he came and stayed at mine?

Thank goodness he did, because Arsenal showed why they will struggle to win the league this year as they were completely outfought by a Tigers team looking for another Premiership scalp.

Let's put it this way, Arsenal had so much talent on show, but once more they spent the whole first half trying to pass the ball in the back of the net unsuccessfully, and I started getting that "

This is going to be one of those days" feelings, until finally Fabregas poked home Walcott's cross just after the break, and it looked like they could take their foot off the gas and relax - cue one of the greatest goals I have ever seen from the mercurial boot of Geovanni for Hull, and suddenly we looked shell shocked, and then when Hull took the lead 2-1 there was genuinely panic amongst the players.

Ah well, I feel Wenger summed it up afterwards when he said the way the Arsenal team played made him physically sick, while we were the better team, we did not have the desire to win that Hull had, and you can't make players feel that, and when it came down to it, they simply wanted it more than us.

So all in all not a great weekend for my teams, but as a sports fan in general there was plenty to admire, as Villa continued their unbeaten run in the league against Sunderland, Derby managed to beat QPR (Maybe the second richest team in the world now), and most importantly as an Arsenal fan, Tottenham lost to Portsmouth, to remain bottom of the table, and they actually have less points than Derby had at this point last year when they went down!

Ah well, there is always next weekend!

This week I am in for Kate Lawler on her drive time show from 4pm-7 during the week, and I am mostly having a blissful quiet week off training, as the guy I train with has a sore shoulder, (I keep telling him he is just getting old!) so I plan to listen to a lot of music, DJ at Dragon Eye on Wednesday on Broad Street, sleep, eat, do my shows, sleep, eat and generally be as lazy as I can..........did I mention sleep and eat???