We Know Major Tom's a Junkie

Surely it's now too late for them to do a Henman?

Worryingly enough, V reckons Michael Vaughan looks a bit like a younger version of Sven. Anyway, football is so September 10th now that we have Flintoff and co and the potential for Australian chippyness on a hitherto unprecedented scale.

V is amongst the many foreigners/women finding discovering a sudden interest in an English pastime they had previously filed alongside Morris Dancing. Her principal residual complaint is that Cricket is a sport where the main interest is what doesn't happen. It's as if they were to do in-depth analyses of every first serve Federer puts into the net, she complains.

"Now, lets look at some more of those almost aces from the first set..."

In spite of stirling support from 20,000 fans includung his ever-serious wife and their ultra-cute children, Agassi was unable to find a solution to the Federer problem again last night. The two naturally-gifted players have remarkably contrasting on-court movements. Federer ambles up to take his serve like a man leaving his girlfriend's apartment in search of where he left his Porsche the night before. Agassi meanwhile waddles like a duck on speed.

The semi-finals at Flushing Meadows had provided a lot of excitement, especially the Clijsters-Sharapova contest. For much of the first set the Russian looked like a petulant teenager, and looked set for an ungracious exit, worthy of Martina Hingis at her stroppiest, but instead she upped her game and produced a series of wonder strikes to save seven match points. Two years ago this would have been the signal for a Clijsters nosedive, but in spite of Sharapova's sporadic brilliance, the Belgian girl had the will and the power to push through to victory in the third set. Sharapova has gained a few inches since winning Wimbledon and now looks just a little bit ungainly and in this match was constantly a sucker for the ball placed just where she had been a moment before.

Clijsters went on to blow Pierce off court the next day in the final, though the French woman wasn't quite the cheese-eating surrender-monkey we'd seen in the Roland Garros final, where she faced Clijsters' compatriot, Justine Henin-Hardenne. Amongst the awkward suits of the presentation party on Saturday was a clumsy USTA official that made some ungentlemanly allusions to Pierce's comparative maturity.