Will United’s cup continue to overflow?

There comes a moment in quite a lot of football seasons when anyone not totally in thrall to the game’s culture of hatred starts to wish good things for Manchester United. This weekend seems to be the tipping point. After this, it might be more amusing to see United win than to see them get their comeuppance.

After their head-nodding victory over Tottenham Hotspur in the Carling Cup final last weekend, they go to Fulham in the quarter-finals of the FA Cup today. They have won their first trophy, they’ll have to blow up to lose the league, and that leaves two more to go in their pursuit of an unprecedented season of four trophies.

The Cup is the lesser of their worries, and for that reason a potential banana skin. But as they move towards the season’s endgame, I am finding myself increasingly wondering not when the empire will decline and fall, but what heights it can reach before it does so.

Sevens offers tonic to jaded spirits

For anyone who follows the England rugby union team, this has been a season of incompetence, disaster and misery. There is no better way to cheer yourself up and to cast aside those patriotic blinkers than to watch a leading sevens tournament, and the World Cup Sevens takes place in Dubai this weekend. A sevens tournament is a wonderful unfolding drama and as a survivor of the Hong Kong Sevens — it’s a lot easier on the pitch, I’ll tell you — I can speak with authority. The game is full of wit and invention. It lacks all those jaw-crackingly tedious exchanges of tactical kicking and it does without the mud-wrestling and bum-biting of the bigger game.

This is, instead, a game of speed and sun, and it gives us an opportunity to celebrate the brilliance of Fiji, the world’s long-term favourites at this increasingly specialised form of the game. It is also a chance to take delight in such unlikely emerging talents as Kenya.

In sevens, you find players running with the ball, passing it and seeking to run round people instead of into them. It is, at the very least, a glorious change of pace and it will certainly stimulate the appetite of anyone whose palate has grown jaded on a diet of mediocrity and yellow cards.

In praise of a man who does not conform

Ivan Ukhov, the Russian high jumper, will be doing his stuff at the European Indoor Championships in Turin this weekend and he is worth looking out for. High jumpers tend to be oddballs at the best of times — lanky, in thrall to a strange discipline and lacking the hot competitiveness you find among runners. High jumpers are as likely to help in each other’s run-up problems as to try to stare them out.

Ukhov is famous for one unforgettable YouTube clip ; he really should be famous for two. The first is his notorious drunken jump, when he attempts one of the most abstruse feats of co-ordination known to man — the Fosbury flop — while being drunk as an owl.

The second clip — is still more remarkable, though. It is Ukhov’s response to his embarrassment — a trumpeting of the fact that he is, when sober, an athlete of virtuoso skills. In this second jump, he gets halfway through his flop and then flips his heels over his head to land on his feet, clearing a couple of metres by means of a back somersault.

The genuine sporting eccentric is an endangered species in these times of Tiger Woods and Corporate Conformity. Ukhov is a man to celebrate.