SUNDERLAND chairman Bob Murray is not known for courting publicity, so it was brave of him to call in the media to announce he is to offer the players record bonuses for achieving promotion.

He risks being reminded that if players have any pride such incentives should not be necessary, especially after he has worked so hard to get the club's debts down to a manageable £38m.

But he is as well-placed as anyone to understand the enormous financial benefits of being in the Premier League and if getting there costs an extra million or two it will be well worth it.

Staying there is the hard bit, of course. The three promoted teams this season are separated from the bottom only by catastrophic Leeds, with Portsmouth sinking rapidly despite having been the outstanding team in Division One last year.

There is no equivalent this time. Sunderland are mired in mediocrity, with defences apparently going AWOL last Saturday to produce such scorelines as: Ipswich 6 Crewe 4, Rotherham 4 Norwich 4, Walsall 1 Coventry 6.

I would be prepared to wager a week's pay that two of the three teams who go up will come down again. And I sincerely hope that Sunderland are the exception.

AT the risk of offending my hordes of female fans, it has been a strange week for the fairer sex.

On the one hand we had a 14-year-old girl hitting a golf ball 300 yards in equalling par for two rounds in a men's professional event, on the other the tennis girls continued to show how few of them are worth a light.

While there were one or two first round upsets at the Australian Open, they didn't come in the women's event, in which the top seeds breezed through without hint of perspiration.

No doubt we will hear a lot more of the girl golfer, Michelle Wie from Hawaii. She missed the cut at the Sony Open by one stroke then announced that her ambition is to play in the US Masters.

As the Augusta officials give the impression that it is only under sufferance that they admit Tiger Woods, it could be some time before they bow to the possibility of fitting a green jacket to the female form.

But if the 6ft Michelle is truly determined to make it, there will be a growing bandwagon for allowing women into more men's events, even if only a handful of them can hope to compete.

That's the problem for women's sport. There are too few stars, leaving the rest floundering in their wake, for it to attract much publicity. Sorry, girls.

FURTHER evidence that the Thunderer rumbles rather feebly these days came with The Times' decision to lead Wednesday's front page with news that England's cricket tour to Zimbabwe in October is in increasing doubt.

Unless Robert Mugabe shuffles off his mortal coil there has not been a cat in hell's chance of the tour taking place since our boys failed to fulfil their World Cup match in Harare last February. They could have been in and out of the country in 24 hours on that occasion, so they are hardly likely to undertake a two-month tour.

It was deemed to be news because a white paper was to be published yesterday outlining how the ECB should reach a decision in such matters. It's not a simple case of black and white apparently - like everything else these days it needs a review body or a think tank or an expert in some obscure subject to analyse all the pros and cons and present the evidence in various shades of grey.

Sport and politics shouldn't mix, but they do. The tour's cancellation will be a disaster for cricket in Zimbabwe, but Mugabe is a disaster for everything in Zimbabwe and without a regime change the moral and safety arguments against touring are insurmountable.

I'M feeling deeply snubbed in not being invited to play in one of the Save the Quakers matches at the Reynolds Arena on Sunday. I note three people from Century FM are to show off their undoubted skills, plus another radio person in Bernie Slaven, who when I last heard of him was bearing his backside in a shop window in Middlesbrough. He should offer to stage a repeat if Boro beat Arsenal again on Saturday.

But I digress. In my cock-eyed squint into the crystal ball on New Year's Day I predicted that Paul Gascoigne would lead out the Quakers at Feethams at the start of next season and would decline to comment afterwards because he would be off to watch his two whippets, Waddle and Beardsley, racing at the Reynolds Arena.

So it's good to see that among the names in Sunday's list are Gascoigne, Waddle and Beardsley (the ex-footballers, not the whippets). David Hodgson is to be congratulated on the (mostly) star-studded line-up he has assembled and I seriously hope the day is a huge success.

Published: 23/01/2004