IT'S been a week of the two Ronnies. No, not Barker and Corbett, but O'Sullivan and Biggs.

It has also been the week when police patrols in London schools were announced, around 50 years too late to save Biggs from a life of crime.

What probably saved O'Sullivan from a life of crime was that his father built a snooker room in a hut at the end of the garden some time prior to stabbing a man to death during a brawl at a King's Road club.

From the Isle of Sheppey prison O'Sullivan senior apparently said to his son this week: "Do you remember building that snooker room? Winning the world title was why we did it."

It's a big step from a garden hut (a potting shed, presumably) to emerging triumphant at the Crucible, and it probably helped that Ronnie possesses the genius which persuaded his quarter-final victim Peter Ebdon to compare him with Mozart.

Whether Ebdon was referring to the fine line between genius and madness isn't known, but Ronnie has certainly had moments of questionable sanity.

His latest threat to quit snooker came just before the world championship, but he has now made more than £600,000 this year, and close to £3m in all, without recourse to robbing a train and fleeing to Brazil.

This may well encourage other dads to substitute a snooker table for the spades, trowels and bags of compost, and if it prevents their offspring from adding to the crime statistics all well and good.

This applies to any sport and it would be nice to think the government would bear that in mind in the run-up to the election.

Fat chance, however. Tony Blair can support either Newcastle or Sunderland, depending on where he is trying to curry favour, and the vast majority of politicians pay no more than lip service to sport.

They had the ideal opportunity to cash in on our success at the Olympics by encouraging youngsters to become the next Redgrave, Pinsent, Faulds or Cook.

Richard Faulds, that is, and Stephanie Cook, and how many people remember now what medals they won?

Snooker is not the best example, but sport as a whole offers a far healthier option than life as a couch potato, drug addict, criminal or simple member of the de-motivated masses who cannot be bothered to fill in a census form.

PERHAPS the message that crime doesn't pay did cross the government's minds when they decided to Get Carter.

Bearing in mind that the national stadium farce is little short of criminal, they preferred Prison Service director Patrick Carter to Sunderland chairman Bob Murray as the man to look at all the options.

A few months ago Adam Crozier, the smoothie Scot who is the FA's chief executive, announced he was taking a more hands-on role in this shambles.

Last week he passed the entire buck to the government, and it has since emerged that he has been given a £100,000 a year pay rise, taking his salary to £400,000.

If he were to donate threequarters of that towards funding the stadium, and encourage all Premiership footballers to do the same, the City would only have to cough up a little loose change to make up the shortfall.

Crozier now stands accused of trying to concoct a secret arrangement with the government and has also infuriated Aston Villa by alleging in an after-dinner speech that £7m of the £9m they paid River Plate for Juan Pablo Angel went to agents and hangers-on.

The figure is no doubt exaggerated, but the culture of bungs is all part of what's rotten in the state of football.

IN the Edgbaston Press box yesterday were two copies of The Daily Telegraph, one bought ten miles outside Birmingham, the other in the city. The former had a page of county cricket reports which had been replaced in the latter by a full page advert for the RSPCA.

Enquiries revealed that the Telegraph's circulation department had sent the overseas edition into Birmingham, but given the current extent of England's culling fields it seems strange that the RSPCA would want to spend so much on advertising abroad.

SO far at Edgbaston no-one has strained a fetlock, which makes a change after the recent spate of injuries.

The more teams consult sports scientists, dieticians, biomechanists, ergonomists and the like, the more players seem to fall down.

When Dean Jones once suffered an injury in a pre-match warm-up, a seasoned member of the Derbyshire Press corps observed to him: "If you'd been sitting in the dressing room with a fag reading the Racing Post it wouldn't have happened."

* SEE Ronnie Biggs is 10,000-1 to become the next manager of West Ham. At least it's a better bet than the 5-2 offered by an Edgbaston bookie at lunchtime on Wednesday for Neil Killeen to be Durham's best bowler. Killeen had gone in the fetlock.

Published: 11/05/01