LIVING for the moment is the modern way, but it would be good to think that a fair percentage of those people drawn to cheer our sporting heroes on open-top bus rides could see some long-lasting significance in such parades.

The benefits of England winning the Rugby World Cup, for example, are now questionable, despite all the talk at the time of capitalising on the triumph. England were rubbish last season, and without a hard core of good England players the Lions were equally poor, handing the initiative back to the southern hemisphere.

It is also disturbing to hear of Rob Andrew describing matches as "80 minutes of sheer warfare." He's right, of course, and it's merely the logical outcome of professionalism in a physical sport. But mothers are not going to encourage their sons to become the next Jonny Wilkinson if the battering required to reach the summit results in two years of misery.

If there is no connection at all between Jonny's various ailments then he may simply have been dreadfully unlucky. But the doubts will persist until he's back in the England team.

Even then he will not have the likes of Johnson, Dallaglio and Back around him, and the difference with our cricketing heroes is that, as a team, they are young enough to improve. They may be mentally and physically drained after giving their all to a series which exceeded our wildest dreams, but they'll soon be ready to face Shoaib Akhtar in Pakistan.

They could be the best in the world for the next few years, and it's essential that the ECB and the government capitalise on that. People are asking me who they should complain to about the TV rights going exclusively to Sky and I can only answer: "Write to your MP." It's a done deal and it's up to the government to intervene, which our esteemed Sports Minister has already said will not happen.

So if you do write to your MP I urge you to add a small postscript calling for Mr Caborn to be replaced by someone who actually cares about sport and has some kind of feel for it.

THE main reason why the government should embrace this opportunity presented by Vaughan's Victors is that if they are serious about arresting this country's slide into slobbery they need to make sure we see more of Freddie Flintoff than that other Lancashire lad, Wayne Rooney.

The more we hear of Rooney's foul-mouthed, ill-tempered behaviour during last week's debacle in Belfast, not to mention his dismissal in Spain on Wednesday, the more we realise what an appalling role model he presents. Sven obviously has no idea how to cope with such tantrums, so when David Beckham was told where to go last week Steve McClaren stepped in and was similarly rebuffed.

If anyone behaved like that under cricket boss Duncan Fletcher he would be out on his ear. Not with any great theatrical gesture - just quietly dropped and left to wallow in his own inadequacies.

IT HAS been rather frightening this week to be reminded that it's 25 years since I clocked 94 minutes in the first Great North Run. It was such a marvellous event I went back the following year to knock a minute off, but on my only subsequent attempt I thought I could do it without putting in the training and was passed after five miles by Jimmy Savile, who had fired the starting gun and joined in at the back of the field.

The winner in those first two years was local lad Mike McLeod, an Elswick Harrier. The event was the brainchild of another famous Geordie runner, Brendan Foster, and had the race been 12 miles shorter it would doubtless have been won several times by Steve Cram.

Where are their successors? According to McLeod, they're either drinking on the Quayside, staring at a screen or fiddling with their iPods. No doubt the Geordies will turn out in their thousands to give the runners their usual magnificent support on Sunday, but wouldn't it be wonderful to think that somewhere in their midst might be a youngster with the talent, desire and drive to actually win it in the not-too-distant future?

AMID all the talk about Steve Harmison rivalling famous footballers as Ashington's greatest sporting hero, we shouldn't forget golfer Kenneth Ferrie. It's strange that he's in the World Matchplay but not the Seve Trophy at Wynyard next week.

You would think it would be the other way round as the former ought to be for the best 12 players in the world and Ferrie is ranked 109th. But Colin Montgomerie has surely missed a trick by not using his wild card to select a North-Easterner for the Wynyard event.

IS SOMEONE selling headlines? Both The Sun and The Mirror's main front page headline on Wednesday was "Off His Fred" alongside a picture of a drunken Flintoff. I don't care how sozzled he was, he had every right to his celebrations and he would still have behaved impeccably compared with Rooney.

Published: 16/09/2005