WHAT a rich and frantic whirl our sporting life is at the moment.It's just as well that last weekend's football was free of controversy by recent standards, so we can spare a thought for the Six Nations, the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics and the Davis Cup.

I speak partially tongue-in-cheek as I wouldn't open my curtains to watch Super Bowl, nor will I be tuning into the extensive coverage of the Olympics, although I imagine the skeleton bob might be quite exhilarating at close quarters.

There was an editor in these parts 15 years ago who proclaimed that Super Bowl was all the rage and insisted that a member of the sports desk should hang around until 3am to ensure a huge report appeared in the paper.

He was also a Chelsea fan, which proves how misguided he was.

He has probably realised since that you can't have your cake and eat it.

While the mania surrounding Chelsea and other top Premiership clubs has grown into an obsession, it has done so at the expense of other sports, so the predicted growth of British interest in American Football never materialised.

The Yanks, of course, still go bananas about it, and they even had Sir Paul McCartney and U2 performing at Sunday's Super Bowl XXXV1 to help them turn it into a tribute to those who died on September 11.

It took an average of 75 minutes for the 72,922 spectators to get through the security screening, so it's safe to assume the only person present with dynamite in his shoes was the New England Patriots' kicker, Adam Vinatieri.

He brought a hard day's night to a dramatic finale by booting the ball 48 yards between the uprights to clinch a 20-17 win against the St Louis Rams, the overwhelming favourites.

One good thing about American Football compared with ours, in which the wealthy elite pull ever further ahead, is that they try to ensure a fair spread of the better players, so that New York Giants don't win every year and an unheralded team like the Patriots have their chance of glory.

Still, they'll need a bit more than that to grab my interest, and they could start by reducing the hype and increasing the action.

WE, of course, don't need the Super Bowl when we've got the Six Nations, in which Ireland showed they have no intention of allowing England to do a Manchester United, while Wales seem to have every intention of doing an Accrington Stanley.

Wales lost the match in Dublin at the first line-out, when Chris Wyatt was injured, reducing their line-out options to zero and terminally puncturing what little passion they had mustered during a half-hearted rendering of Land Of My Fathers.

It's going to be quite a contest when Ireland visit Twickenham next week, but their annihilation of the Welsh merely confirmed what a mistake the Lions made in having Graham Henry as their coach.

It's not many years since the Irish coaching manual ran to little more than "give it a lash."

They did pretty well last season with Warren Gatland as coach, but they felt they needed to move on and replaced him with Eddie O'Sullivan.

Wales, until Wednesday, stuck with Henry and continued to go downhill fast, which is the sort of link a radio presenter would use when the next topic is the Winter Olympics.

IT'S difficult to imagine the apres-ski being up to much in the Mormon capital of Salt Lake City, and in any case will the Brits have anything to get excited about?

Torvill and Dean won our last winter gold in 1984, and the lack of investment in rinks since then has meant that triple loopers have been increasingly thin on the ice.

Like T and D, Robin Cousins and Jon Curry were voted sports personalities of the year by the admiring British public.

But the vast majority will not have heard of our only skaters at Salt Lake, Marika Humphreys and her Ukrainian-born husband Vitaliy Baranov.

They are not expected to score a series of 9.9s, and our best hope for a medal lies with the diminutive Alex Coomber, a 28-year-old flight lieutenant in the RAF who has been the women's skeleton bobsleigh world champion for three years.

The event involves plunging down an almost sheer, twisting track on something akin to a tea tray on runners.

It apparently helps that Coomber weighs only 8st, not to mention that she has an indomitable will to win.

CAN the same be said of Tim Henman?

I foolishly predicted this could be the year he lives up to all the hype, only for him to surrender meekly to Jonas Bjorkman in Australia.

Bjorkman was not even certain to play in the singles in the Davis Cup tie starting in Birmingham today until Australian Open champion Thomas Johansson was injured.

Sweden can also call on two other highly-ranked performers in Thomas Enqvist and Magnus Larsson.

We have Henman, Rusedski and no-one else. Unlike Alex Coomber, they face an uphill task

Published: 08/02/02