WHAT a brilliant effort by Barnard Castle golfer Rob Dinwiddie in winning the English Amateur Strokeplay Championship, otherwise known as the Brabazon Trophy, at Ganton, near Scarborough. After winning the Scottish and Welsh titles last summer, he completed his hat-trick by coming from behind in foul weather to win by three strokes, with the third man a further six behind.

After closing with a 69, Dinwiddie was the only player to finish under par, proving that the glorious, gorse-filled Ganton course is no pushover, despite its lack of length by modern standards.

He defends his Welsh title next week, but according to the handicapping system is not as good a player as he was at this time last year, when he had the lowest handicap in the country on plus five. He's now plus four, but is unlikely to let that deter him from turning professional at the end of the season.

The perks which go with being a member of England's elite squad persuaded the Walker Cup star to remain amateur for one more year and he reached the quarter-finals of the South African Amateur Championship before losing to the eventual winner. He clearly knows how to win, however, which should stand him in good stead in the pro ranks.

IT'S amazing how often top sportsmen, supplementing their riches through a ghost-written newspaper column, announce within that column that they don't read the papers. Obviously they don't need to worry about biting the hand that feeds them, partly because they have enough money anyway, but also because the newspapers are misguided enough to believe that whatever a top sportsman has to say is automatically interesting.

It's not just the tabloids which are at fault. The latest example was in Wednesday's Daily Telegraph, when new England batsman Alastair Cook announced: "While I haven't been reading the papers this week, I'm sure plenty was made of the way things went wrong at Lord's." Later he observed: "If you take the accolades when things go well, you have to be prepared to accept criticism too."

This is familiar stuff, and the bit about accepting criticism should go without saying. But in reality most professional sportsmen lap up the plaudits then cry "negativity" if any brickbats come their way.

Steve Harmison has greatly improved in his dealings with the media since, as a shy teenager who had rarely left Ashington, he declined one day to speak to the Durham cricket press on the grounds that we all wrote sh..

Now he declines to speak to us because he has a weekly column with the Sunday tabloid which paid John Prescott's secretary mega-bucks for her lurid revelations, which seems to me a good enough reason not to allow it over the threshold.

It may well be a condition of Harmison's contract with the newspaper that he doesn't speak to other media, and I also accept that he is sufficiently famous to be constantly badgered by autograph hunters and well-wishers as well as requests for interviews.

But by cutting himself off from those who inform his North-East public he reinforces the impression that he is using Durham merely as a means of getting back into the England team as soon as possible. After yesterday's events he might have to wait a while longer.

I WASN'T invited to the Beckham party, which was held in a marquee the size of a football pitch at their Hertfordshire home, so I didn't have the pleasure of turning them down. No, really, we shouldn't mock the outrageous extravagance because the occasion included a charity auction which raised almost the value of the £2m worth of diamonds Posh was apparently wearing.

The man who has inherited the world's most famous metatarsal from Becks was reported to be still dancing at 3am. After all that time sitting in an oxygen chamber to promote the healing he probably deserved a bit of fun.

CALL that a party? It was probably just a bit of a shindig compared with what must have been going on in the south-west of Ireland this week. If Gretna was empty on the day of the Scottish FA Cup final, what about Limerick when Munster beat Biarritz 23-19 in the Heineken Cup final at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium?

There were more in the stadium than for the FA Cup final, and 60,000 of them were Irish, some of them even arriving via Durham-Tees Valley Airport after rough weather forced the Cork ferries to be cancelled last Friday. Somehow I think there would be more Guinness drunk than Heineken.

APART from coming across as utterly charmless, Dwain Chambers is now paying a heavy price for being a twerp. Having spent huge sums on legal fees vainly fighting doping charges, he admitted after completing his two-year ban that he had used THG longer than originally thought. The authorities therefore ruled that he should repay prizemoney and appearance fees dating back to early 2002, and it is estimated to be costing him £135,000. I could almost feel sorry for him.