Much as I admire Sir Alex Ferguson (which I do), I don’t care much for his constant whingeing whenever his team loses, for afterwards he always seems to be looking for scapegoats.

After complaining about ‘The Germans’ (simply for being German!) when Bayern Munich lost 3-2 but won on away goals in the quarter-finals of the European Cup last week, he said that 19-year-old Rafael da Silva shouldn’t have been sent off for his tackle on Franck Ribery because: ‘he (Rafael)’s only a youngster. You have to make allowances.’

Man Utd captain Gary Neville added his tuppence worth will: ‘Technically, you could say there was a small tug by Rafael – but did that warrant a sending off to change the whole flow of a massive European game? I don’t think so.’

Well, ‘technically’ the referee was fully justified in sending him off and, as for Sir Alex’s argument that he should have stayed on the pitch because he’s just a lad, surely the logic follows that if that’s true, football managers should include more teenagers in their teams on the basis that if they do foul anyone, they’ll get away with it because they’re so much younger than the other players around them . . .

All of which brings me to the shortage of referees in Jersey at the moment.

Late last month we highlighted the dilemma – too few referees for too many matches – following the criticism by one club official that he was less than pleased when only one official turned up to referee an important league game. ‘Where were the assistant referees?’ He asked.

A day or too later in conversation with Island referee Nigel Hammond, I mentioned this apparent shortage and he explained that one of the problems is that too few Islanders will volunteer to ref because the hassle’s not worth it.

We both agreed that the money they can claim, for the amount of hours they have to give up to get there, get changed, spend 90-plus minutes out on a pitch only to have every decision you make questioned or sneered at before you go home, makes it a fool’s occupation.

And, in this day and age, even the youngsters will question a ref’s decision . . . and if not the kid, then possibly his dad, watching from the touchline.

Of course a referee will make mistakes. It’s only human for them to do so, even if they have made the right decision 99 times before.

‘Our job is to referee fairly, which is what we’re always trying to do,’ Nigel said, ‘but you always run the risk of making the wrong decision. If you do so, the players will always complain.
‘But then you don’t see referees running after a striker when he’s missed an open goal, complaining that he’s not done his job properly, do you!’

I would have liked Lee Westwood to have won the Masters in Augusta last weekend, but I was still impressed by eventual winner Phil Mickelson’s speech after he finished three shots clear of the Englishman.

For the 39-year-old father of three dedicated his win to his wife and said: ‘It’s been an emotional year. I’m very proud of my wife and the fight and struggle she’s been through. This has been one of the best things we’ve been through. To go through all that and come out the other side is something very special.’

The ‘all that’ is cancer. For in May last year his wife, Amy, was diagnosed with the disease. Six weeks later so was his mother.

During those 12 months we all know that, for most of it, Tiger Woods was engaged in what he claims was an illness of a very different kind. Still, he’s had treatment and rehabilitation and has even made a commercial for Nike, in which, apparently, he maintains he is now heeding good advice from a recording by his late father Earl.

However, the next time you listen in to the ad, consider this. Earl Woods wasn’t talking to his son at all at the time. The advice given was to his wife, Kultida. The ‘Tiger’ part was just a bit of clever editing. A contrite Tiger? . . . You decide.

Still on the subject of the Masters, and as I watched the Korean KJ Choi (who finished fourth) on the 13th green I was struck by his fashion sense. There was nothing wrong with it – far from it. Fashionable white peaked golf cap; dark, close fitting shirt, stylish trousers and golf shoes – if you didn’t know better you would have sworn he was an American.

And for a minute or two his admirable sense of fashion dominated my thoughts rather than his golf swing.

For in the past I have argued that sport – all sports – have the ability to unite nations in a way that politics can never do.

I still believe that, on the whole, that’s true. But what I’ve never really considered is how sport also unites nations through the clothes we wear. Okay, they might be designer clothes, but they are also a universal, sporting uniform, and I wonder how many Korean kids look up to Choi, not only wishing they could play golf like him, but also dreaming of wearing the kind of clothes he wears. Similarly, millions of children throughout Asia must dream of emulating Hong Kong’s world class snooker player, James Wattana, as he closes up his cufflinks, puts on his waistcoat and bow tie and competes in the world championships in Sheffield!

Before leaving the great game of golf, I’ve written before about how I fall apart on a golf course when other people are looking at me. All kinds of thoughts go on in my brain as I imagine them judging the shot I’m about to play, which is why my golf ball invariably goes no more than a couple of metres or else veers alarmingly, normally to the left side of the fairway.

So how, I’ve often wondered, do the world’s greatest golfers cope with the pressure of crowded fairways, TV cameras, and a putt or two that can make the difference between winning or losing ten thousands of pounds?

Well, Colin Montgomerie seems to have an answer.
‘ . . . I try to recite the 37 times table. Now most people finish at 12, but I thought 37 was a difficult number, and so I get to 74, and 111, and then I have to stop and think. When you see me thinking on the tee, I’m actually trying to recite the 37 times table . . . then I can stand on the first tee and swing the club naturally, without thinking about it. I do the same thing to ignore the crowd or anything that’s distracting me . . .’
Thank you Colin. ‘Two 37s are 74, three 37s are 111, four 37s are . . . er, er . . .’

While the game of cricket can be traced back to the 16th century, if not before, cricket boxes weren’t generally used until the 1870s.
After that it was to be a full 100 years before cricket helmets were generally considered acceptable in all levels of cricket, from Test matches downwards.
‘Doesn’t surprise me at all,’ said my wife as we talked about why protecting the head came a full century after we protected the groin. ‘We women have always known that men do most of their thinking from down there anyway.’

In eight days time I hope to be at St Peter, watching Jersey RFC beating Taunton before I pack my bags a couple of weeks later ready to head off to Twickenham.
It will, I know, be a close run thing and I am not fooled at all by Taunton’s two recent league defeats and cup final reverse, nor by their director of Rugby, Lee Waddon, who dismisses the game’s importance and says that he sees a trip to ‘holiday Island Jersey’, as a ‘treat for the lads’ after a particularly grueling season.

No, mark my words, every member of the Taunton squad will be up for it. ‘Wads’ will have done his homework and know our strengths and weaknesses; and it wouldn’t surprise me if he was unconcerned about those two league defeats – why, he might even have been resting players, knowing that as his team had already won the league, the games were irrelevant anyway.

However, Jersey do have two distinct advantages . . . one real, one, at the moment, only a possibility.

The reality is that Taunton’s players will have to get up at some ungodly hour to drive to Birmingham on Saturday morning for their flight over to Jersey (perish the thought if they have a bumpy crossing!); not the best way, one would have thought, to prepare your team for one of the most crucial games of the season.

Meanwhile the ‘possibility’ is that a huge partisan crowd awaits them at ‘Fortress Jersey’; hopefully a crowd so voluble, so passionate, that their cheering will be heard in every parish, throughout the Island. I hope so.

And I, for one, will be shouting myself hoarse if Jersey do win their biggest game of this, and many a season.

Finally, to the more sedentary sport of lawn bowls. Well, not quite. For on Sunday I was at the indoor bowls centre at Grainville, watching the men’s inter-insular when, for the first time in three years, Jersey won back the men’s trophy by 112 shots to 108.

In that final series of games, 48 men played a mammoth 126 ends with neither island side being able to relax . . . and I was there when Jersey were leading by the slightest of margins, 101-99, at a time when the atmosphere was so spine-tinglingly electric the JEC could have bottled it up to light half the Island.

On that day and at that particular time any Islander who loves his or her sport would have wanted to be there.

And afterwards, after the men’s team had held on to their four-end win from 220 scored, I couldn’t but agree with Ty Thomas, president of the Indoor Bowls Association, when he said: ‘Bowls isn’t the quiet, old-man-smoking-a-pipe stuff most people make it out to be. It’s far more intense than that.’