FINAL Whistle' is getting damned fed up of this arctic weather. No GAA, no rugby, Premier League football across the water decimated no decent horseracing or anything else worth tuning into for that matter. Thankfully there's a bit of Spanish football to look at or else we'd be reduced to viewing some dreadful drivel like the All-Ireland Talent Show or some other mind-numbing offering from RTE, made even worse by the fact that the TV licence has just been purchased for another year of 'delights'.

Thankfully we're getting some value for our € 160 by tuning into the news and weather on an almost frighteningly regular basis, even if it is just to catch another glimpse of reporter Paul Cunningham's hat.

Okay when, as in Final Whistle's case, you can barely get out of your own driveway for a week and have no running water, negating the ability to do things we take for granted like flushing toilets and showering, and have actually been reduced to melting snow to fill the cisterns. You'd imagine a lack of sport would be the least of our worries – but that's the life of a sport addict.

The beauty of sport is that no matter what hardship or stresses are going on around you, they can be shouldered to one side for an hour of two by a rip-roaring match, an enthralling race or a titanic battle.

In desperation, over the weekend 'Final Whistle' even tried watching a bit of the BDO World Darts Championships, but five minutes was enough of the torture. It fails miserably in comparison to its sexed-up, money-fuelled PDC.

There's a hand-full of decent dart throwers in the BDO, but invariably the better ones are lured by the more lucrative rewards of the PDC, thus leading to continually dropping standards at the Lakeside.

That's not the biggest problem, however. The stifled and dated format of the BBC-covered tournament is like watching paint dry – a week in the stocks would be more alluring.

Okay, Sky's version may be more than a bit panto and downright raucous as drunken Duracell bunnies chant inces-

cousin, the santly but it's far more fun and exciting, something that's evident from the players' faces in comparision to the funereal goings-on with the other crowd in Frimley Green.

Another of Final Whistle's regular pastimes of a Saturday afternoon is to tune into the racing, particularly at this time of year as the countdown to the Cheltenham Festival gathers pace.

Normally we can watch Channel 4 and monitor the progress of the likes of Kauto Star, Zaynar and Big Bucks to name just a few, but instead we're stuck looking at some God awful all-weather fare from Lingfield or Kempton or the like.

It may keep the horse racing business ticking over across the water, but it hardly sets the pulses racing watching some low-grade seller where cart horses are pitted against each other in a marginal step up from a donkey derby.

Of course the biggest sporting story of the weekend was the deplorable attack on the Togo squad in Angola, which definitely puts all our whining about the Thierry Henry handball and how it was labelled as a national tragedy into some kind of perspective.

Some things unquestionably are way more important than sport.

- Dave DEVEREUX