Hands Betray Alonso's Anguish

While Michael Schumacher talked happily about the win that increased the momentum of his bid for an eighth formula one title, the man sitting next to him presented an expressionless face to the world. Unfortunately for Fernando Alonso, however, his hands were on camera. And what they were doing told the story of the climax to this season's world championship.

So harshly were they being kneaded that it looked as though Alonso was trying to tear his own knuckles off. In contrast to his bland visage, this was the unmistakable sign of a man in torment, confronting the evidence that those hands were no longer in control of his own destiny.

Today's grand prix drivers are taught to give nothing away. They live in a world of secrets. They are permitted to betray neither technical strengths nor psychological weaknesses. In public their utterances are purged of substance. And never is that blankness more apparent than in the post-race press conferences, when the men who finished second and third - the first of the losers, in other words - impersonate a pair of Easter Island statues.

So it seemed in Shanghai on Sunday, when Schumacher jubilantly talked of his achievement in drawing level with Alonso at the top of the drivers' table while the Spaniard and his Renault team -mate, Giancarlo Fisichella, who had completed the podium trio, attempted to disguise the extent of their joint failure to keep the Ferrari leader at bay.

Eventually Alonso seemed to realise that his body language was giving him away, and his hands came to rest. But you could not blame him for his agitation. As he struggles to defend the championship he won with such flair and confidence last year, he must feel that he is having to fight against odds stacked in his rival's favour.

Just 20 laps into Sunday's race, for instance, the data screens in front of the Renault engineers went blank. Flavio Briatore, the team's boss, threw up his hands in a gesture of anger and frustration, and such is formula one's current mood that you did not have to be a conspiracy theorist or wearing a blue and yellow uniform to entertain the vision of an unseen hand flicking a switch or uncoupling a connection.

No one mentioned that incident afterwards, but so often has the course of events this season run against Renault's interests, and therefore in favour of Ferrari, that it was tempting to see this minor impediment as one more link in a chain of events seemingly controlled by something other than fate.

It is hardly necessary to mention Schumacher's attempt to screw up Alonso's qualifying lap at Monaco. Other examples are even more telling. A few weeks ago, after Ferrari's technicians failed in their efforts to make the "mass damper" system - a device intended to assist the work of the front suspension - deliver the kind of benefit experienced by Renault, the sport's governing body outlawed a simple and elegant solution to a straightforward engineering problem. Thus, on what seemed to many outsiders to be entirely spurious grounds, they effectively handicapped Alonso's team, who had built their car around it and competed without protest for more than a year.

And then, at Monza, came the outrageous decision to penalise the Spaniard for allegedly interfering with the qualifying effort of Felipe Massa, Schumacher's team-mate, when he was a couple of hundred yards in front at the time of the "offence". So blatant was this injustice that the governing body changed the rules afterwards to ensure that it could not happen again - but too late, of course, to repair the damage to Alonso's campaign.

No wonder his hands were fidgeting. Should he manage to hold on to his title after the coming weekend's Japanese grand prix and the season-ending race in Brazil in three weeks' time, he will probably feel that he needed to beat rather more than just the other 21 drivers to do it.

Punters' anger at Ryder Cup streaker reveals depths of the gambling habit

When Paul McGinley conceded a 20ft putt to the Ryder Cup rookie JJ Henry after a streaker had run across the 18th green at the K Club a week ago, some of us believed that we had seen a fine example of sporting ethics in action. Others, however, came to a different conclusion.

They include the man with a scouse accent who was given time on Radio Five Live on Saturday morning to point out that, by halving the match and thereby ensuring a win for Europe over the United States by 18½ points to 9½, McGinley had seriously inconvenienced those who had gone to the bookies and put money on a 19-9 result.

"I think they" - he meant the players - "have obligations to punters because the Ryder Cup is a massive betting event now," the man said, revealing at a stroke how debased sport has become under the influence of gamblers and those anxious to encourage their habit.

The notion that professional sportsmen and women should adapt their behaviour to the requirements of the betting market is almost as obnoxious as SkyBet's slogan, which attempts to implant in the minds of the terminally gullible the belief that "it matters more when there's money on it". Oh no it doesn't.