The abundant ridiculousness of the sport itself need not detain us here. That it appeals to male members of the House of Windsor within a death or two of the throne is ample comment on its mingling of needless physical danger and grotesque unaffordability. Its appeal to the female sex is predicated on something else, of course, as close students of Jilly Cooper’s oeuvre will need little reminding. Why frustrated women d’une certaine age prefer the ogling of equestrians, and inter-chukka traipsing around fields stamping down displaced pieces of turf to work off some of that ardour, to availing themselves of the splendid pornography so freely available on cable television, I cannot say. All we know is that the Argentine polo player, that prancing ponce of the aristo sporting world, makes the polo field cougar paradise.

Invariably sickeningly handsome and repulsively dashing, this archetype of gentrified machismo has correctly identified the tight-buttocked, muscle-bulging activity of riding around swinging a mallet as the speediest route to a life of idle riches. For decades, long before the trail was blazed by Sarah Ferguson’s mother, wealthy English and American women have been alighting on the pseudo-gaucho talent pool as a source of mid-life gratification.

Exactly how many of the players are descended from gentlemen who hurriedly fled central Europe in the mid-1940s is unknown, though any genetic inheritance from Prussian cavalry-men would obviously be handy for horsemanship. One of the age’s finest players, meanwhile, glories in the first name of Adolfo.

Yet it is not for us to visit the sins of the great-grandfathers on the great-grandsons. What it is for us to do is point out that these show ponies are essentially glamourised gigolos with nothing on their minds but the servicing of Anglo-American sugar mummies and the cushy lives their capacious purses will thenceforth provide. What polo represents to the Argentine, in other words, is a hole with a mint.

Blake Aldridge

So much nauseating drivel is intoned by sports people about the primacy of the collective effort – the striker insisting he couldn’t care about scoring so long as the team wins, for example, when he’d massacre an orphanage for a hat-trick in a 3–9 defeat – that any expression of individuality in a group context generally acts as an anti-emetic. When, however, a member of that group, even a group as small as two, pinpoints the midst of competition as the time to slag off his partner, the antidote loses its efficacy. When that same group member chooses to do so at the side of an Olympic pool, by speaking to his mother in the crowd on his mobile phone, you know you’re dealing with a fool of the very first water.

The diving prodigy Tom Daley, who represented Britain in the 2008 Olympics at an age when others are gingerly ditching the armbands, was admittedly an irritant himself, with all the robotic references to his sponsor. He paid tribute to ‘Team Visa’ with all the frequency and sincerity Barry McGuigan lavished on ‘my manager Mr Barney Eastwood’ before the two went to attritional courtroom war.

But then, precocious fourteen-year-olds are irritating, as parents and Britain’s Got Talent viewers need no reminding. They also tend, inexplicably, to lack Olympic experience, which perhaps explained the sub-par performance in the Beijing synchronised diving event of a pubescent boy who would confirm his talent a year later by winning an individual world title in Rome.

Aldridge, although more than a decade older, allowed him no such latitude, publicly criticising Daley during the competition despite the experts identifying Aldridge himself as the weaker performer. As for the phone call, filial piety is a wonderful thing, but there are times and places to demonstrate it. Seldom since Oedipus has a public figure found a less appropriate method of showing the world how much he loves his mummy.

Aldridge’s punishment was not the putting out of his own eyes, but a lurch into a new sport also covered by live cameras. Sadly, he seems to have as much talent for shoplifting as for diving, winning his first conviction in May 2009, a few months before Daley won his gold in Rome. He was fined £80 by police for nicking stuff from B&Q.

Encouragingly, he appears to be showing more sticking power in this career. He was arrested again in February 2010 on suspicion of stealing wine from Tesco and assaulting the security guard who caught him at it. His trial awaits at the time of writing, and we wish him well. If and when it takes place – if it hasn’t already – a word of advice. Whatever the temptation, try not to call your mother in the spectator seats at the back from the dock. Judges hate that. And however badly you think your barrister is performing, Blake, on no account criticise him publicly until the verdict is in. In court, as on the diving board, it is essential to work as a team.

Peter Fleming

John McEnroe’s old doubles partner may be the most unnervingly weird character ever to analyse any sport on television. His air of intellectual superiority may be well-founded, as it would be for anyone with an IQ over ninety sharing airtime with Barry Cowan, but it does tend to grate.

Although he behaves himself during Wimbledon, when he works for the BBC, Fleming seldom hears a question on Sky that isn’t beneath his dignity. His preferred mode of expressing disdain, particularly towards presenter Marcus Buckland, a modest and charming soul, is the exaggerated pause. How, Mr Buckland once asked him, would he explain the amazing abundance of talent in the men’s game today? Eunuchs grew rabbinical beards in the time Fleming took to ponder this, before offering a desolate ‘I dunno,’ and lapsing into quietude once more.

On a good day, the silence in response to a seemingly unchallenging enquiry – Does Novak Djokovic’s second serve look a bit off? Are Rafa Nadal’s knees playing up? What is the time? – puts you in mind of Pinter performed by the Theatre of the Mute. On a bad one, you could write a wistful rite-of-passage memoir in the style of Alan Bennett in the time he requires to address a wayward Andy Murray two-hander down the line.

Occasionally, when Fleming feels that the foolishness of the question requires more peremptory treatment, he might wince, snort or raise his eyebrows to the crown of his head. Now and again, he will stare in disbelief, the gaze apparently in homage to Jack Nicholson in The Shining or Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men.

When Mr Fleming, facially a hybrid between the Addams Family’s butler Lurch and Jay Gatsby, does deign to share an opinion, it’s invariably worth hearing. He is an extremely bright guy, and he certainly has a presence (that of a Harvard philosophy professor stunned into an existential crisis at mysteriously finding himself redeployed as a third-grade teaching assistant). Tennis, like darts and nothing else, is a sport Sky covers well, and the languid gloss Fleming lends to its broadcasts does much to explain that bucking of the form book. I wouldn’t be without him for the world.

Nor, however, would I wish to get into a big-money staring contest with him, much less be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the Situation Room at the White House demanding an instant decision from a President Fleming about how to respond to worryingly raised activity levels in an Iranian nuclear silo.

Tony Green

The most perplexing event in the sporting calendar is the BDO World Darts Championship, broadcast each New Year by the BBC. The tortured history of the great darting split, as featured in a hilarious edition of BBC2’s documentary strand Trouble at the Top, needn’t detain us long. Suffice it to say that in the 1990s a trickle of BDO stars flowed away to form the rival PDC, now run with typical commercial élan by Barry Hearn, and that the trickle later became a torrent.

Where the PDC is dart’s equivalent of football’s Premier League – a point it subtly underscores by naming a competition ‘the Premier League of Darts’ – the BDO is, at best, its Conference. So robbed of talent has it become that the trades descriptions people risk a class action for negligence by failing to have it restyled The World Championship for People Who Try Hard, Bless ’Em But Just Aren’t Terribly Good at Darts. An averagely well coordinated male who threw the first arrow of his life on Christmas Day could expect to reach the quarter-finals, at least, a fortnight later.

The timing of the BDO event, which starts immediately after Phil ‘The Power’ has retained the real world title on Sky Sports, is the equivalent of rescheduling Wimbledon as a warm-up for a satellite event in Cleethorpes, and adds an additional layer of poignancy that isn’t strictly required. That the work of lead commentator Tony Green perfectly reflects the quality of the darts completes a startlingly surreal picture.

Best known to students of game show theory as Jim Bowen’s Bullseye stooge (‘And Bully’s special priiiiize … a reverse lobotomy!’), this John Prescott lookalike, and alas soundalike, must be the most clueless commentator in the history of televised sport. Like the former deputy PM he so closely resembles in girth and jowls, Mr Green boldly pioneers aphasia as a mainstream lifestyle choice.

His trademarks may be boiled down to two. Whenever the director shows a cutaway shot of a palpably bored crowd sullenly watching the apology for top-flight darts on a giant screen (and isn’t that the special appeal of a live event? It’s so qualitatively different from watching at home) he will respond with an elon-gated ‘Yeeeeeessssss, there they are!’ Technically, it’s hard to pick a fight with that. There is invariably where they were. On other levels … well, it’s not Richie Benaud, is it?

The other signature dish is to respond to a cosmically witless pre-prepared pun from co-commentator David Croft with the wheezy breath of an obese hyena dying from emphysema. This death rattle is then followed by ‘Dear, dear … oh dear,’ to suggest a psycho-geriatric-ward fugitive reacting with a mixture of delight and shame to a bladder accident induced by unquenchable mirth at Arthur Askey affecting, on the London Palladium stage in 1957, to be a busy, busy bee.

How Mr Green has been retained by the BBC for so long, in defiance of the verbal facility of the inter-stroke victim, is less mysterious than it seems. The BDO is effectively the property of a cabal – a couple of veteran players, chairman Olly Croft, master of ceremonies Martin Fitzmaurice (the sea monster who screams ‘Are you ready? Let’s. Play. Darts’), cackling sub-Kray blingmaster Bobby George, and Mr Green himself.

Between them, this bunch have transformed the BDO into a hybrid of kitschily ironic entertainment, aversion therapy for those terrified of becoming hooked on televised darts, and crèche for those who might one day grow up to join the PDC.

Mr Green himself refuses to acknowledge the existence of the rival organisation, which unusually for him makes some sense. The immortal Sid Waddell, his one-time BBC colleague, is of course the PDC’s main commentator, and even Mr Green can see the danger of drawing attention to the contrast. Even when the BDO version was won by a disabled man unable to extend his arm fully when throwing, the Australian haemophiliac Tony David in 2001, Mr Green’s confidence in its supremacy remained unshaken.

‘Yeeeessssss,’ is how he greeted the winning double that day, ‘it’s Tony Davis!’ After two weeks of the tournament and two hours of final action, how cruel to come within a single space on the middle line of the Qwerty keyboard of calling the new champion’s name right. For once, Mr Green had stumbled on a certain eloquence. Albeit unwittingly, and with unwonted succinctness, he had told his audience all it needed to know, if only about himself, in a syllable.

Frank Warren

How a man of such exquisite sensitivity has survived and made money in the rough and Runyonesque world of boxing is one of the miracles of the age. Mr Warren’s vulnerability to criticism does him nothing but credit. Where others become hardened by long careers in the big-fight game, he has been softened remarkably.

Other than offering sincere admiration, what can you say about the adorably florid-faced boxing promoter and gunshot survivor? Not a dickie bird. While Frank lives up to his own belief that when people have an opinion, ‘they are entitled to express it’ – for example, he repeatedly expressed his opinion of me (‘moron’, for example) in his News of the World column – experience teaches that this passion for freedom of speech is a one-way street. Even the most affectionate of teasing will provoke from Frank the threat of an action for libel. In fact, he’ll more than likely sue over this.

‘If it pleases your lordship, my client Mr Frank Warren, a man of the most blameless character, a pillar of his local community, a tireless worker for many deserving charities, is profoundly distressed by the implication that he may tend toward the mildly litigious, and seeks substantial damages for the injury to his feelings and reputation …’ Somewhere in such an action we might sniff out the stirrings of a defence, should it come to that. And it’s even money that it will.

Graeme Souness

Even in the legalised GBH halcyon era of the 1970s and early eighties, English football knew no more vicious a would-be maimer than Graeme Souness. With the thick moustache and bubble perm regarded as mandatory at Liverpool at the time, he may have joined team-mate Mark Lawrenson (see no. 14) as a prototype for the Village People’s construction worker. But had you found yourself sharing a YMCA dormitory or navy bunk with Souness, you’d soon enough have swapped the warmth for a street doorway or Davy Jones’s locker, for fear of being on the wrong end of a studs-up leg-breaker in the middle of the night.

No one ever took such unsmiling satisfaction from endangering careers. His most infamous assault, late in his career for Glasgow Rangers against Steaua Bucharest, crystallised the purity of his malevolence. About the raising and spiteful stamping of his right boot onto the thigh of one Dmitri Rotario there was nothing unusual. What was so refreshingly novel was that Souness, whose reaction to this arrestable offence was to clutch his own leg in mock agony, was in possession of the ball at the time.

The best to be said of Souness’s commitment to violence is that it never lacked integrity. Just as with Roy Keane, who is excused an entry thanks to the accurate character reading he offered Mick McCarthy (see no. 31), he was too magnificent a player to need the brutality. There was no design or purpose to it whatever. This was the Edmund Hillary of football hatchet men: he sought to rupture cruciate ligaments because they were there.

Souness went on to earn his berth on Sky Sports, where despite the hot competition he shines out as a beacon of charisma-free witlessness, in the traditional manner. Only having repeatedly proved his uselessness as a manager, with Liverpool, Blackburn Rovers and Newcastle among others, was he deemed fit to point out their inadequacies to coaches in current employment.

Despite the rich catalogue of failures, his self-confidence remains as strident as it is misplaced. A few years ago I came across him in a bar during one of Tottenham’s then perpetual managerial crises, and asked if he fancied himself the guy to turn Spurs around. ‘Son,’ he said, leaning magisterially back on his stool, ‘the club I couldnae turn round has yet to be built.’

Inexplicably, this remains a judgement shared by no one else. Indeed, in a nice instance of life imitating art imitating life, Souness has come to emulate Yosser Hughes, with whom he famously appeared in a Boys From the Black Stuff cameo (excellent he was, too). Time and time again he has invited chairmen to ‘Gizza job,’ and been answered with a sarcastic chuckle. Although not, one suspects, to his face.

Kriss Akabusi

It pays testament to his enduring genius to irritate that even today, years after last setting eyes and (worse) ears on the man, it remains impossible to do the late-night channel-flick of the insomniac philistine without a frisson of terror that Kriss Akabusi might crop up in an ancient repeat of A Question of Sport.

As a useful 400-metre runner over hurdles and on the flat, specialising in stirring last legs of the relay, Akabusi seemed a harmless enough soul. Yet even then the exaggerated can-do enthusiasm of his post-race interviews – for all that they often came moments after he had proved that he couldn’t do, and indeed hadn’t done – hinted at the horrors to come.

Television executives evidently noticed them, and concluded that what the viewing public needed in the deep recession of the early 1990s was the human equivalent of one of those executive toys which, at the faintest touch, produce an extended burst of deranged giggling. If laughter is indeed the best medicine, Akabusi will live to be 140. The problem for the rest of us is that while he was getting all the health benefits, we were stuck in the placebo group. Worse than that, the insane chortling that was doing him such a power of good had the disturbing side effect of raising the blood pressure in the rest of us.

If there is an unflatteringly jealous tone in the above, the reason for that is simply put. Of all the human traits, the one I envy most is the Akabusian gift of being easily amused. In a dark and gruesome world, what ineffable bliss it must be to laugh uncontrollably at nothing until the ribcage creaks and the bladder screams for mercy.

In what passed for his televisual heyday, when he was a presenter on Record Breakers and a guest on just about everything else, nothing – not one thing – Akabusi could hear would fail to strike him as outlandishly amusing. If the Shipping Forecast on Radio 4 revealed a high ridge of pressure moving towards South Utsira, he’d squeal with mirth. If the Hang Seng index in Hong Kong had been marked sharply up in brisk early trading, he would yelp and shake with merriment. If his GP had told him that he’d developed gangrene in both legs, and required an immediate double amputation, he’d have collapsed with mirth and crawled around on the floor until the limbs detached themselves of their own accord. In his commitment to laughing uncontrollably at the studiedly unfunny, he was a one-man Michael McIntyre audience long before that alleged comedian emerged to raise fresh doubts about the taste and even the sanity of his compatriots.

Whether the unceasing screeching was genuine, possibly due to an undiagnosed neurological condition, or the stand-out feature of a construction designed to get him media work, it is impossible to be sure. I don’t remember his eyes laughing in tune with his mouth, but it was all a blessedly long time ago.

Today, Mr Akabusi does what retired sportsmen with a TV future buried in the past tend to do. He is a motivational speaker, using silly voices, demented changes of decibel level (whispering one moment, yelling the next, neither volume remotely explained by the text), anecdotes and archive footage of relay triumphs to give new meaning and direction to the lives of those unable to find a televangelist at the right price.

No doubt he makes a decent living from reliving the highlights of a decent career, and explaining to those unable to better the late King of Tonga’s personal best for the 60-metre dash how to adapt his athletic experiences to become better, happier and richer people. I hope so. There is no obvious malice in the man, and I wish him well.

For all that, I can’t help thinking that that the only people for whom a talk from Kriss Akabusi would constitute an effective motivational force are members of the voluntary euthanasia society Exit.

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