I think Sunday was quite a bad day for media hype. A good thing, I’m sure you’ll agree.

First of all there was Jamie Murray’s victory at Wimbledon, which I find absolutely hilarious. It certainly puts the past two years of hype surrounding Andrew Murray to shame a bit. Of all the people who could usurp saintly young tennis genius media darling Andrew Murray, it would be his brother who has not received even a fraction of the attention. Well done MSM!

Then of course, there was the British Grand Prix, where Lewis Hamilton put in a frankly lacklustre performance. It was by far his worst of the year, which is also absolutely hilarious because the media was getting into a frenzy over the prospect of a Brit winning the British Grand Prix. Ha ha!

My favourite part of the British Grand Prix coverage was actually just before the race started. The usually bearable Martin Brundle had fallen into the Lewis lovey-dovey-vortex. “There is a massive crowd here at Silverstone,” he said, “and they are all hoping for a…” Just in time, a man with a Spanish flag stood up to dominate the camera shot. Brundle battled on. “Errr. Err. Man with a Spanish flag there. Brave man.” Hahahah!

Of course, Hamilton’s poor showing at the British Grand Prix could not possibly have had anything to do with Hamilton himself. The media were already making his excuses for him — even before the race was finished. After the race, ITV pundit Mark Blundell was adamant that Hamilton must have had a problem with his car.

Well, I have not heard anything about what this problem with his car is — probably because it didn’t exist. That was just the media trying to cover its sorry arse.

There probably was an issue with the set up of the car. But guess whose job it is to set up the car? That’s right, Lewis Hamilton’s. Fernando Alonso didn’t have any trouble setting up his car, did he?

We have also seen that Lewis Hamilton does crack under pressure. To be honest, the fact that he could stick to the racing line when he was put under pressure by, say, Alonso, was the most impressive thing about Hamilton. Alonso could have stripped naked and Hamilton wouldn’t have batted an eyelid.

Not so at the British Grand Prix, where Hamilton got so wound up that he ended up trying to leave the pits far too early. He managed to stop before causing an Albers-esque situation, but he was close to doing that. (Incidentally, Albers has lost his job — but it’s nothing to do with the pitlane incident, oh no!)

The media’s story is that Hamilton had lightning-quick reactions to stop his car before anything worse happened. But the point is that he shouldn’t have had his car moving in the first place!

The rest of Hamilton’s race wasn’t much better, and once again he had a fair bit of good luck on his side. If Felipe Massa hadn’t stalled his engine and had to start from the pitlane, there is no way Hamilton would have finished on the podium. Imagine that. The first time he would have failed to get on the podium. Golden boy Lewis had his worst race at the British Grand Prix!

Hamilton still has an intimidating lead in the Drivers’ Championship. But all of his main rivals — Fernando Alonso, Kimi Räikkönen and Felipe Massa — have had more than their fair share of bad luck. The second half of the season will be much more difficult for Hamilton. It will be very interesting to see how he copes with the pressure from now on.

As I said, this kind of follows on from my last post. But I know a lot of you just skip past the Formula 1 posts, so I will briefly summarise the relevant bit here:

ITV’s Formula 1 coverage sucks, partly because it is fixated with hyping up mediocre drivers because they are British.

As it happens, there is a debate about sport and nationality in Scotland at the moment. It appears as though Alex Salmond has called for Scotland to enter a separate team in the Olympics. Apparently the media have acted surprised, although I’m not. It seems to be quite a common view held by a lot of nationalists, so indeed it would be surprising if Mr Salmond wasn’t in favour of it.

It seems to bit a bit of an overblown media story (ho! This blog is becoming a bit one-note). But it has nevertheless sparked a bit of a debate, so here is my view on it.

Often I don’t care where a sports person is from. My interest might be coloured by media coverage. That just means that I end up being more interested in whatever I hear about on the radio. But that’s just because I hear it on the radio. This can go either way, because obviously if I’m pissed off with the media coverage I will suddenly have a burning hatred of whoever is flavour of the month.

Take Andrew Murray for instance. At first I was interested because he was young and Scottish and sounded like he had a lot of talent. Then whenever I heard him being interviewed he turned out to be a sour, sullen, ungrateful little whiner. So now, while I would marginally rather see him winning than losing, I am more ambivalent than anything else.

Similarly, whether or not I feel like rooting for England in cricket or football mostly depends on how bearable I find the media coverage. During the football World Cup, it is easy to get sick of England. At other times I wouldn’t mind seeing them win.

Obviously in football I would root for Scotland first and foremost. An obvious choice because I was born here in Scotland. But here is where the whole thing falls to bits, because I am actually not very interested in football so it doesn’t really affect me either way. I like to see Scotland winning, but you certainly wouldn’t catch me sitting through ninety minutes of it at a time.

In fact, the only sport that I am really interested in is… well, take a guess. That one, and snooker (if I can be bothered). And cricket is okay too. I couldn’t tell you why I was interested in any of these sports. As Richard Thomson says, there is nothing rational about this sort of thing. It’s just the way you turn out.

But I do have quite firm beliefs about nationality and sport. Like I said, I usually support Scotland if they are playing. But that wouldn’t stop me from supporting any British team. And neither does it preclude me from rooting for England. And here is why: nationality doesn’t matter a jot. Not to me as a spectator, and not to a sports person either.

A couple of years ago I saw part of a documentary about Ben Johnson. A relative of his was asked a question about whether or not Ben Johnson let down his country by taking performance enhancing drugs. The response was very firm: “Don’t be so stupid! He wasn’t running for his country. He was running for himself.”

While I don’t doubt that there might be the odd athlete who gets a real kick out of performing for their country, at the end of the day you have to be realistic about athletes’ real motives. If we are talking about professional athletes, we are also talking about careers. They want to win for the good of themselves and their own career, not for the good of their country (whatever that means).

Most sports people might say that they are very, very proud to be representing their coverage. But I think this is probably mostly, once again, for selfish individualistic aims. Saying such things helps get the media off your back and gets the general public supporting you.

Crowds at home matches are less hostile, giving you the confidence to perform. Merchandise sales skyrocket. You can make tons of money appearing in adverts. And once you get old you might even become a TV sports pundit. All by playing the game correctly, by playing up to the image of a “plucky Brit” or a “gritty Scot” or whatever.

I am under no illusions as to what a sports person’s motives are. They want to win, and they would want to win no matter where they happened to be born. So I don’t buy into the nationalistic hype that surrounds sport stars.

That is also why I am somewhat sceptical of the idea that entering a separate Scottish team would, overnight, turn Scotland into a sports-mad nation, driven on to win because of national pride.

Richard Thomson says:

…the idea that our athletes would win fewer medals than they would as part of a UK team is utterly risible, epitomising all that’s worst about the ‘awww, we’re rubbish!’, ‘expect the worst and you’ll never be disappointed’, loser mentality that stifles so much talent and potential in Scotland.

But it is just a matter of numbers. With a smaller pool of talent to choose from, Scotland’s sports teams would wilt. At least as part of TeamGB, any talented Scots there are can be part of a bigger, more talented team that has a better chance of winning a medal.

As Jeff at SNP Tactical Voting says,

…would a Scottish relay sprint team, or rowing team, or badminton team even qualify to the Olympics proper without the undoubted benefits of competing with our English/Welsh/Northern Irish brothers and sisters. One could argue that the benefits of extra places is cancelled out by not being able to qualify for half of the disciplines.

Some people find this difficult to believe, but I watch Formula 1 as a neutral. I don’t have any particular favourite drivers or teams (although I used to quite like Jordan). I have some drivers and teams that I prefer to others, but this certainly doesn’t run along nationalistic grounds.

For instance, I cannot stand that smug (even though he has nothing to be smug about) Jenson Button. “Plucky Brit” he may be, but this is just code for “talentless fuckwit”. As I said in my post below, he is utterly incapable of winning a race unless everyone in front of him breaks down.

Even worse, he seems to be quite a dodgy individual, as he has twice signed contracts with teams which he has subsequently tried to wriggle out of. So he is a slippery character as well as an average racer.

What about that fine Scot, David Coulthard, you ask? I actually quite like him — but not because he is a Scot. I admire him for the fact that his career is still going strong after so many years. I also think he is quite a likeable personality, quite engaging and funny when being interviewed.

But I lost a lot of respect for him following the 2001 Monaco Grand Prix, where he was unable to overtake Enrique Bernoldi, an inferior driver in an inferior car. In a way, this is understandable because the Monaco circuit is very difficult to overtake on due to its narrow and twisty nature. What did it for me was when after the race he complained, saying that Bernoldi should have just let him past. Err, no. It’s motor racing — the point is that you have to overtake him if you’re good enough.

If I was held at gunpoint and asked to choose my favourite F1 team, I would say McLaren. And there has been an interesting row about the “nationality” of that team in recent months. German newspaper Bild tried to claim that McLaren is a German team because it is partly owned by DaimlerChrysler under the guise of Mercedes-Benz. As such, a fuss was caused when McLaren won a race and the German national anthem wasn’t played.

But McLaren is “officially” a British team, and the British national anthem is played when a McLaren driver wins a race. It has been like this for many, many years. And why not? After all, it is based in Britain, Chairman Ron Dennis is British and I would guess the majority of employees are British.

But the story doesn’t end there. You see, Bruce McLaren, the founder of the McLaren team, was a Kiwi! So if anything, surely New Zealand’s national anthem should be played when McLaren win a race!

Many teams face this dilemma of having multiple nationalities, particularly when their parent company is based in a different country to where the factory is based. Is Renault British or French (the team is based in Britain, the parent company is from France and the car is built in both!)? Is Honda British or Japanese. Is Toyota German or Japanese. Is Spyker British or Dutch? Is Red Bull British or Austrian? Is Toro Rosso Italian or Austrian? Is BMW Swiss or German?

The point is that it doesn’t matter what national anthem gets played. McLaren is McLaren is McLaren, whether it is British, German, Kiwi or Cloudcuckoovian. And I guess if they were to officially change their nationality, it would not have a single bearing on the race result.

And the controversy over McLaren’s nationality? Nothing to do with national pride or any tosh like that. It was in fact stirred up by BMW for their own self-interested ends.

At the end of the day, you might have guessed, I don’t really care whether or not Scots perform as part of Scotland or as part of TeamGB in the Olympics. Really, who cares? After all, the medals table (more a reflection of population size than anything else) has only ever been useful for Cold War propagandists.

Apparently the craze sweeping the tennis players at Wimbledon this year is blogging.

…for many of the players, the [rainy] weather meant the chance for many to turn to their favourite pastime — blogging.

Is that a recipe for disaster? Usually when public figures and celebrities try their hand at blogging it is absolutely shit.

Andy Murray’s blog is attracting a fair bit of controversy, which is a good start for a blogger. I cannot stand Murray myself. What a miserable bastard he is. Have you ever seen him smile? I haven’t. Infact, most of the time he is just grumping about a journalist or something. He seems like the sort of person who would frown when he hears he’s won the lottery. Cheer up man! You’ve got a career playing tennis, not bloody toilet cleaning!

Nevertheless, I do like this man’s blog.

I realise my hair’s a bit of a state but it doesn’t really phase me too much. Why get a hair cut when you can just put a cap on? Its cheaper to buy a cap than pay for half a dozen haircuts a year!

Quite right! Even in this post about haircuts and autographs he is still getting a barrage of comments from chippy Englishmen who can’t understand why Murray won’t support a foreign football team (beats me!). For instance, stats is a charming fellow:

typical scotman wont get his hand out of his pocket, get a haircut you tight git!!!

Now who is the racist between Murray and stats? All I can say is, at least Murray is man enough to have unmoderated comments on his blog.

Rafael Nadal is “blogging” for the ATP’s website, but I am taking one look at it and saying, “that is not a blog”. I know that’s getting into the boring old debate about what is and isn’t a blog, but face it: this is a static web page with no comments and not even permalinks.

All I can see is a load of boring photographs and some totally banal writing, completely playing into the stereotype of bloggers writing about their breakfast (for the record, I had two Weetabix today, but I am still bloody shattered). Just as well he was only writing it for the French Open.

All of the many ATP blogs follow along the same lines. I have never heard of Bob and Mike Bryan but apparently they are revolutionary doubles players. Their “blogging” is anything but revolutionary.

Dmitry Tursunov’s “blog” is much more like it. I like his sense of humour. And he is a bit of a typical blogger in that he uses far too many exclamation marks. Good on him I say.

So ATP has asked me to tone down on exclamation points! Oh really?!?! You don’t like them?! Maybe that’s how I feel! Maybe I feel like putting exclamation points!!! Maybe I just like them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It smells like Bryanne [Stewart]’s hand has been in it. She’s been turning ATP against my exclamation points!!! The only way to battle it is to put more exclamation points!!!!

But now I am just wondering what Bryanne Stewart’s hand smells like it’s been in… She has her own blog, but hers is a bit different because she is videoblogging, vlogging, vodcasting, whatever the hell you want to call it.

The problem is that it’s quite wooden. It is like watching James Rubin again. “Sorry I missed yesterday,” she says monotonously, “but I had other priorities. Um. Australia was playing in the soccer yesterday.” It ends rather abruptly. There is no goodbye. She just looks at somebody to the right of the camera with an expression that says, “Can I be finished yet?”

So the Wimblogedon revolution hasn’t quite been the complete disaster it threatened to be. Just like all blogs, it is a mixed bag and there are good and bad ones. If this was a tournament it would be a close final between Tursonov and Murray. Unfortunately Tursonov hasn’t written a single word since May, so victory goes to Andy Murray!