The fact is that the British Open, excuse me – THE Open, is a complete lottery, utterly dependent on the weather.  If the sun shines and the wind doesn’t blow too much, then the best golfers will indeed do well.  But because the competition is often held in grim seaside places in Scotland, more often than not the result is a lottery, won by somebody who is a complete non-entity.

At the time of writing this year’s competition seems to be a collector’s item for dreadfulness.  One day sunny, the next windy, the next lashing with rain.  Clearly the best golfer in the world in such conditions I the one who plays in the best conditions.  And that means he is the luckiest golfer in the world – not the best.

Why does the British media have to devalue our competitions by claiming them to be the best in the world when they so clearly are anything but?  I don’t know – but I do know a second rate competition when I see it.

The rankings, which score players on their performances in this summer’s World Cup, appeared online on Saturday.

“I did not authorise this and am angry it was published,” said Capello, while the Football Association claimed it was “satisfied” with the Italian’s actions.

The project was set for launch before the World Cup but, following a media outcry, it was postponed.

“The index was published without Mr Capello’s knowledge and his representatives have taken immediate steps to have the material taken down,” read an FA statement.

The website uses a statistical system devised by former Roma, Juventus and Real Madrid coach Capello to award players a score out of 100.

Not a single England international appears in the top 45 players from the tournament, following the team’s dismal showing in South Africa that ended with a 4-1 last-16 defeat to Germany.

Captain Steven Gerrard is the only member of the squad to be ranked in the top 100 performers of the group stages, coming in at a lowly 65.

Tottenham striker Jermain Defoe has the highest average score of Capello’s squad with 62.47, while goalkeeper Robert Green, who was dropped by Capello following his glaring handling error that gifted the USA an equaliser in the England’s opening 1-1 Group C draw, has the lowest score – 51.67.

Uruguay’s Diego Forlan, the Golden Ball winner in South Africa, top the ratings. Germany’s Miroslav Klose and Thomas Mueller are second and third respectively.

Tournament winners Spain occupy the next three spots with Andres Iniesta fourth, Xavi fifth and David Villa sixth.

Uruguayan striker Luis Suarez, Dutch winger Arjen Robben, Germans midfielder Bastian Schweinsteiger and goalkeeper Manuel Neuer complete the top 10.

News of the project first emerged in early May, when Capello announced himself as a co-founder of the Index, alongside Chicco Merighi, the founder of an online gambling company.

“It’s not only about money, my interest is in football,” Capello said at the time.

A four-week trial of the index – limited to players from Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur – rated Ledley King, Michael Dawson and Sol Campbell as the best English central defenders ahead of John Terry and Rio Ferdinand.

However, following harsh media criticism of the idea as badly timed and potentially damaging to players’ confidence, Capello was forced to put World Cup ratings on hold after holding emergency talks with the FA.

But a message on the front page of the site reads: “We are finally able to satisfy the numerous request we have had by publishing the results of the evaluation of the players’ performance during the South African World Cup.

“Out of respect to the Football Association, who asked us to suspend the real-time publication, we decided to wait until the end of the tournament.”

The site also claims the analysis will next season be applied to “all games of the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A and the Champions League”, with all the data to be published “within two hours of the end of the matches”.

His slightly more practical version of the space shuttle appears to have come through some test unscathed.  Good news I suppose for those who want to throw money at Mr Branson and go up where the sky is black – and then look down on the rest of us.

But I have to admit that space exploration on the cheap is not for me.

The Virgin team aiming to send tourists on suborbital flights has tested its spacecraft with a crew for the first time, it has announced.

The craft remained attached to a specially designed aeroplane throughout a six-hour flight over California’s Mojave desert on Thursday, Virgin Galactic said.

On its website, the company congratulated the crew and said “Objectives achieved”. It says the two crew members evaluated all the spaceship’s systems and functions.

Virgin Galactic says the flight test programme will run until 2011 before it starts commercial operations.

Ekstrom and his Swedish diving colleagues opened the bottle and tasted the contents.

“It was fantastic… it had a very sweet taste, you could taste oak and it had a very strong tobacco smell. And there were very small bubbles,” he said.

Experts said the shape of the bottle showed it was from the late 18th century, and the bottle and its contents have been sent to champagne specialists in France to be analysed.

“We are 98 percent sure that it is Veuve Clicquot champagne and that it was probably (made) between 1772 (the year the business was established) and 1785,” Ekstrom said, adding that the cargo vessel was probably sailing to St Petersburg, then the capital of

He said they had found the wine on their first dive and did not yet know how many bottles the wreck contained or what other cargo it carried.

The current title of the world’s oldest champagne is held by Perrier-Jouet, which has two bottles from 1825.

Richard Juhlin, a Swedish champagne specialist, told the newspaper Alandstidningen he believed the champagne was Veuve Cliquot and said that if it was from the late 18th century, it could cost around 500,000 Swedish crowns ($68,000) a bottle.

Because the wreck lies off Aland, an autonomous part of Finland, the local authorities will decide what will be done with the wreck — and the champagne.

However, economic necessity dictates that every so often I have to do some work.  Usually this is pure purgatory.  I sign up with a local job agency and do some factory job that nobody in their right mind would do.  It pays crap – but at least it pays.

However, recently I have discovered the surreal world of cleaning.  In a former life when I worked in advertising, I was introduced to the darker side of office cleaning or office cleaners when slightly shy, awkward types who came from faraway places like Peru and Brazil asked me if I wanted my office cleaned.  I was never entirely sure if they were just being exploited – or were illegal immigrants who were really being exploited.

To my mind office cleaning is really quite cushy.  If you want to earn not very much money with a frisson of danger you could always pack agrochemicals as I did recently.  Or unload lorry-loads of flat-pack furniture.

This too was highly dangerous – putting fingers and backs at risk for a pitiful hourly rate.  But the strange thing was it was all being financed by high-street companies who just sold on furniture that had been returned for whatever reason to a bunch of cowboys.

But the bottom line is, if you want to earn a bit of money, don’t get a job at Tesco’s – get a job in office cleaning.  You get paid by the hour to do not very much at night.  And the day is yours.  And when you get fed up – just give your job up!

I used to have a foolproof way around these bargain offers.  I would ask what is the lowest tariff they company could give me if they wanted to keep me (and not give me a new phone I did not want.  For a few years this worked fine.  Then I realised I was making virtually no calls on my mobile phone – so I canned the contract and went on to pay as you go

On the face of it this might seem a daft decision.  I have to pay for every call and every text. And the tariff is I believe, quite eye-watering.  But here’s the thing – I don’t make any calls.  For me, the mobile phone exists as a medium for people to call me – except they never do.  So far this year I have made £20 of credit last until July.

From this little insight you might guess that I am fairly immune to all those TV adverts that promise you money for your unwanted phones.  Let’s face it if your mobile phone service provider puts a value of zero on your phone, it seems fairly reasonable to assume that its value is not unadjacent to zero.

But no.  If the adverts are appearing – it must mean that people are sending their phones in.  To my mind this is a bit like all those fools that send off gold in an envelope, expecting to get anything like a fair price.  It just isn’t going to happen.

SO the bottom line is.  If you want to risk having an unknown person get access to all your numbers in exchange for a few pennies, send your phone off to phones r us.  If on the other hand, you are not a mug, do what the rest of us do.  Stick the phone in a drawer.  Who knows – you might actually need it.

All of which is curious.  France is a pretty big country and cycling has lost most, if not all its credibility.  So why are they taking their tour to different countries?  Publicity I suppose.  And if I have noticed, then it must be working.  But all it does is draw attention to a ludicrous event.

Although maybe this year some of those brave Brits will get a bit of publicity – as long as they manage to pass their drugs tests.  I suppose you have to admire the fitness levels of people that can relentless pedal thousands of miles up and down hills and mountains in extreme heat.

But at the end of the day, cycling is a bit like athletics.  No matter how extraordinary the feat of the athlete involved – you wonder what is behind it all.

The extraordinary thing about cycling is how popular it seems to have become.  Wherever you go you will see lycra-clad men and women huffing and puffing their way  up hill and down dale – usually on some expensive piece of kit.  You know the sort of thing… a colour scheme that speaks volumes to those in the know – and a foreign sounding logo that is more expensive the more unpronounceable it seems to be.

I am much more interested in all the patronising gits who sit on management committees.  The ones who decide what biscuits to have with tea… and should it be lady grey tea or earl grey?

But I guess the BBC has to show lip service to reality now that public service excesses are being marginally trimmed.  So BBC director general Mark Thompson has backed plans to publish stars’ earnings in pay bands, but said revealing individual wages would be “wrong”.

On Thursday, the BBC Trust called for earnings made by the corporation to talent to be made public.

Speaking to the BBC’s Andrew Marr, Mr Thompson said revealing exact earnings should be kept private.

He also defended the BBC’s plan to overhaul staff pensions, saying “times are hard”.

Last week the BBC announced plans to change its pension scheme in an attempt to tackle a £2bn deficit.

“Times are tough for everyone and pension arrangements, across the public sector, are going to be looked at very hard over the coming months,” Mr Thompson said.

And therein lies the problem.  Anyone can look at something hard.  It takes a bit more willpower to actually do something about it.

A study of women at a Belgian clinic found half wanted to freeze their eggs to take the pressure off finding a partner, a fertility conference heard.

A third were also having eggs frozen as an “insurance policy” against infertility.

Many students would also consider the procedure to focus on a career before motherhood, a separate UK survey found.

The study of nearly 200 students showed eight in 10 doing a medical degree would freeze their eggs to delay starting a family.

Among sports and education students half said they would consider it.

Egg freezing is still a relatively new technology, which enables a woman to save eggs for future IVF treatment if needed.

The chance of success is better with younger, healthier eggs, yet most women currently choosing the procedure are in their late 30s and opting for egg freezing as a “last resort”.

The average cost of egg freezing is around an eye-watering £3,000 per attempt and some women may have to undergo up to three cycles in order to preserve a good number of eggs.  Personally (and admittedly I am not a woman) but I can think of a lot better things to spend my money on.

To my mind, banks are dull utilities.  And somehow those dull utilities have metamorphosised into utilities with a casino attached to them.  Yet at the end of the day. I really want from my bank is someone I can rely on to manage my current account.

There can be few businesses more bomb-proof than banking.  When the markets are on the up it’s a licence to print money.  When the markets are on the down – well it seems much the same.  And when the worst comes to the worst and you destroy the global economy with reckless greed and incompetence.  Well the government bails you out with someone else’s money.

As gravy trains go, banking is rich in every sense of the word!   But if anything, there is a financial career that is even more rewarding for failures.  The strange world of the independent financial adviser.

Common sense would dictate that a financial adviser who has to use other people’s money to make money is not very good.  After all, if he or she knew anything they would surely be rich making the best use of their own advice?  But in my experience, a financial adviser is just an individual who charges commission for losing you money when the markets are bad – and doing the obvious when the markets are good.

How often do you hear about independent financial advisers who make their clients money?  Or recommend a pension scheme or an insurance policy that they do not get a walloping great commission on ?   I suppose there is a first time for everything – but I think we’ll see pigs flying before the truly independent financial adviser is discovered.