'Sorry, Sir, three of my grannies ate my homework!'

Those of us of a certain age will remember the traditional (and inevitably unsuccessful and therefore painful) excuse trotted out by less-than-academically-oriented fellow pupils.Teachers enquiring as to the absence of completed homework by such students (most of whom are now millionaires.They are oblivious to matters such as Latin"s "accusative and future infinitive" - I loved it and am now broke), were met with: 'Sorry, Sir, my dog ate it!'Well, with Clinton Morrison being the recipient of many column inches last Saturday prior to Coventry"s FA Cup quarter-final clash with Chelsea, I instantly honed in on the worst sporting excuses I have heard.You see, the one-time Irish international striker, "Clinto" was asked by an intrepid reporter to explain his poor performance some years ago - in fairness you could pick from a huge collection of poor displays. He came out with this classic answer (so good it is pinned up on a colleague"s desk for use as a pick-me-up giggle when feeling under pressure). 'I"d been ill and hadn"t trained for a week and I"d been out of the team for three weeks before that, so I wasn"t sharp. I got cramp before half-time as well. But I"m not one to make excuses.'Of course, he wasn"t the first "boy in green" to whinge as the undoubtedly brilliant footballer, Roy Keane moaned his way around Saipan in 2002.Sadly, all this in a manner that ensured he would he forever associated, for the wrong reasons, with the trials and tribulations of the country he was expected to captain in that summer"s World Cup. 'The training pitch is too hard'; 'the goalies are not concentrating hard enough'; 'the players are drinking pints with the journalists'; 'the gear hasn"t arrived'; 'the manager"s an English c**t' etc etc. So off heads Captain Fantastic to play with his dog, instead of the patriotic Irishmen he was there to play with. And lead! What a pity that Triggs didn"t get his master to eat his homework from the canine finishing school.I have also come up with a few internet-assisted gems from other sports.For example, Zambian tennis player, Lighton Ndefwayl (try that one without any practice, Bryan Dobson) responded to his 1992 defeat in a local tournament by compatriot Musumba Bwayla (ditto, Sharon Ní Bheoláin) with a mature assessment of his conqueror. 'Bwayla is a stupid man and a hopeless player. He has a huge nose and is cross-eyed. Girls hate him. He beat me because my jockstrap was too tight and because when he serves he emits wind and that made me lose my concentration.'How about this from an exponent of darts (which rhymes with a disguised word in the previous quotation), Mervyn King? He blamed his 2003 defeat to Raymond Barneveld in the world championship semi-final on the air conditioning. 'I asked for it to be turned off before I went up there, and it wasn"t. I asked for it to be turned off at the break, and it wasn"t. The air conditioning doesn"t affect Raymond because he throws a heavier dart and a very flat dart.' Surely a case of more hot air from the opposite end of his anatomy to Bwayla?Then there was Australian netball player, Carol Gaudie. She/he/it (to borrow Pat Kenny"s politically incorrect term when referring to former Eurovision winner, Dana International) tested positive for the male hormone testosterone in 2002, claiming her drink was spiked at a nightclub. One can only presume the spiking was done by one of those men who prowl nightclubs seeking out a woman with a hairy back, huge muscles and a deep baritone voice. At least Michelle de Bruin sings her favourite song, Whiskey in the Jar, in a nice soprano voice!Add in snooker great, Ronnie O"Sullivan, who had raced in to an 8-3 lead against Steve Davis in the first-to-ten-frames Masters final at Wembley in 1997, when a female streaker entered the arena. The "Rocket" promptly lost the next seven frames (and the match), later claiming that the shock interruption had broken his concentration. I imagine that Davis merely found the intrusion 'interesting'.Don"t blink or you"ll miss this one. José Cardenal, the Chicago Cubs baseball star is credited with two humdingers of excuses for shirking duty.He told his manager on the opening day of the 1974 season that he couldn"t play because his eyelid was stuck open. And, two seasons earlier, the red-hatted one had declared himself unfit to play because crickets in his hotel room had kept him awake all night. Howzat for an excuse?Fair play to the Finnish daily newspaper which concluded after a poor Olympic showing by the once-mighty Scandanavian athletics-mad nation: 'We dominated one event - finding excuses.' Javelin thrower Paula Huhtaniemi had won "an excuses gold" with: 'The big stadium surprised me and I could not direct the javelin right.' Yes, it"s a bad idea to practice that particular discipline in the tiny back garden of a "two-up, two-down" in Helsinki. Middle-distance runner Kirsi Valasti earned silver by blaming her performance on an unfamiliar masseuse. Sailor Sari Multala bronzed herself in the open seas and put her abject slowness down to a bag that got caught in the back of her boat. Truly a case of making a bags of it!Soccer, of course, is infested by players with homework-eating dogs.Rotherham goalie Chris Mooney once blamed a howler on the blinding glare created by his centre-half"s bald head. (Now my former team-mates know the real reason that I retired from the five-a-side in Gainstown a couple of years ago, nothing at all to do with turning 50!) Of course, the grossly overworked and underpaid, Rio Ferdinand forgot to show up for a drugs test because he had a found a rare free moment to go shopping. In 1996, Rio"s manager at the "Theatre of Excuses" (who, let"s be fair, host a fabulous team at the moment) trotted out the memorable line about their unfamiliar grey away kit being responsible for a 0-3 half-time deficit at Southampton in 1996. 'The players couldnae pick each other out,' moaned Fergie, to the amusement of the post-match interviewer and cameramen on the (grey?) grass.On the other side of Manchester lives the arch-excusemaker himself, who must have gone to the same school in Mayfield as Triggs" master. Picture Stephen Ireland as a kid arriving in class, taking down his short pants, not for the caning which would have greeted him in bygone days, but just for the amusement of his classmates. 'Please, Sir, three of my grannies ate my homework.' And a decade and a half later, what on earth does Trap"s translator make of the eventual demise of all of the shaven-headed midfielder"s grannies (or maybe there are more than three) because of "homeworkitis", from which they endured a long and painful debilitation since the early 1990s? I know when I hear these pathetic excuses, I feel like asking: 'An bhfuil cead agam dul amach go dtí an leithreas?'