KEVIN MCCALLUM: Please, a quiet weekend

The news at this hour... Sundowns won the Betway Premiership. Again. Formula One drivers can put the F-word back into F1. Liverpool fans booed one of their own. Romania may be about to elect a Trump fan and former football hooligan as president. A giant, Merc-driving rabbit is the new star at the San Francisco Giants. Periods may cause ACL injuries in female athletes. Chiefs won something. 

Rory McIlroy and Bryson DeChambeau are not the best of mates. Serena Williams’ husband has spent £20m on buying 8% of the Chelsea women’s football team. Virat Kohli has retired from Test cricket. The BCCI are about to restart the IPL after the war between India and Pakistan has taken a breath. Shukri Conrad has Kagiso Rabada’s back. Tim Paine, the former Australian wicketkeeper who sexted a woman who wasn’t his wife, remains a dick.

All that and it’s just gone noon on Thursday. And breathe. Friday, Saturday and Sunday, take it easy on us, man. That Sundowns were going to win was a given. One local football journalist said this week that he was getting a little tired and bored of writing about how good Sundowns were. I suspect he would like a little more competition, a lot more of league’s going down to the wire instead on being hard-wired to the team in yellow.

Max Verstappen’s effing and blinding on the team radio will return, according to The Guardian: “Formula One’s governing body the FIA has retreated from its hard stance against drivers using bad language that has caused controversy and division since it was pursued by the president, Mohammed Ben Sulayem... On Wednesday the FIA announced it was cutting in half the maximum penalties for drivers swearing.”

Great f**king news, Max. 

McIlroy didn’t curse DeChambeau during the final round of the Masters. In fact, he didn’t say a single word to him all day: “I don’t know what he was expecting. We’re trying to win the Masters. I’m not going to try to be his best mate out there. Everyone approaches the game in different ways. I was focused on myself and what I needed to do. It wasn’t anything against him. It’s just what I needed to do to try to get the best out of myself that day.”

Sounds like it was against him, Rory, but I’m with you. I wouldn’t speak to him either. 

What else? Oh, Megan Rapinoe, the two-time World Cup winning footballer, this week said: “I’ve had not one, two, but three ACL tears — all three have been on my period.” This week it was announced that the relationship between menstrual cycles and knee injuries will be investigated in a “new, year-long academic study at Kingston University in London, which has received funding from Fifa”.

It will test how the fluctuation of hormones “might be related to things like increased ligament laxity or decreases in neuromuscular control,” according to Dr Simon Augustus, senior lecturer in sport biomechanics at Kingston.

In San Francisco “a giant bunny rabbit called Alex the Great stole the show inside Oracle Park” as the Giants played the Mariners, The Times reported. “Alex is a 12kg, four-year-old Flemish giant and “is a local legend around the Bay Area. He can be found riding through his neighbourhood in a toy Mercedes which mechanical engineer Josh Row, Alex’s owner, adapted to make suitable for the rabbit.”

“Disregarding the action on the field, the director of the television broadcast could not resist repeatedly turning the camera on to Alex, who was wearing a mini baseball cap. ‘OK, I’ve seen it all,’ the commentator on the official MLB broadcast said as Alex nibbled snacks from his owner’s hand.”

The winner of the chirp of the week goes to Conrad, who was speaking on Rabada and his positive test for a “substance of abuse”: “To Tim Paine and everybody else out there, I’d probably say something simple like: ‘Let he without sin cast the first stone’. I’d leave it at that.”

Here’s hoping for a quiet weekend of sport... I need a lie down.