The joys of time travel

Jose Mourinho is a sly one. He and his high-flying Chelsea football team were held to a draw by lowly West Ham United a few weeks ago, but he dodged much criticism by playing the media and modern sensibilities.

He deflected attention onto his opposing manager, accusing him of "19th-century football" tactics - and football "connoisseurs" nodded and murmured knowingly about dinosaurs.

The fact that the Special One had been outwitted, by a team whose combined cost was probably less than the individual price of any one Chelsea star, slipped quietly away.

The goal of sport is to win, or at least not lose, but this is sometimes forgotten in a couch-potato notion that style is superior to substance. Of course, the dream is style and substance coming together and, to Mourinho's credit, this is often the case with Chelsea of late.

A sense that we can have it all, win prettily, is bred of our relative wealth and ease. Pleasures and satisfaction come much more easily to us than they did to our forebears and science makes extraordinary things possible.

So we expect ever more; like sports teams winning in the manner of computer-generated heroes.

A clever bloke on TV this week turned the 19th-century tag on its head to good effect. He said Russian tsar Valdimir Putin was playing 19th-century politics in Ukraine while the West was tangled up in airy-fairy 21st-century morals and fond ideas about international law. Well, we all know who's winning that particular game of marbles.

In the 19th century, Greyville racecourse in Durban was a bit of a bog (a 21st-century wetland). When the first races were held there in 1852, horses and jockeys picked their way through swamp, hippos and crocs.

It was very different last week when modern jockeys staged a strike, refusing to ride on an "unsafe" track - despite officials declaring it fine - and the night meeting was expensively abandoned.

Now there's an inquiryinto "premeditated collusion" by the riders - whatever that means.

Part of the problem for jockeys at Greyville is that a Polytrack course is being installed alongside the turf course, making the place a muddy construction site.

Polytrack is a very 21st-century technology - a sand, fibre, rubber and wax mix that drains rapidly and allows racing in the wet. Jockey uppityness should soon be a thing of the past, then. Dream on.

The brand name of the all-weather track at Dubai's Meydan is Tapeta. The dramatically black galloping surface and the architecturally imposing grandstands alongside seem futuristic, even in the 21st century, and it's amusing to think of this place as a sandy desert as recently as the 20th century.

At least one person knows tomorrow's "Super Saturday" meeting at Meydan is about winning, not style. Mike de Kock, South Africa's racing ambassador, will be giving many of his top charges a strategic outing to position them for the World Cup fixture in three weeks' time.

Old-fashioned, 19th-century holding of thumbs is in order.