It's been a grim week for our rugby. The Lions were said to be bankrupt, the Stormers were found to be bankrupt and Sarel Pretorius revealed he'd prefer to be a Wara-tah than a Chee-tah. And who can blame the Free State scrumhalf? When the Bok coach thinks Ricky Januarie is better than you are, it's time to move on.

Pretorius would have enjoyed Peter de Villiers' squirming in his Newlands seat on Saturday, watching some of his first-choice Springboks made to look second-rate by the Crusaders. The Stormers were more Buffalo Bill than Sonny Bill.

Allister Coetzee took his second-hand team to the Crash Crusaders and got nothing in return. It's now easy to understand why a section of the Cape Town crowd are so enamoured of the Crusaders (by the way, they used to be Blues supporters not too long ago). The rugby nomads from the broken city of Christchurch are a delight to watch and will form the core of the team that holds aloft "Bill", the Webb Ellis trophy, in October.

Again the Stormers were shown up as a channel-one team that knows how to defend and maul, but little else. And without the massive presence of Duane Vermeulen at No8, their defence is without its strongest link. I have also seen better scrums on Mnandi beach at New Year. Once Wyatt Crockett finished with him, Stormers tighthead Brok Harris had been turned into Crock Harris. Is the Crusaders loosehead a combination of Wyatt Earp and Davy Crockett? With a bit of Jim Bowie thrown in?

And to think that the Crusaders have two magnificent tightheads in the Franks brothers, Owen and Ben, when most teams are struggling to find just one.

The Super 15 semifinal on Saturday night again showed that rugby is no game for sissies. Certainly the IT billionaire and the arms dealer found that out last week and skedaddled out of a deal with the Lions. They were like two little boys who had tried to play with the big okes then, after the first tackle, taken their ball and gone crying to their mummies.

Only a few months ago the pair were talking about turning the laughing stock of South African rugby into Manchester United. If they'd said the Canterbury Crusaders we might have believed them.

There was so much dissembling it was hard to know whom to believe on the Ellis Park debacle. What is still not clear is why Robert Gumede and Ivor Ichikowitz decided to invest in an institution that is in as bad a financial way as they say it is. Did they not do their homework, or were they dazzled by dreams of a Manchester United in Doornfontein?

What is clear is that there is a crown jewel in all this mess. Ellis Park stadium can be sold off for a tidy sum if the Lions move to Soccer City. Who gets their hands on the lolly then? Find that out and you will begin to understand what lies beneath all of this.

Fortunately, there were distractions from the rugby. Wimbledon, for one. The men's game - as we saw yesterday in the final and even in the semis on Friday - is in good shape. Not so the women's game, however. Without the Williams sisters and Mother Clijsters, they are a very average bunch. If Maria Sharapova can't win a grand slam title against that lot, her best bet is to find a Maybelline contract.

At least there was some satisfaction for Martina Navratilova, the greatest woman tennis player of all time, seeing another Czech win at Wimbledon. Petra Kvitova, who lost in the semifinals last year, dispatched Sharapova in two sets. It was a resumption of a Czech tradition in Wimbledon women's finals: eight wins from Navratilova (six of them in succession from 1982 to 1987) and the last Czech triumph 13 years ago by Jana Novotna, just a year after she had lost there to Martina Hingis, and sobbed on the Duchess of Kent's shoulder.