I’ve found my new golfing hero. Ever since Nick Faldo started to treat competitions as a hobby I’ve been looking for someone else to support, but they were all a bit lacking in personality – which I think is a problem in most sports these days.

I was at The Grove in Watford on Saturday for the third day of the AMEX World Golf Championships, which Tiger Woods won by some distance. And as enjoyable as it was to see him eagle the 18th hole, spot Bruce Forsyth charming the PR girls, and chat with Michael Buerk and his wife about the club’s olive trees, it was following Australian Stuart Appleby (below) around the back nine that made the day.

The highlight was on a dog-leg par four, when he ignored the dog-leg and smacked it straight into a tiny bunker. “What a shitty little bunker,” he said to his caddy as he strolled down to see the lie of his ball.

He’s a proper old-school Aussie, the son of a dairy farmer, and grew up hitting golf balls from pasture to pasture. Now aged 35, he’s number 24 in the Official World Golf Rankings, and as he looked at his ball sitting sadly in the sand, he gave his verdict: “It’s fucked.” If we hooked golfers up to microphones maybe the sport’s personalities would be a bit better received.

But my favourite sporting profanity was witnessed by a lad from my school, ‘Stoker’ – someone who once skived off school to watch a Guns N’ Roses concert and gleefully, but stupidly, told the headmaster about it the next day – meeting England hero Jack Charlton in a paper shop. Excited at seeing the former manager of Newcastle United, Stoker asked him for an autograph. A stone-faced Charlton, paper under one arm, fishing magazine under the other, looked down at the boy in his school uniform and without hesitation told him, “Son, fuck off.”

So Tuesday night was the night “football was going to be blown wide open”. Did anyone else feel it was just a wheezy puff rather than a hurricane?

If you’d believed all the hype – the black outlines of shady managers on the front page of the tabloids, the hyperbole-strewn trailers running incessantly on Radio Five Live and the Beeb – the Panorama documentary Undercover: Football’s Dirty Secrets, which delved into alleged corruption in the Premiership, would have José Mourinho and Arsène Wenger performing a mano-a-mano pole-dance routine while cackling agents tucked fifties into their Speedos.

But, what did we get? A couple of badly dressed agents filmed by a secret camera in a variety of terrible-looking hotel restaurants in which they revealed that “some” managers – we were never sure who as the names and clubs were repeatedly bleeped out – liked a bit of a backhander. And this from the high-flying men who handled world-famous footballers like, wait for it, Khalilou Fadiga (heard of him? Me neither) and Bolton’s reserve keeper Ali al-Habsi.

Then there were the fleeting glimpses of Bolton boss Sam Allardyce (above) doing the highly illegal manoeuvre of taking part in a post-match meet-and-greet with a fake agent called Knut (surely an anagram). And a jovial Harry Redknapp being offered and accepting the idea of a free holiday. Well, who wouldn’t? If some bloke came up to me and offered me a private jet and a five-star hotel to watch a few World Cup games, I’d bite his arm off.

OK, admittedly Allardyce’s son, Craig, seemed a bit slippery and Chelsea’s Frank Arnesen probably shouldn’t have offered £150,000 for a teenage prodigy at Middlesbrough. But surely in the high-pressured, dog-eat-dog world of professional football, if an agent comes to you saying that their client wants to move clubs and asks if you’re interested, wouldn’t you more than likely say “yes”?

I found the whole thing very underwhelming and couldn’t help but think what a waste of the BBC’s resources (which ultimately means our money) this year-long sting was. However, if you have any idea who the bleeped out names and clubs were, then we’re dying to know – we’ve spent the last two days attempting to find out from all our tabloid moles. So far, our money’s on beeeeeeeeeeeep…

I was going to use this blog to prick the Zara Phillips hyperbole by asking, “How many people at your school had a horse?” But I tried it in the office and it appears there are many more horse owners than I thought, so she did have some competition.

At my school only one person had a horse and her dad was a vet. Famously – among about half a dozen of us – he used to shoot the fallers at Newcastle Racecourse if they failed to get up. Imagine that happening in football. Instead of rushing on with a magic sponge, the physio brings a .44 Magnum, points it at Cristiano Ronaldo’s greasy temple, and asks, “Aaah. What’s the matter? Have you hurt your wittle leg?”

Miserably, things don’t work that way. But returning to the horse issue, it seems every family has a horse trotting around their back garden these days, which means Zara isn’t the equivalent of a spoiled kid who beats everyone at conkers because their dad coated a marble in brown paint. So with that subject spiked, I’ve gone for the polar opposite of her highness, in both social and sporting terms, which is Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor, the greatest darts player there ever was.

I took him on in a game of arrows at a pub in London’s ‘trendy’ Soho last night, during the launch of the Nintendo’s 42 All-Time Classics game for its DS hand-held. As I’m sure you appreciate, it was a night of true and just journalism at which I didn’t get heavily juiced for free and didn’t look at the PR girl’s fantastic bottom.

On the oche I took on the world champion in a game of highest score, for which I had nine darts and he had only six. But he still beat me, obviously. Well, I say obviously, but it doesn’t seem that way to everyone. To me, playing Phil Taylor at darts and giving him a three-dart handicap is the equivalent of fighting Ricky Hatton and telling him he can only use his right arm. But one of the PR women was genuinely surprised at the night’s results and exclaimed, “Wow, he’s beating everyone!”

So I guess we’re all just different. Some people think we all have horses, some people don’t. And some people clearly think you can down half a dozen pints of Staropramen and still go on to beat this country’s most successful sportsman.

I’m beginning to swing away from Pakistan’s point of view on the ball-tampering fiasco that kicked off during the Test match last weekend.

At first I thought it was fair enough to object so strongly to an accusation of cheating, but now I’m starting to think the Pakistanis are being a bit overdramatic. Their captain Inzamam-ul-Haq (below) has said the ball was perfectly normal for one that’s been used for 56 overs and “visited the boundary a few times”.

But umpire Darrell Hair is very experienced and you’d imagine he could tell the difference between hitting the advertising boards a few times and having fingernails plunged into it. I’d say he was very brave to make the decision despite knowing he’d be heavily criticised for it.

He’s also done exactly the correct thing according to the rules. Pakistan should have taken the punishment of a change of ball and five penalty runs and made their objection afterwards, rather than petulantly spoiling two days of cricket for millions of fans.

And professional contrarian Imran Khan’s call for Pakistan to sue for defamation is ludicrous. Imagine if a referee wrongly sent a player off in football and could then be sued. There’d never be another decision made.

He’s claiming he’s 21, but in my opinion, if he’s 21 then I’m a Chinese waiter called Won Hung Lo.

Martins is a striker playing for Inter Milan, who could soon be on his way to Newcastle United if the issue of age is sorted out. But Inter Milan and the player himself are claiming he was born in 1984, whereas Newcastle have been told by a source in Martins’ country of origin, Nigeria, that he’s 27.

He had the same problems last year when an Italian journalist published a story about a discrepancy he found on the Nigerian FA’s website, which had Martins listed as six years older than he claimed. But when he confronted them they changed the age and said it was an “administrative lapse”.

It all sounds a bit suspect, but Newcastle are so desperate for a striker maybe they should just get on with it, whether or not he looks old enough to be Michael Owen’s dad.