Dream Team The Nightmare Nightmare

With most of the swimmers clearly doped to the eyeballs (their necks are wider than my thighs, for Christ s sake), and the athletics remaining in abeyance until just after my deadline for this piece, so far the Sydney Olympiad hasn t exactly given Euro 2000 a run for its money in the Most Gripping Televised Sporting Event Of The Year Award.

In the absence of anything more interesting, the BBC and RTE have been valiantly filling up their huge stretches of airtime with all sorts of shite, like archery, or that cycling event where they zip around a track seemingly the size of my driveway at insane speeds.
Half an hour can be pleasantly whiled away by viewing the women s beach volleyball, as long as it s Brazil v Italy rather than, say, Germany v Belgium. But, as a wiser man than me once remarked, It s magnificent, but it isn t sport. Or something.
Looked at from another angle, though, it can be argued that the networks are actually doing us a favour, because each minute spent covering the Australian swimmers, Venezuelan beach-volleyballers and Equatorial Guinean drowners is a minute that could have otherwise been taken up with coverage of the many-headed monster that is the USA basketball team, and we wouldn t want that.
I m willing to guess that many of you watching the Olympics aren t even aware that the Dream Team (sic), or at least their franchise, are back for another bout of unpalatable jingoism, weighted contests of nauseating lop-sidedness, and needless sneering at far weaker opponents. Oh, and some basketball.
Despite being so superior to everybody else at the Olympics that not even David O Leary could play down their chances before a match, the unnecessary denigration of one s opposite number has become something of a leitmotif for the Dream Team.
The Yank basketballers call it trash-talking , whereas Australian people call it sledging . In the right hands, this practice can be perfected to something approaching high art.
Conversely, Foul Play recently met a Bray Wanderers FC midfielder who claimed to have marked Celtic s Israeli midfielder Eyal Berkovic during a pre-season friendly, and treated him to some doubtless terrifically witty jibes about the Carlisle Grounds shower facilities and the Nazis methods of disposing of Jews at Belsen.
Couldn t happen to a nicer guy but I digress. The usual purpose of this nonsense is to put a superior opponent off his stroke, and rattle him so badly that he fails to reproduce his usual brilliance. But such is the innate classiness of the Dream Team that they engage in it even when dunking their 150th point against Angola, as they did in Barcelona in 1992.
Defensive guard Gary Payton has inherited the mantle of chief trash-talker from that other great wit of our time, Charles Barkley, who was his predecessor on the team. Payton is the man who recently sneered at an opponent that had just been out-foxed by his team-mate Kevin Garnett, I guess you haven t been watching TV for the past two years. Dickhead.
If the whole Dream Team nonsense has any discernible point, it is as a showcase for the finest basketball stars on planet earth, but that isn t even the case here. All the best players Kobe Bryant, Karl Malone, Shaq O Neal, the obnoxious Allen Iverson and many more have opted to stay at home. So it s the worst of both worlds: a mediocre team by NBA standards, but with all the arrogant, millionaires-row charmlessness of their predecessors.
All the more pleasing, then, that they should almost fall spectacularly on their arses about a week ago, against Lithuania in Sydney. To their utter mortification, they only beat the Baltickers by 85 points to 76.
Lithuania, it should be pointed out, are much better at basketball than they are at football (though it says much about the game that most of its heavy hitters outside America come from countries that didn t exist a decade ago; Croatia are also in contention for the silver medal at these Games).
But even without their two best players, who were injured, they still kept the Yanks under pressure till the final minute, chiefly due to their use of the zonal defence, a long-obsolete system which cancelled out much of the USA s firepower.
At the time of going to press, normal service was scheduled to resume with a showdown with New Zealand, a fixture that promised to be even more one-sided than its rugby union equivalent, if that were possible.
Instantly, the mind s eye summons up a tantalising vision of the Dream Team s conceited young whelps being locked in a small, stiflingly hot room with some of the less appealing characters from the ranks of the All Blacks, such as messrs Maxwell, Kronfeld, Cribb and Meeuws. But that would be bad-minded.
Some uncharitable observers have proffered a few suggestions in order to make these matches slightly more watchable than the average bass-fishing tournament, like making the USA line out with only four players against their opponents, or with three players plus Dennis Rodman, or with two of the defensive guards playing blindfolded.
Personally, Foul Play wouldn t mind seeing a few guards in watchtowers training their guns on the Yanks every time they concede a point to mighty Lithuania, but then I m funny like that.