Sport

The gospel according to Zlatan: He who is second might as well be last...

AND the Dodgy Tackle Sports Personality of the Year for 2014 is Lewis Ham... Only joking. The Formula One world champion finished somewhere around 1000th position, well down on every inter-county hurler and three spots his car.

But don't be thinking O. Rory McIlroy won it either (the O stands for "Our", obviously). This latest snub is unlikely to inspire the sort of indignance that flooded the Norn Iron media after McIlroy finished second to Hamilton and his motor in the affections of BBC viewers.

Hopefully the Dodgy Tackle award's credibility isn't ripped to pieces by people who were clearly sleeping when Zara Phillips and Ryan Giggs won the Beeb gong, but DT panders to no-one.

McIlroy was actually nailed on to pick up the award until just this week, when Zlatan Ibrahimovic (right) swept in like only he can and grabbed it from under the nose of Holywood's finest.

At first glance, honouring the Paris St Germain superstar - and what an honour it is - like this reeks of pandering on a massive scale. Giant pandering, if you will.

And maybe it is. The last thing Dodgy Tackle wants is to get on the wrong side of Zlatan, and it seems there's no easier way to do that than put anyone above the big man on a list of anything. Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyhether found out the hard way that Mr Ibrahimovic is a list all by himself. When asked how he felt finishing second on the paper's list of the 150th greatest Swedish sportspeople ever, he just wasn't having it. "Thank you but to finish second is like finishing last," said Zlatan, in an effortless diss of Ronnie Hellstrom, who kept goal for Sweden through the 1970s, played in three World Cups and finished last in the 150-strong list. Only 11-time Grand Slam winning tennis legend Bjorn Borg was higher than Ibrahimovic, whose own opinion of what a list of Swedish sporting greats should look like was spectacular.

"On that list I would have been number one, two, three, four and five, with due respect to the others," he said, without a hint of irony.

None of this polite smiling while clearly seething.

Take a lesson from Zlatan, Rory. Be a bad loser, a really bad loser.

If nothing else it means you'll be able to write a snottery column about whoever wins SPOTY in 2015.