Jenson Button on pole for Sports Personality award but show is sure to lack X-Factor

Front runner: more celebration champagne could be on the way for Jenson Button on Sunday night
13 April 2012

What a thrilling night Sunday promises to be for the 15 million viewers expected to tune in for a celebration of all that's best and most vibrant about our national sport.

But so much for sitting on the sofa tapping out phone numbers for Olly Murs, Stacey Solomon or, more likely, Cheryl Cole's honorary Geordie kid brother Joe McElderry as the X-Factor reaches a suitably juddering climax on ITV1. Over on BBC1, those who have delighted us these past 12 months in such lesser activities as Formula One, cricket, football, boxing, gymnastics and high board diving will gather in Sheffield to pleasure that brave band of resistance fighters who refuse to yield to Simon Cowell's dominion.

I'm a yielder myself, shamefully, but even if I wasn't this has been such a paltry year that BBC Sports Personality of the Year would be relegated to delayed viewing on Sky Plus at 30 times normal speed all the same. The only smart way to endure this interminable drear is to race through the excruciating little chats Sue Barker, Gary Lineker and schoolboy debutant Jake Humphrey will insist on holding with audience members.

A feeling in my bones suggests, for example, that Geoff Hurst will be there to share some oven-fresh insights about you know what, and in the absence of total amnesia most of us could scrape by without any more of that rot.

Every now and then, there will be a need to watch the show at normal speed, whenever the witless padding (they don't even bring Frank Bruno on these days to spar with Des Lynam) gives way to genuine highlights. Most of these will revolve around Jenson Button's season in F1.

Button is the hot favourite to add Sports Personality to his Grand Prix driver's world championship. Recalling how Nigel Mansell twice won it in an era when his charisma earned him the contract to spearhead a recruitment campaign for London bus drivers, it would be hard to resent a Jenson victory; but harder still to resent the trophy going to the double diffusor that won him and his Brawn the title. Curiously, that mystical piece of technology isn't nominated.

Ryan Giggs, second favourite and the sentimental choice, most certainly is, albeit more for being 36 and still active in the Manchester United midfield than anything else. In England, as Alan Bennett said, you need only be 90 and able to eat a boiled egg to be deemed worthy of the Nobel Prize. If this love of durability does the trick for Giggsy, who could begrudge recognition for one who ridicules the notion that football stars are obliged by law to be squealing, infantile prima donnas?

Next in the betting comes Jessica Ennis, but while she seems like a nice girl, as Larry Grayson possibly never put it, rewarding a heptathlon world championship so lavishly would be scraping the bottom of the barrel even by the historic standards of this show.

As for David Haye, richly promising heavyweight though he is, a ponderous points victory against that schtick fleisch mit oigen (Yiddish for lump of meat with eyes) Nikolay Valuev doesn't merit an upset.

It would be an even greater shock were Andrew Strauss to triumph, and the odds are that our reticent Test captain must content himself with a share of the Team of the Year award. Were there any justice, however, he would replicate Andrew Flintoff's 2005 win, because Straussy's sharp, calm leadership was the crucial difference between two pretty mediocre sides, and unexpectedly regaining the Ashes the major highlight of the sporting year. But there isn't, so he won't.

Perennial contender Beth Tweddle, the gymnast, and young Tom Daley both won world titles, but while the latter deserves special credit (and perhaps the Young Sportsman prize) for edging out Didier Drogba in his diving event, minority sports people only win if (a) they are royal or (b) they have recently won Olympic gold. As for Andy Murray, he would have been a dead cert had he won Wimbledon, but Andy Roddick put that dream to bed.

And that, barring a few no-hopers and the mandatory moans from the darting world that Phil Taylor has been robbed yet again, is that.

In an ideal world, I'd vote for Cheryl Cole as Sports Personality of the Year for sticking with Ashley. Yet all the evidence suggests she'll have a slightly more lustrous victory of her own on Sunday night, in front of far more viewers than will watch Old Man Giggs totter up to the stage or, most likely, Jenson Button celebrate his journey - and what an amazing, amazing journey it's been, Dermot - from zero to hero.

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