Sudha Singh took the rain-lashed inter-state athletic championship by storm on Thursday with a national record in the 3,000m steeplechase. The 27-year-old Uttar Pradesh livewire lowered her own mark with a scintillating run in 9:45.60 seconds.

K. Prem Kumar reserved his best for the last on Wednesday. The Tamil Nadu long jumper lit up an uneventful day at the inter-state championship with a leap of faith.

An established star burnishing her reputation and an unheralded athlete living his dream was the story of the first day of the national inter-state athletic championship in a nutshell. There was a meet record but new national marks failed to materialise at the Nehru Stadium here on Tuesday.

The opening party of the newly-laid track at the Nehru Stadium here has got a perfect guest in the inter-state athletic championship. With the Asian and World Championships coming up in quick succession, the inter-state meet, starting from Tuesday, is loaded with significance.

If the start was excellent, the finish was even better as Team MRF’s Esapekka Lappi nailed the opening round of the Asia-Pacific Rally Championship 2013 here on Sunday.

A new season, like the New Year, fosters hope. As the stage is set for the start of the Rally of Whangarei, the first of the seven-leg Asia Pacific Rally Championship, top drivers in the fray spoke of finishing the season on a high. The opening press conference on Friday was marked by a mixture of anxiety and optimism.

There’s an air of excitement in Europe, even though the title race is over in major leagues. The potential changes in managerial positions at a few major clubs have kept fans hooked to news sites. It’s understandable because no one defines a club better than their manager. Players may come and go but bosses remain there for some time if they are successful or lucky.

The worst nightmare for an incurable Arsenal addict would be to eulogise Manchester United. The pain of saluting your rivals’ achievement is so acute that even the joy of celebrating your team’s success later on can’t alleviate it. Anyway Arsenal fans may well have forgotten the art of celebration because the London club’s last silverware came in 2005.

German football is cool again. Not since the heady days of the early 70s have Germany’s national team and top clubs evoked so much excitement. While the Die Mannschaft are serenely and inexorably moving towards a place at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund are a step away from setting up a tantalising all-German final in the Champions League. In the 90s and even at the turn of the new millennium, neutral fans loved to hate Germany and Bayern.

Has the time come for Fifa to have a look at football’s only contentious rule? The world football body has given the green light to technology to solve the goal-line puzzle but the offside rule continues to confound fans and the hard-nosed professionals alike. The rule itself isn’t complex but its implementation and interpretation certainly are.