Perhaps the worst row I've had in my scribbling career came when a press officer at a Premier League club accused me of racism.

We had written a story about whatever issue everybody was talking about that week and buried the launch of an anti-racism rap that had been recorded by a couple of the team's players. To give that story secondary importance was racist, the PR man claimed. I disagreed and tempers flared.

But nobody likes being called a racist. Even racists prefer to be called something else, something less nasty, less ugly. That is why I'm not going to accuse English football of racism - it would be as unreasonable as that press officer's rant.

So I'm just going to note two numbers: 23 and three. The first is the percentage of footballers in the top four divisions who are black, and the second is the number of black managers working at that level. That's three out of 92, basically 3%. Does that sound right to you? Cards on table time: it does not sound right to me.

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There are times when I think a seat on the sports administration gravy train might just be the very best place in the world: great food, first-class travel, the best seats for the big matches, fancy handbags and so on.

And then I remember they sometimes have to make tough decisions - 50/50 calls that will leave lots of people annoyed no matter which way you call it - and wonder if I really would like that responsibility.

World cycling's bosses are facing one of those lunch-spoiling dilemmas right now and the decision they appear to have made has certainly annoyed a lot of people, many of them British.

But before anybody accuses them of plotting to do us in now that we're good at something we should perhaps try to understand why preventing British cyclists from defending hard-won Olympic titles is not the open-and-shut case of incompetence/insensitivity/anti-British prejudice it might seem at first glance.

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Early next week, there will be a change to how you leave comments on this blog - we're upgrading our current registration system to a new and improved one. When you log in to the new system, you will be prompted to upgrade your existing account, and you should be able to do that with a minimum of fuss. More details on this can be found on the BBC Internet Blog.

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