It’s such a highly charged, emotional sport, bursting with testosterone – the ultimate gladiatorial battle, if you will – that fans are bound to get over-excited. At a tennis match. That’s right. Not at a Midlands derby between The Baggies and Wolves. Or the Superbowl (between the Los Francisco Ice Picks and the Kentucky Mash, or whatever the teams are called these days).

No, trouble’s now likely to flare at a tennis match. And it did yesterday at a second-round match at the Aussie TENNIS Open.

Tennis. The most genteel of sports marred by crowd trouble. We’re not going to go into what happened to cause the police to pepper-spray a load of fans. Suffice to say, the even-handed, liberal progressives in the Victoria Police Department are unlikely to steam in unless severely provoked. In fact, the top cop on duty said he wasn’t willing to allow his officers to be used as ‘punch bags’. So he ordered them to gas the fans. Sounds fair.

A sad day for tennis all round. That the fans began rioting after rumours circulated Sir Cliff was about to entertain the crowd proved unfounded.

(Image: from Thiru Murugan’s flickr stream)