All the ingredients to cook up a tasty sporting storm

They say Irving Berlin kept a musical genius chained up in his attic — starving, shoeless — and whenever the composer of White Christmas needed another hit, he lowered the Stira, climbed up and told his resident hit machine to crank out another one.

Or else.

Clearly ‘they’ in that sentence stands for the army of disgruntled and jealous songwriters lurking forever in the shadows of Berlin’s talent, but a similar arrangement would have been manna to this writer on Saturday.