Running riot with transfer procedure

Were Fionnuala McCormack a footballer she would stand with that clichéd cohort of players who ‘let their boots do the talking’ so it was some shock to wake up yesterday to the spiky sights and sounds of the Irish long-distance runner dropping an f-bomb and calling out the nationality rules in athletics as “a joke”.

This is the same Fionnuala McCormack who, trust us, wears the most haunted of looks at press conference and launches and whose words are so soft as to leave less of an imprint on a dictaphone than her shoes do on a track.

To say that her outburst in Amsterdam was out of character would be as understated as she normally is herself.