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So get those mental propellers whirring…In the meantime, the year’s big dates start tomorrow with the 70th anniversary of Herbert Chapman’s death. A few months ago, when I listed my contenders to be considered the greatest British club manager of all time – Matt Busby, Jock Stein, Bill Shankly, Brian Clough, Bob Paisley, Alex Ferguson and Gordon Lee, as I recall – I got a stern note from an Arsenal fan, furious not that I had omitted Ars? Wenger, but that I had overlooked Chapman.My correspondent was right to be indignant, not least because Chapman made FA Cup winners and League champions of Huddersfield Town before he even joined Arsenal. There was a record number of entries, and an impressive number of those had every answer correct. The latest rejig comes after signing and cutting two Americans and losing four other players from the roster.. It is traditional for this column, in its first outing of a new year, to look ahead to all the birthdays and anniversaries which in turn will cause us to look back. The title-holders, Sheffield Sharks, regained their two-point lead over the BBL Championship by easing to an 86-71 win over Newcastle Eagles at Ponds Forge last night, after taking control by outscoring the visitors 23-10 in the third quarter to lead 72-51.
Sheffield’s opponents in Sunday’s BBL Cup Final, Scottish Rocks, lost 74-70 at Milton Keynes Lions.

Rocks, under-strength since losing their leading American Niki Arinze to injury for the season, have borrowed Mike Martin from NW London for the final but still look seriously lightweight to take on the Sharks.Brighton Bears briefly joined Sheffield at the top of the table with their 10th successive domestic win on Saturday night by dismissing Leicester Riders 97-59 at Loughborough.Before the match, the Riders’ coach, Karl Brown, had tried to convince his players that “Brighton are good, but they are not the Los Angeles Lakers” In the end, the Bears did not need to be. “I missed the school registration deadline,” she recalled, “and if I’d gone back home my parents would have given me away in marriage.” Instead, her sister and cousin persuaded her to stay in Addis and take up running. She joined the Prisons’ Corrections Athletics Club and the rest is becoming distance running history in the making.Four years on, Dibaba has her sights on capturing an impressive global double in March: the 5,000m title at the World Indoor Championships in Budapest, followed by the senior title at the World Cross-Country Championships in Brussels later the same month.She is likely to be joined in the Belgian capital by Sileshi Sihine, her 19-year-old compatriot, who prevailed ahead of the Kenyans Eliud Kipchoge and Paul Tergat in the men’s 8.7km race on Saturday – a day of triumph in the Tyneside mud for the fleet-footed teenagers of Ethiopia.. “I hope to build a home there eventually.” It might have been different for her.

“We train together in Addis Ababa now, so I know how good she has become. She is going to be a bigger star than me.” That remains to be seen. After all, Tulu has won two Olympic 10,000m titles, one World Championship 10,000m crown and three World Cross-Country Championships.Dibaba, though, has already been bestowed stellar status in her homeland. “I am happy for her,” Tulu said, looking more of a mother than a cousin as she painstakingly dabbed every fleck of Tyneside mud from Dibaba’s baby-faced features. The first black African woman to win an Olympic title, Tulu’s success has inspired a whole continent. It has inspired her family, too.
Tirunesh Dibaba was seven when her cousin returned to the Arsi highlands of Ethiopia with Olympic gold from Barcelona.

“I wanted to become someone, too,” she recalled, “but I never thought I would be strong enough to be like Deratu.”On Saturday, in the mudbath grounds of Exhibition Park on the outskirts of Newcastle, Tulu was not strong enough to keep up with her cousin. She had to settle for fifth place in the women’s 6.3-kilometre race in the View From Great North Cross-Country as Dibaba sprinted to victory ahead of the Ethiopian-born Turk Elvan Abeylegesse in the final 200m.At the tender age of 18, Dibaba is rapidly establishing herself as a formidable force on the global distance running stage. In Paris last August she became the youngest-ever winner of a World Championship title, outsprinting an impressive field (which included the European 5,000m champion, Marta Dominguez; the world short-course cross-country champion, Edith Masai; the world 10,000m champion, Berhane Adere; the Olympic 5,000m champion, Gabriela Szabo; and the Olympic 5,000m silver medallist, Sonia O’Sullivan) to take the 5,000m crown just 36 days past her 18th birthday.On Saturday, the smooth-striding Dibaba added the scalp of her 31-year-old cousin to her list of conquests; they had raced together just once before, when Tulu finished second and Dibaba third in the 5,000m at the World Athletics Finals in Monaco last September. I treated it as I do any spam, by blocking the address and reporting him to Yahoo! mail, though I did depart from my normal treatment of spam by e-mailing him and requesting him to desist from flooding the internet. I trust this is not the beginning of a trend – is he going to change his e-mail address once a week so as to continue to spam us?TONY COMPTON Hitchin, Hertfordshire.