SOMETIMES don't Londoners get on your muddy curves (that's mock-Cockney for bloody nerves).

The London bid for the 2012 Olympic Games was submitted in all its capital glory yesterday to the International Olympic Committee along with tenders from host-city rivals Paris, Madrid, New York and Moscow.

But as the 600-page London submission thumped on to the varnished IOC desk at its Lausanne headquarters in Switzerland, there came the revelation that a percentage of Scottish sports fans in favour of the London 2012 bid was higher than those inhabitants of the England capital.

Bookmakers presently have London installed as 2-1 second favourites. But the results of such a survey will hardly strengthen the chances of overhauling the price of odds-on favourite Paris, who are listed at 4-7 to host the Games in eight years' time.

So what's up with the residents of England's premier city? Surely they should be snapping at the leash like Walthamstow greyhounds to clinch the return of the Olympic five-ringed circus to England for the first time since 1948.

After all, this is the world's greatest sporting occasion offering an unrivalled chance to put the city, indeed the nation, into the global spotlight for all the right reasons and not just for the scourge of political spin.

Yes, staging the Olympic Games will be expensive. Yes, the logistics of accommodating and transporting the world's best athletes for nigh on a month will mean disruption on a massive scale. Yes, the hosting of the Games will increase the fears of terrorism that now stalk every major western city.

But let's not forget how London is already graced by sporting venues which are the envy of the world and which could be readily integrated into the 2012 bid.

Wimbledon, Lord's and Wembley - it should be finished by then, surely as will be Arsenal's new Ashburton Grove stadium - would provide historic and modern backdrops. Then there are the open spaces in the capital such as Hyde Park, Regent's Park and Greenwich Park, and of course that certain little river by the name of the Thames. Athletics fans are already aware of how dripping in heritage is the route of the London Marathon.

That's all besides an 80,000-seater stadium for athletics and the planned transformation of 1,500 acres of east London's Lower Lea Valley an Olympic Park which would include the aquatic centre, the velodrome, three sports halls, the hockey centre, media facilities and the Olympic Village, housing 17,800 athletes and officials.

Between now and the final decision next July, IOC officials will visit the would-be candidates to further inspect the bid and the gauge public reaction to it. London's bid will sink if those officials are greeted by a shrug and a 'ahm not vat bovvered, mate' response.

Come on London. Embrace, don't disgrace 2012. A world event of this magnitude has been sadly absent from these shores since football's World Cup of 1966 and remember how brilliant that was.

SOMETIMES, my own profession really grates on my nerves as it did last weekend.

Both in the newspapers and even more flagrantly on the BBC the Great Britain rugby league team's blood-stirring conquest of world champions Australia was given scandalously short shrift.

In one national Sunday newspaper there was not even a mention of Britain's barnstorming passage into the Tri-Nations Tournament final as a reward for finally garrotting their Aussie jinx at the JJB Stadium.

And on television bulletins, viewers were first treated to how England rugby union had caned Canada which was about as exciting a tussle as Chelsea taking on Chertsey in football. Even Scotland's 100-8 jumping all over Japan - akin to Lennox Lewis fighting Norman Wisdom - got preference over the rugby league routing of the Kangaroos.

Who says public schools still do not influence the great British media?

Updated: 08:48 Tuesday, November 16, 2004