One of the more absurd things I've heard Sepp Blatter say is that football doesn't have a drugs problem.

It was a while ago that he offered that observation, at the time when Fifa and World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) were wrestling over compliance with the world anti-doping code, and how they would manage disciplinary measures. I was never convinced that football had actually embraced the code fully, but Wada seemed satisfied in the end.

Blatter's remarks seemed to be entirely based, at the time, on a lack of positive drug tests at successive major tournaments. (Before, incidentally, the recent Women's World Cup where five members of the North Korean team failed tests for performance enhancing drugs, resulting in the team's ban from the next competition in Canada in 2015.)

It's an absurd remark because football and footballers are no different from any other sport, in that where there's financial reward for success, there's doping. To deny that because no-one's been caught is meaningless. We all know sprinter Marion Jones never failed a drugs test, but by her own admission, was a cheat.

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The Premier league season might be due to start this coming weekend, but for some media organisations things have already kicked off in a fairly major way.

You may have noticed when you picked up the papers over the last few days that pictures and copy from football league matches has been a bit thin on the ground. Your eyes do not deceive you: It's because of a dispute over the terms and conditions for coverage of live matches that newspapers, websites and wire agencies have been asked to sign up to.

The previous agreement, set up six years ago, has now expired, and rather a lot has changed since then in terms of platforms, available content and customer expectations: In 2005, 'Twitter' was what birds did outside your bedroom window of a morning.

The media world has marched on and, so says everyone involved, must this new agreement.

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The sight and sound of the Indian women's 4X400m relay team being roared home to win gold was one of the highlights of the Commonwealth games in Delhi last year.

The nation had been yearning for track and field success, and here was a team of bright talents, role models for women in India, beating the best of the rest of the Commonwealth.

That landmark success has been tarnished with the news that three of the four members of the team have failed drug tests over the last few days. Ashwini Akkunji, Mandeep Kaur and Sini Jose have all tested positive for anabolic steroids, and are suspended pending further investigation.

Apart from the Commonwealth gold medal, what all three have in common is a Ukrainian coach named Yuri Ogrodnik. Well, they had him in common, but he's now been sacked, according to the Indian sports minister, Ajay Maken.

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