There’s no feud like an old feud, especially in sport

Many years ago, when I used to work for the Guardian, Germaine Greer, who was then a columnist for the paper, wrote a vicious little piece for the op-ed pages slagging off Suzanne Moore, who was also a columnist. Even in the shell-shocked state that goes with the territory of trying to handle egos like that, I realised this could be a problem, so I rang up Ms Greer to wonder whether she felt like toning it down a tad, dropping the reference to ‘fuck-me shoes’ and suchlike. She snorted with laughter: ‘Stay out of this, dear; this is a mud fight.’

Happy days, and a nice fore-runner of the current spat between Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova, who have been cheerfully knocking seven bells out of each other. Prepare to duck if you see them in the same Wimbledon bar. Their current feud rocked up to volume 11 pretty quickly, largely thanks to Sharapova’s current boyfriend, a Bulgarian tennis player called Grigor Dimitrov, who likes to rip off his shirt whenever possible, much to the delight of the ladies.