GOLF First day.

Channel Ten, 1.30-8.30am. Ryder Cup.

FOOTBALL Bayer Leverkusen v Hanover 96.

Setanta Sports, 4.30-6.30am. German Bundesliga.

LEAGUE St Helens v Leeds.

Fox Sports 2, 4.30-7am. English Super League semi-final.

BASEBALL Minnesota Twins v Tampa Bay Rays.

ESPN, 9am-noon. Major League.

WHAT? From the Channel Seven website: "After two hugely successful events in 2006 and 2007, the Australian Muscle Car Masters is revving up for another weekend of unforgettable muscle car racing nostalgia at Sydney's Eastern Creek Raceway." Strap yourselves in, my friends: for the next 60 minutes, some middle-aged blokes will be racing some souped-up old Commodores .

Channel Seven, 3-4pm. 2008 Australian Muscle Car Masters.

RUGBY Final. Sydney University v Randwick.

ABC1, 3-5pm. Shute Shield.

LAWN BOWLS Women's semi-finals.

ABC1, 5-6pm. Australian indoor championships.

FOOTBALL Sydney v Adelaide. Central Coast v Melbourne from 7.

Fox Sports 2, 5-9pm. A-League.

LEAGUE Eels v Dragons.

Fox Sports 1, 5.30-7.30pm. Toyota Cup semi-final.

LEAGUE Broncos v Storm.

Channel Nine, 7.30-9.45pm. Second semi-final.

AFL Hawthorn v St Kilda. Delayed coverage.

Channel Ten, 8.30-midnight. Second preliminary final.

FOOTBALL Aberdeen v Dundee United. German Bundesliga from 11.30. Bayern Munich v Werder Bremen.

Setanta Sports, 9.30pm-1.30am. Scottish Premier League.

FOOTBALL Sunderland v Middlesbrough. Liverpool v Stoke, Blackburn v Fulham or West Ham v Newcastle (viewer's choice) from midnight. Bolton v Arsenal from 2.30. On The Box was greatly reassured to read earlier this week that despite his recent injury, Cristiano Ronaldo's ability to conceive of himself as an entity separate from himself has not waned one bit over the off-season. Accepting the award for last season's European Golden Boot in his native Madeira, Ronaldo told La Gazzetta dello Sport , "With this Golden Boot I have changed football a little. Usually strikers won it and I'm a winger." He then added that he was confident of winning the upcoming Ballon d'Or and FIFA World Player of the Year prizes as well: "The best candidate for the other prizes is Cristiano Ronaldo … To be honest, I think I have been the most consistent and the best. And over time I want to enter the book of the all-time best players." To which we would simply like to respond, adapting that immortal line from Robert Smith: Cristiano Ronaldo, why can't we be you?

Fox Sports 2, 9.45pm-5am. English Premier League.

NETBALL New Zealand v Australia.

Channel Ten, 11.30pm-1am.

GOLF Second day.

Ten HD, 11pm-8.30am; Channel Ten, 1-8.30am. Ryder Cup.

AND ON RADIO … 2KY, noon-midnight. Racing.

702 ABC, noon-10pm. Grandstand . Includes Broncos v Storm from 7.45.

630 ABC NewsRadio, 6.30-10pm. Hawthorn v St Kilda. SUNDAY TENNIS

Channel Seven, 2-4am. Davis Cup.

LEAGUECatalans v Wigan.

Fox Sports 3, 3-5am. English Super League semi-final.

FOOTBALL Roma v Reggina.

ESPN, 4.30-6.30am. Serie A.

BASEBALL Chicago Cubs v St Louis. Is baseball like cricket? Not really, but that won't stop us, once again, from using a baseball listing to discuss a sport that has nothing to do with baseball, beyond its silly dress code. The news this week that Andrew Symonds has finally committed to playing cricket in Australia will bring joy to lovers of cricket all over the country. But if you, like us, are a lover of fishing first, and of cricket second, you will no doubt sympathise when we say that a beautiful opportunity has just slipped through the nation's fingers. The vision this column articulated only a few weeks ago - of a national sporting landscape in which, with Symonds's unique promotional appeal, casting a line for deep-sea perch would figure just as prominently on the list of ambitions for Australian children as full-tossing a Pom, having your legs taken out by Kevin Muscat, or offering an All Black the opportunity to ruck your earlobes out of existence - now seems to have been brutally, irredeemably cut adrift. This is the nation's loss, ultimately. But in the meantime, what have we seen? Symonds has emerged from his angler's exile to publicly apologise for stuffing everyone around over the past few weeks. And he has done it not in the manner of a guy who once crash-tackled a streaker, but with one of the most syrupy, affectedly contrite pieces of pressreleasese this column has ever read. "I'm going through the process of trying to improve and become not only a better cricketer but a better person," Symonds told the media on Tuesday. "I'm looking forward to the challenge of taking up cricket again for my club, state and country, hopefully. I'd like to apologise to those people I've let down - family members, mates, sponsors and fans. I apologise for some of the things I've done over the last little bit, and hopefully I'll come out of it a better person and not make those mistakes in the future." Bloody hell. We asked for Andrew Symonds; instead, we got Phil Drummond from Diff'rent Strokes . The day where Symonds gets sledged mid-innings, smacks the ball to the boundary, and responds to the sledge, post-boundary, by donning a maroon cardigan and uttering the words, "Willis, Arnold, I hope you learnt your lesson," can surely only be a matter of weeks away.

Fox Sports 1, 5.30-9am. Major League.

AMERICAN FOOTBALL LSU v Auburn.

ESPN, 9.45am-12.45pm. US college football.

FOOTBALL Perth v Wellington.

Fox Sports 2, 5-7pm. A-League.

MOTOR SPORT Round 12 from Italy.

Fox Sports 2, 7.45pm-1am. World superbike championship.

FOOTBALL Feyenoord v Ajax. FOOTBALL West Brom v Aston Villa. Chelsea v Manchester United from 11. All the indignant huffing and puffing that has gone on over the purchase of Manchester City by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan and the Abu Dhabi United Group will no doubt be revealed to have been a complete waste of time in a couple of years. By that time, we predict that Mark Hughes will have been sacked, the new coach will have tried, and failed, to accommodate Robinho, Fernando Torres, Karim Benzema, Leo Messi, Thierry Henry, Theo Walcott, Didier Drogba and David Villa within his preferred 4-5-1 formation, Franck Ribery will have been purchased and sent out on loan to Brighton Hove & Albion for the 2009-2010 season, Fabio Cannavaro, after months of agonising over his lack of match time, will have been persuaded to relinquish his playing ambitions and take up a goalkeeper coaching position with the women's reserve-grade side, 13 Croatian defenders will have been bought and sold within the space of two weeks in the January 2010 transfer window, the club will have been sold off at a major loss to a Slovenian smallgoods magnate, and Zinedine Zidane will still be wondering what he has to do to get a game. In the meantime, just take a moment to imagine the kind of team the new owners, with their bottomless wells of energy cash, could put together. Maradona, Cruyff, Jairzinho, Socrates, Yashin, David Zdrilic: they could get anyone they wanted. Yes, that's how much cash these people have to spend: they could even get Zdrilic. He'd come with a hefty price tag, but boy, would it be worth it.

Setanta Sports, 8.30-10.30pm. Dutch Eredivisie.

Fox Sports 1, 9pm-1.15am. English Premier League.

GAELIC FOOTBALL Tyrone v Mayo.

Setanta Sports, 10.30pm-12.30am. All Ireland Minor Football Championship final.

FOOTBALL Torino v Inter Milan.

ESPN, 11pm-1am. Italian Serie A.

TENNIS Chile v Australia. Day three. Isn't it time Australia gave up on tennis altogether? We've toiled for decades to recapture the glories of Laver, Hoad, Roche and Rosewall, and what has that given us? Lleyton Hewitt, a couple dozen Pat Cash comebacks in the early 90s, Pat Rafter in underwear, and John Newcombe's too-small blazers late on a weeknight in June. Now comes the greatest indignity of all: we find ourselves stuck in Santiago, scrapping for promotion to the Davis Cup world group, and the only people we have to rely on to protect the nation's honour and dignity are a 10-foot serving machine, a so-called "claycourt specialist" who also has the distinction of being a perennial French Open failure (surely the gold standard of specialisation on clay?), and some 15-year-old dude who's been talked up something ridiculous and duly responded to the hype in the manner of all the great lapsed prodigies of tennis lore: by not winning anything. In addition, the team includes two people by the name of "Carsten Ball" and "Sam Groth" - surely made-up names. For any Australian tennis fan, this should be cause for great concern. But even greater than the lack of decent emerging tennis talent in Australia is the lack of decent emerging tennis parents. This column has long believed in the power of parents to provide the motor for Australian sporting excellence: if you develop the right parents, you get the right players. That's why we can say, as we often have on this page, that tennis in Australia lost the plot around the time we let Damir Dokic go. Think about what Dokic brought to the table - and the force with which he would bang his fist down on the table once he'd made it there. The beard, the hatred of officialdom, the nutty, fish-related conspiracy theories (of all the world's conspiracy theorists, Dokic would have to have been the first to be able to say, "Well, actually, that does have something to do with the price of fish, now that you ask"), the regular quips about his daughter's incipient lesbianism, that magnificent pant-gut: the man was an inspiration to millions. He was Tennis Australia's Barack Obama - not quite change we could believe in, but certainly change he could believe in. There were, of course, other legendary parents that emerged around the same time - the Hewitts, for instance, were classic angry sport parents, all downturned mouths, pinched aggression, and vein-popping fist-pumps. And Mark Philippoussis's dad also seemed weird, albeit in a quiet, keep-the-sunglasses-on kind of way. Together, these and other sets of parents joined Dokic to form perhaps the most stunning array of parental talent Australian sport has ever seen. When we say that the years 1997-2003 were a golden age for Australian tennis, what we really mean is that they were a golden age for Australian tennis parents. Four grand slams, two Davis Cup wins, 1748 looks of glaring intent from the box and one unsuccessful complaint about the inflation of orange roughy prices at Flushing Meadows: this is the true tally of achievement from those years. If we want to bring back the glory, we have to bring back the middle-aged nutbags. Today, then, this column makes a special appeal: tennis parents of Australia, it's time to pull your fingers out. Your country needs you.

Channel Seven, 12.30-4.30am. Davis Cup.

AND ON RADIO … 702 ABC, noon-6pm. Grandstand . Includes Wagga Brothers v Tumut from 3. Chile v Australia. Day two.