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Ricky Ponting - Liz Hurley. Finding her in the sack's probably the best chance he's got of getting close enough to Warnie to beg that bloke to make a comeback.

Sonny Bill Williams - A nice safe hobby to play away from rugby that doesn't involve either speeding down mountainsides on slabs of sharpened fibre glass or asking another man of equivalent bulk to don gloves and punch his living daylights out.

West Ham United - Just your stock standard, garden-variety-type total miracle needed please, St Nick.

Tiger Woods - Whatever it was when he was the man who had everything.

LeBron James - Someone to go round and remind all the other teams they're only there to make up the numbers, remember?

Black Caps - A team they can beat. (Santa politely declined this request intimating that, no, not even his special skills would be of help in this particular area.)


Graham Henry - A brilliant scientist to invent a machine that only clones Test match players who wear jerseys numbered "10" and "7".

Sepp Blatter - Something, anything, that could only ever be described as "a gay old time".

All us couch potato tv viewers - Many more ads like the "We Will Be Match Fit" cameraman commercial. Utterly brilliant, perfectly pitched.

Pakistan cricket - A conscience. Or failing that a village idiot somewhere who might actually believe that the pile of cash (29,000 pounds) found in capt Salman Butt's hotel room during the recent spot-fixing allegations really was, as he says, "given to me for the opening of a London ice cream parlour".

Halberg Judging Panel - Eye Lasik surgery so they can clearly see that just because rowing holds its "World Championships" every 12 months, that doesn't mean those titles are necessarily worth more than the All Whites fantastic unbeaten efforts at this year's FIFA world cup.

Wayne Barnes - A new career doing anything at all as long as it doesn't involve controlling Rugby World Cup quarter finals.

Australian cricket - A spinner. But not in the way that errant paceman Mitchell Johnson is.

Tour de France - A race winner with better luck than this year's bloke who, by sheer act of incredible coincidence, just happened to dine at the only restaurant on earth that serves steroid-laden tainted-meat as its regular main course. Or failing that, the same village idiot Pakistani cricket have asked Santa to find...

Roger Federer - Rafael Nadal's entry form for the Australian Open to get unfortunately lost in the post somewhere between here and the North Pole.

The America's Cup - A regatta where a whole lot of normal looking yachts with things like sails and rigging race eachother to win an age-old trophy without either a law firm or bored billionaire with nothing better to do anywhere in sight. (Note from Santa: "Please refer to Black Caps request as above".)

Stadium Southland - A new roof designed strong enough to withstand a heavy snowfall just in case something similar was ever to happen again in Invercargill. Although, being only a brisk southerly north of the Antarctic, why would it?

Shane Warne - Nothing. Not a single thing. By the look on his face I think he already knows that, yes, Santa is real (only he changed his name to "Liz") and that if you ask nicely then, truly, "all your Christmases really can come at once".