Chiefs need large grin and Tomic...

THE Australian tennis player Bernard Tomic clearly has issues.

Not financial issues, so the $20,000 fine for saying Tomic (below) was “bored” during his firstround Wimbledon defeat to Mischa Zverev will not hurt.

“I felt a little bored out there, to be completely honest with you,” he said.

Maybe not the brightest thing to admit to, but, as he says, honest.

Yet, it seems tennis, along with most sporting authorities, want their performers to express themselves on the field or in the arena, but not off it or out of it.

They want automatons. Take the ludicrously draconian social media rules imposed by the FA. Remember Robert Huth being banned for two matches for playing a gender-guessing game on Twitter?

Hardly politically correct, but suspended from doing your job?

Throw over-protective PR advisers into the mix and we’re getting a sporting cast-list of dullards.

Tomic might have issues, might be a bit of a brat, but at least he is a sportsman who speaks his mind.

For that rarity, we should be grateful.

THE horse-racing community reacted with indignant outrage when the Racing Post, a newspaper dedicated to the industry, ran a front page suggesting it was time to ban the whip.

The debate has been going on for some time and has more subtleties and nuances than you would imagine.

A point often made here is that, if the racing authorities are serious about clamping down on excessive use, offenders’ mounts should be disqualified in addition to the jockey being banned.

In the meantime, we should probably listen more attentively to the pro-whip arguments from people steeped in the sport.

There is, though, one indisputable fact. The general public will never be convinced by racing’s insistence that whipping a horse is not cruel.