There has been some strange events in sport recently.

First, we had a terrible accident which resulted in the death of young Henry Surtees in an F2 race at Brands Hatch on 19th July 2009. He was minding his own business when a wheel became detached from another car, bounced across the track and contacted his helmet.

Objects hitting drivers is thankfully an extremely rare occurence, yet we had a very similar thing happen the very next week when the F1 circus pulled up at the Hungarian Grand Prix. During the qualifying session on 25th July, Massa was struck on the head by a spring which had fallen from the back of the car of Rubens Barrichello - a freak accident at the best of times but to have two such similar accidents within a week was all the more surprising.

Thankfully Felipe appears to be on the mend, but we await to see when he will be allowed back in an F1 car.

Last night’s Carling Cup games brought an unwelcome return of football hooliganism to the headlines. The game at Upton Park between West Ham and Millwall was marred by violence outside the ground before, during and after the match coupled with “fans” invading the pitch not once or twice but three times during the game.

It’s normally pretty clear that those who fight at football matches really aren’t fans at all, they simply want to have a fight, but it’s the clubs they associate themselves with which suffer. An investigation will follow last night’s altercations, and it’s possible that both clubs will suffer punishments from the FA.

As far as the pitch invasions are concerned there is obviously only so much stewards can do to stop these - ultimately if 100 or so people decide they want to get onto the playing surface then they will no matter how many people try and stop them. I just don’t understand why they would want to get onto the pitch in the first place!

In this day and age it shouldn’t be too much trouble to find decent images of the people who did get onto the pitch, and let’s hope decent punishments are handed out to deter this from becoming a more regular occurence.

By far the most bizarre sports story in recent weeks concerns the game of rugby - I couldn’t believe half the stuff I was reading about this story!

The incident happend during a Heineken Cup quarter final between Harlequins and Leinster. Harlequins were trailing coming up to the end of the game, a period when it’s often possible to clinch a win with a drop goal. Their recognised goal kicker had come off injured earlier in the game and his replacement was also showing signs of not being able to finish the game.

The only way the first choice kicker could come back on was for one of the other players to suffer a blood injury requiring them to come off for treatment. So it was that this very thing happened, when Tom Williams appeared to take a knock and left the pitch with blood streaming from his mouth - despite this enforced substitution, Harlequins didn’t manage to get a drop goal and lost the game 6-5.

But the story didn’t end there - allegations of cheating and feigning injury started flying about and it turned out that the Harlequins coach had instigated the whole thing with the physio passing Williams a fake blood capsule to bite on when in fact there was nothing wrong with him just so they could make the substitution. When in the dressing room they realised that the other team may ask to inspect Williams’ mouth and so the doctor deliberately cut him with a scalpel so he would be able to show off a wound.

Harlquins coach, Dean Richards, has been banned from coaching for 3 years and the player has been banned for 3 months. I dare say the player and indeed the physio felt under some pressure to do what was asked of them and that given their time over they would do things differently. No doubt one thing led to another and they wouldn’t be thinking straight in the heat of the moment.

But what about Richards? Was this simply a sign that he was so determined to win that he would do literally anything to help his team? We’ve seen in other sports that this seems to be the mentality of a lot of the top guys, but to me it stinks.

I couldn’t believe that someone would have the foresight to plan for this eventuality - the blood capsules had been bought in advance so it wasn’t a spur of the moment decision.

The big question really though is what else has he done in order to try and win in the past which he has gotten away with?