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Whereabouts (noun): The place or general location where a person or thing is.

It's an old-fashioned word and it has connotations of time happily wasted looking for something or someone.

So, for example, 's most likely whereabouts for 11 months of the year will be somewhere in the triangle between , Manchester United's training ground and his mansion in the .

For the remaining four weeks of the year Rooney's most likely whereabouts will be in the triangle between Prestbury, the Barbados resort of and Dubai's .

That's a big triangle. Time an anti-doping expert spends looking for Rooney during those four weeks might be happily wasted for somebody but it won't be the footballer.

Like it or not, the drug-testers ("vampires" as they're known to cyclists) are coming for Britain's footballers and it would be in everybody's best interests if we can work out a way to make this as painless as possible.

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British athletes didn't have to wait long for new head honcho Charles van Commenee to brandish the big stick, although they would also have noticed a fair amount of carrot in .

The 50-year-old Dutchman arrived with a reputation for hard work and honesty: by reducing the number of athletes in the elite programme he has demonstrated the latter, the former will no doubt start very, very soon.

The headlines were eye-catching: a 20% cut in headcount (a fitting reduction after winning four of five medals targeted in Beijing), only limited support for the under-achieving relay teams and the thinly-veiled threat of there being "no room for sentiment" in the future.

Gone were veterans like Donna Fraser and Joyce Maduaka, out too were injury-plagued talents such as Sam Ellis, Becky Lyne and Rhys Williams.

So with just one press release, it seemed the new man had swept away the bloated vestiges of the , struck the perfect note for these cash-strapped times and set back on course towards PBs and parades in 2012.

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