Welcome to this week's Picks. "You always take the weather with you", sang Crowded House, the now former (alas) Antipodean kings of rock. And this week, in particular, the Australian cricket team appear to have bought it with them like some unwelcome twelfth man, trailing clouds instead of cricket whites.

Bookies stopped taking bets on the result of the Lords Test Match last Friday, gambling, at no great risk, on a washed-out draw. Which leaves the official Ashes website a few balls short of a maiden over, as far as their whizzbang real-time score applet is concerned.

No matter. This website is more than the sum of its applets. Cricket is a game of statistics as much as it is about the leathery thwack of willow on ovoid, and this site is packed full of arcane material, including the scorecards for every player in every post-war Ashes series. If you register, you'll also receive regular e-mail updates, exclusive reports by journalists from The Guardian and free entry into a cricket prediction competition.

Since it is the last week of June and it is raining, it must also be time for the Wimbledon Tennis Championships. With due deference to the weather, the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club (incidentally -- croquet? Who plays croquet these days?) employs 125 people whose only job is to run across various show-courts, clutching pieces of canvas at the merest hint of a deluge. According to folk tales, advance warning of these precipitations is given when an ageing rock-star-tennis-fan like Cliff Richard begins singing a capella on Centre Court.

That is one of the strange but interestingly untrue facts not to be found on The Official Site of the Championships, another site which offers blow by blow coverage of the matches, statistics and a wealth of historical detail.

Now, as we have been talking about cricket and tennis it seems only fair to mention Britain's third great summer sport -- Football Punditry. This is played as a precursor to the forthcoming soccer season (starting on August 9th this year) and involves large numbers of the (frankly) underinformed, blathering on at length about the merits of a 4-4-2 zonal system, as opposed to the 5-3-2 Christmas tree formation. Various tools are available to help players improve their knowledge, including the estimable TeamTalk, which offers gossip and news for every UK league team in England and Scotland.

Football Punditry games are long, often have no clear result (unless they descend into a fist-fight where the victor is obviously the last one standing) and take place over a pint of warm beer. Which seems an apposite point to mention Beer Necessities, Scotland's first U-brew centre. This, it transpires, is a club where, for about £60, you can brew 80 pints of your own beer. Or, rather, they do the brewing on your behalf and you sit back and do the drinking. This seems a fair enough deal to us.

We seem to remember Eddie Grundy trying something similar with cider on The Archers (the world's longest running radio soap) a year or two ago. That, we have found, is the spooky thing about The Archers -- it has a habit of mirroring real life ... before it happens! Addicts of the show should bookmark Archers Addicts, the online arm of the fanclub run by the BBC.

A recent study into Radio 4 revealed that its listenership consisted mainly of people who tuned in to hear either the news or The Archers, and that 90 per cent of the rest of its output was being broadcast to one old man and a pack of homing pigeons in Rotherham.

News services on the Internet are unlikely to suffer such a fate. Not only can they appeal to a global audience, but we are reliably informed that the old man and the pack of pigeons only use their computer to play Doom. Of the current crop of free online news services, Microsoft UK's MSN News can lay claim to be among the best. With its mix of own-sourced news -- particularly Nick Assinder on politics -- features and sports, it offers a comprehensive and reliable read.

Well, we're off to buy a brolly so we can splash about in the street, humming quietly to ourselves that old Ann Peebles hit: "I can't ... I can't ... I just can't stand the rain ...''

Sites featured in Picks of the Week

• The Official Ashes Guide. - watch England virtually pulverise the Aussies (we hope!).
  
• The Wimbledon Tennis Championships - will there still be a Brit competing by the second week? Lets hope so!
  
• TeamTalk - feed that footie addiction during the close season.
  
• Beer Necessities - homebrew the easy way. Someone else does it!
  
• Archers Addicts - yes, we know it's sad. But we do it anyway.
  
• MSN News - Microsoft's bid for global domination manifests itself on the UK news scene.
  

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