It was the ultimate Champagne moment – as a stray cork from a bottle of fizz interrupted play during the men’s singles final at Wimbledon . The stopper, from a bottle of bubbly, landed on court during the game in which world No1 Jannik Sinner beat Carlos Alcaraz to lift the trophy . But it’s not the first time that a sporting spectacle has been halted for a bizarre reason, as JAMES MOORE reveals… Bug bother : On Friday a swarm of ladybirds invaded the Lord’s cricket ground in London, briefly pausing play between England and India in the test match. It was bees that hovered over the ground in Kandy, Sri Lanka, in 2007 as the home side played England in another cricket match. The players and the umpires had to drop to the ground and lie flat until the insects had buzzed off. Just car-azy : In 2017 a motorist ended up in the middle of a cricket pitch in New Delhi, India, interrupting the game between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. The driver of the car claimed to have been lost. What the elk? A stampede of elk brought a halt to the action in a golf match, as the animals crossed the course in Colorado in 2011 . Back in 1998, at the Players’ Championship, a seagull stole the show when it picked up a ball hit by American Brad Fabel and dropped it into a lake. He was eventually allowed to replace it with another ball. Flapping heck : A pigeon stopped play at the World Snooker Championship in 2022 during a match between players Mark Selby and Yan Bingtao. The cocky bird landed on the table and had to be chased out. In 2016 a giant moth landed on the table during a game between Judd Trump and Kyren Wilson at the Scottish Open before fluttering off. Just quackers : There have been plenty of tales of dogs and cats invading football pitches. But some more unlikely critters have also caused stoppages on the turf. In 2010, footballer Mahamadou Habib Habibou had to hustle a duck off the ground during a Belgian league game. He was luckier than player Loris Benito, who was bitten while trying to remove a pine marten from the pitch during a clash between Swiss sides FC Thun and Zurich in 2013. Pint of order : Last December a World Championship darts match between Nathan Aspinall and Andrew Gilding came to a halt as the crowd were cheering on a man in the crowds, dressed as a hot dog, downing a huge jug of beer. The pair watched before carrying on their game. Chute, not shoot : In 2013 a football match in Salisbury, Wiltshire, between Salisbury City and Chester was disrupted when a parachutist suddenly landed on the pitch. The skydiver had made an emergency landing in low cloud. The match continued after he was escorted from the ground. Alien invasion ! On October 27, 1954, a football match between Fiorentina and Pistoiese in Florence was briefly suspended when the referee spotted what many think was a UFO . The 10,000-strong crowd and players gazed up to see a strange cigar-shaped object moving across the sky.