This is my debut column this season on account of the Olympics, which seemed to be a success, everyone seems chipper about the achievements of cyclists, yachtsmen and what not - and why not? If it makes people jolly then get on with it, I say. A teacher once said to me "a lot of you boys like to take cocaine because it makes you feel jolly" - it was simultaneously the most modern and old-fashioned thing I'd ever heard anyone say, its Blyton-esque vernacular coupled with a tacit endorsement of drug use was as barmily jarring as a krunk-fuelled orgy held at the tea rooms of the Café Royale.
I mistrust the Olympics, believing it to be the Blue Peter of world sport, a medicinal spectacular, a big pyrotechnic barn dance for squares. That said I regard with awe anyone who can master any physical pursuit; just yesterday I journeyed for seven minutes on a "cross-trainer" before someone kindly pointed out that I was ambulating backwards - literally going nowhere fast. Actually it wasn't even that fast. And it asks your weight and age before it lets you have a go. Naturally I lied to it, the cross-trainer currently believes I am a 22-year-old ice-skater trying to lose a few pounds off her sweet tush - it's gonna kill me when it finds out the terrible truth.
Football, a sport at which I am also rubbish, I can at least enjoy watching without the suspicion that it's trying to teach me something about "community" or "trying". In a way it is an utterly amoral game, except for when an opposing team returns possession after the ball has been kicked out for an injured player to receive treatment or when Paolo Di Canio eschewed a scoring opportunity rather than put the ball past felled Everton keeper Paul Gerrard.
Or when in the 70s at Anfield a mounted policeman tumbled from his steed and a fellow officer helped him on to his own saddle causing the Kop to reprise Rolf Harris' hit "Two Little Boys" - "Did you think I'd leave you lying when there's room on my horse for two..."
Aside from these isolated phenomena the game is entirely governed by sponsorship, agents and roasting - of course it is. How could our national game not reflect our national character? They say societies get the government they deserve and perhaps we get the sport we deserve too; and as a West Ham fan that is a troubling idea. The club seems to be in some turmoil and it appears there is division between manager Alan Curbishley and the board. Not least one suspects as a result of the growing trend in top-flight football for superscouts, at West Ham there is a fella called Gianluca Nani who is tasked with finding and recruiting new players for the team. Now whether he works in conjunction with the incrementally castrated Curbishley or not it's easy to envisage how such a relationship could cause tension.
The other week Nani, whose official title is "technical director" (need any techniques directed? Ooh, yes please, they're all over the shop) brought in the Chilean striker Sebastián Pinto on loan from the Brazilian side Santos and Curbishley refused to play him in a friendly against QPR that took place "behind closed doors". There's a few things in this story worthy of note; firstly the whole "on loan" concept is bizarre, in a transient world such as ours everything is impermanent, the planet itself will one day implode so the notion of an eternal transfer is berserk.
Also borrowing people is perhaps more quirky than buying them - "oy, mister can I borrow your wife?" sounds macabre, as does "give us a go on your girlfriend Russ" which is what the video man used to shout when he'd pull up his van outside ours. I never let him of course, in spite of his pledge to give me the Star Wars trilogy free for one week as recompense. I'd already seen it and those videos were moody, plus Tracy was a schoolgirl.
And what kind of pervy Aleister Crowley football matches have to be played behind closed doors? What do they get up to in these clandestine contests? Play in the nude? Worship the devil? It's difficult to imagine them doing anything more embarrassing than the performance they turned out so publicly and brazenly at Manchester City last Saturday. If that game had been conducted in private I wouldn't now be harbouring the spectacle of Luis Boa Morte guiltily scampering like a fare evader on an InterCity train.
Most troubling though is the innate structural difficulty that the position of technical director brings. Kevin Keegan at Newcastle has to play with the hand dealt to him by his own technical director Dennis Wise. One of the myriad problems with school was packed lunch, I never knew what I was having till the Tupperware was prised open and the day's selection revealed.
I never would've selected a first team comprising a jam sandwich, a wagon wheel and a packet of Wotsits but that was what I had to contend with because those decisions were made above my head. Why? Because I simply couldn't be trusted to pick my own lunch as I was a nitwit child. At least my diet was constructed by my mum, who I know loves me, and not Dennis Wise, whose intentions towards me remain unclear.
