New Year begins just like the old one..a football manager talking bollocks

Gary Megson is known for not being the sharpest knife in the drawer but you do wonder sometimes if there is any link between his brain and his mouth. He has attacked the 'Transfer Window' by saying it's only there to benefit the big clubs and is to the detriment of the small clubs - so far not too daft really, then he spoils things by saying, "can you imagine a haulage company wanting to buy a new vehicle in September but being told they can't buy one until January?"

This is the biggest problem football has. It sees itself as part of an integrated society, a vital cog in the gears of economic prosperity whilst all the time being so far removed from most people's reality it could be existing within a vacuum. Take Mr Megson's analogy and examine it. When did you last hear of a group of truckers settling a £43,000 bar bill? When was the last time you met a lorry driver who booked into a hotel for his firms Christmas bash and was told he could pick six 'special friends' from a group of approximately 100 young ladies for the night? When did you last see a lorry driver telling a Police traffic officer to fuck off six times in thirty seconds because the officer had the temerity to give the lorry driver a speeding ticket or a warning for disregarding basic rules of the road? When was the last time that SKY bid £900 million for the rights to televise the movement of HGV's in and out of Dover?

Football isn't so much a special case as a world inhabited by nut cases.

Sol Campbell, who is one of footballs more cerebral footballers, recently compared the abuse that footballers receive with humans rights issues. I bet those poor buggers who have been shot overnight in Kenya because of the anti-Government riots would have loved to have been shouted at rather than shot. Football and footballers lose perspective at the drop of a hat. They exist in a self fulfilling world completely oblivious to 'real issues'. Footballers aren't stupid, they possess sporting intelligence which is completely different to academic intelligence in the same way that my accountancy skills are different to those of a plumber or electrician. That doesn't mean when I have problems with a rude client I compare my lot to that of the victim of sex trafficking or a drug mule. Not all footballers are like this but unfortunately it's those who do lack a little bit of a reality check who make the news more often than those don't.

Footballers earn a lot of money, I don't have a problem with that, but you do wish sometimes that they would remember that they are paid a lot of money for their talent on the field rather than their thoughts off it.

And whilst I'm having a rant can somebody please tell Mark Lawrenson that saying something and finishing the sentence with the word 'not' went out of fashion about ten years ago.