It just happened to be last night that I discovered Bet365 run free live streaming of sport, and it just happens that I have a login for Bet365 even though I never bet on sport (I used Bet365 to put a tenner on Klaxons to win the Mercury Music Prize in 2007 and won £70, thankyou very much). So whilst I was polishing a script, I also had a window open with Milan vs Chievo running in it.

The commentary was limited – the Italian pictures were accompanied by what seemed to be some bloke employed by Bet365 to sit there on his own, with no pundit or contact with the action. At one point Chievo had the ball in the net and the commentator had to rely on the scorer’s body language and the fact that the top-left scorebox continued to read 0-0 to realise that it had been ruled out for offside, as the pictures failed to show the referee or linesman to confirm. (It did occur to me that Bet365 might make things more entertaining by getting punters with a stake on the match to commentate. ‘SCORE YOU FACKING USELESS SHOWER OF TWATS, I’VE GOT A MONKEY RIDING ON THIS’ – that sort of thing.)

As a result, when I spotted Beckham pull up in the latter stages it was hard to tell how severe the injury was. One of the times when ex-pro pundits make themselves most useful in the commentary box is when an injury needs to be interpreted: they can often tell the difference between a player who’s coming off as a precaution and one who’s properly knacked something. Our Bet365 commentator was left at a loss as the cameras focused on the match’s tense finale (check Seedorf’s superb winner below, which will likely be seen as a defining moment in Milan’s season should they win the title).



But as the coverage flashed to Beckham’s tearful face as he was loaded onto a stretcher, it became obvious what was happening. With a ruptured achilles tendon it may be difficult for him to come back at all, never mind in time for the World Cup. In that light, he’s almost certainly played his last game for his country – and his rationale for going on loan to Milan was to keep the level of his game high for England, so it’s possible he’s played his last game of top-flight European football too.

It seems a terrible anti-climax for him to go out this way, to an injury picked up under no challenge. But what it does demonstrate is the pressure Beckham put himself under to keep his game up. I was only half-watching the match, and admittedly I was more likely to notice what Beckham was doing than any other player because English commentators on Beckham’s overseas club matches tend to go ‘Oooh BECKHAM’s on the ball’ as soon as it comes to him. But he did work very hard to help break down a Chievo defence which was happy to play on the counter and often had six or seven men in the box. He’d done a lot of running and, as a golden chance to close the gap on Inter seemed to be slipping away, possibly worked that bit too hard for his age.

It’s typical of how Beckham has played ever since his early twenties. One day people will look back at the honesty and commitment of his game and wonder why he got the piss taken out of him so much.

It’s not as if FIFA need anyone to help them look foolish, but Liam Ridgewell, David James and the officials at the Portsmouth-Birmingham match gave them a helping hand at the weekend. Just minutes after the FIFA-backed International Football Association Board announced that new technology would not be brought in to help officials, Ridgewell knocked the ball over the goal-line, but it was disallowed for none of the officials having noticed.

I’ve never been that keen on the notion of bringing in replays or Hawkeye-style goal-line technology. This is partly because I don’t want the game to be slowed down: sports like tennis and rugby can accommodate that sort of thing in their usual pace, but any stoppage in football is an inconvenience, hence the concept of stoppage time. However, I also like the idea that football is played under the same conditions, at whatever level, wherever you are in the world. As the profile of the sport canters away to levels of insane hype, it’s something to hold onto that the European Cup final is a match just like Harrogate Town vs Stalybridge in the Conference North – strip away the context and they are the same thing underneath.

I always think this is a slight flaw in the use of Hawkeye in tennis. It’s a great system and hasn’t adversely affected matches where it’s used – the pauses where players wait for the decision have simply replaced those longueurs caused when players fruitlessly harangued the umpire. However, it’s so technology-intensive that it’s only in place on the show courts at the major tournaments, which effectively means your chance of getting laser-accurate calls depends on how popular you are. Everyone on the outside courts just has to take their chances, so even within the same tournament you’ve got matches happening under different conditions. As if former champions didn’t already have enough cause to be bitter about playing their first-round match on no.2 court. If you had it in football, what level would you install it to? Would you make clubs remove it if they got relegated, or would they be free to use it if they could afford it?

On the other hand, the fitness of top-level footballers has risen so much that maybe we have to acknowledge that the game is different at the highest level. Maybe it’s unreasonable to expect officials to be able to keep up like they used to, and it’s inevitable that they’ll make more mistakes when the game moves faster – unless the officials are backed up by technology. Futhermore, it seems unfair on the officials of televised games to allow their mistakes to be exposed with the benefit of the TV replay: it just puts them under more pressure.

Most of all, though, the introduction of technology would hopefully mean less post-match whingeing about refereeing decisions, and it would definitely mean the end of interminable discussion over whether technology should be introduced. When I think of that, suddenly it seems like a superb idea.

I was going to share with you my plan to sort out football TV rights forever, but I’ve got something else to comment on. Not the Carling Cup final, about which I have nothing to say beyond the Vidic decision being rather questionable, and everyone else in the world has already said that, even Alex Ferguson.

No, I’d like to address this as a sort of open letter to supporters of the Premier League’s Big Four. Like everyone, I was horrified by the injury to Aaron Ramsey at the weekend; it does really upset me to see a player’s potential going to waste whilst they sit on the sidelines, to say nothing of the fear that they’ll never be the same player again. It’s also a great shame for Arsenal, who have taken on a young British talent and done a great job of developing him.

However, I don’t really think anyone is to blame here. If you can bear to watch the incident again (I can’t bring myself to stick the YouTube link here), it’s not even a tackle, because Ramsey doesn’t have the ball: it’s a loose ball, more in the path of Ryan Shawcross than Ramsey, and both players have every right to go for it. Ramsey simply gets there faster and Shawcross has no time to pull out. It’s not malicious, it’s not even rough play – it’s just an awful accident. In a physical game, these things unfortunately happen.

But Arsene Wenger and Arsenal’s supporters have cited this as yet more evidence that their players get roughed up unfairly. One Arsenal supporter I know suggested that the team is actively persecuted in that other teams seem able to get away with it, and I don’t doubt that lots of supporters agree with him.

The thing is, this is common among supporters of all the Big Four. They routinely accused football hacks of being biased: one of the Guardian’s writers noted with amusement that last season he received at least one email accusing him of bias towards AND against each of the Big Four. The managers encourage this: Ferguson with his moans about the fixture list, Benitez with his ‘list of facts’. It’s a standard tactic to create unity, to claim that everyone else is against you, the media don’t like you, the authorities favour other teams.

Personally, I don’t believe any of it. Most of these things have rational explanations. Yes, Ferguson plays mind games with referees, but the reason Manchester United get more injury time when they’re behind at Old Trafford is probably because when teams are winning there, they try to waste time. I was at the Villa game there in December where we won 1-0, and Ferguson was rightly furious that there were only three minutes of injury time. Both sides had made three substitutions and Villa had dragged out a couple of late minor injuries to run down the clock. Nobody mentioned that, because the story was Villa winning at Old Trafford, not United getting ‘lucky’ with another late goal. But that’s how conspiracy theories work: the facts that don’t fit the pattern go unnoticed.

All I want to say to Big Four fans is this: why not enjoy it? This is the golden age. You get to watch great players and your team wins most of the time. You get to participate in the world’s biggest club football tournament whilst the rest of us look on as ‘interested neutrals’ (or disinterested neutrals where most of the interminable group stage is concerned). I know it seems like it’s going to last forever – it certainly does to those of us who remember the days when our club had a vague chance of winning the league at the start of the season – but nothing lasts forever. Eventually things will change, and then you might just regret having spent those years of greatness preoccupied with the injustices – whether real or imagined – that your team suffered.

And with that said, I’ll wish Ramsey a speedy recovery.

I gather that I wasn’t the only person to be taken by surprise by the realisation that the last-16 round of the European Cup (it’s not a league and it’s not just for champions) was being staggered over four weeks, and a total of eight matchdays. This is in order that, if all four teams from one of the big countries makes it to the last 16 (which, as it happens, they haven’t this time), both legs of all eight ties can be televised without clashing. Yes, because what the Champions League really needs is to gain greater exposure and drag on a bit longer.

An immediate example of why this is bullshit has been conveniently provided. In the aftermath of the Crystal Palace-Aston Villa match last weekend, many people suggested that a draw had been a good result for Palace because they need the cash and there was a good chance the replay would be televised. Well, all those people clearly hadn’t noticed that on the night of the replay, ITV will be showing Inter vs Chelsea. The chances of them swapping that for the opportunity to show Villa winning off the back of a dodgy refereeing decision which Neil Warnock will moan on about until Christmas seem slim.

Now, that night should be free for the FA Cup, but instead the Champions League has decided to squat in midweek for a month. It’s personally irritating for me, because I might have been able to watch my own team otherwise. Ask most neutrals which match they’d rather watch and yeah, they’d probably rather watch Inter-Chelsea. But if we followed that logic all the time, we’d never see matches that didn’t involve Global Brand teams and this is, depressingly, the way that football seems to be heading.

One area where I can’t fault UEFA’s strategy is in maintaining a policy of selling at least some of the rights to terrestrial broadcasters. I admit, I’m partly in favour of this because I don’t want to pay for Sky: I don’t have a lot of spare money and I hate Sky. However, it’s undeniable that the Champions League has made itself the main place to see regular games involving England’s biggest clubs for free: UEFA have chipped away at it in recent years, going from the whole tournament being on ITV to Tuesday night’s games being on ITV to ITV getting the juiciest match of the week and Sky getting everything else, but UEFA apparently consider the policy important to keep.

Notably, they have also done so without being forced to or moaning about it – it’s their choice, apparently – and it can only have helped the competition’s prominence. The FA seems to have realised that the same is true of the League Cup, and that if you don’t screen the final on terrestrial TV then within a year nobody can even remember who won it. Seven million viewers for the Manchester derby semi-final suggests that it was a move worth making, and should be a lesson for those asking if the World Cup and European Championships should be allowed to sell some matches to subscription broadcasters. Do it at your peril.

Next time, I will explain how I’d organise football TV rights if I had Brian Clough’s posited job of Supreme Dictator of All Football.

The World Cup play-offs are almost settled, and thank Christ England aren’t involved. But if we were, I’d be very relieved that FIFA have apparently decided that the play-offs will be seeded according to the teams’ world rankings, which would prevent us playing France, Russia or Portugal. (Although we could potentially have wound up playing Sweden, which in many ways would have been worse.) But deep down I’d have known the whole idea of seeding these play-offs is unfair. Actually, it wouldn’t even be deep down, I’d just be openly hypocritical about it.

The Republic of Ireland, who have sealed a play-off spot, are quite rightly annoyed about it, not only because they’d been given to believe that the draw would have been random, but also because this system transparently favours teams who should have topped their groups but fucked it up, and makes life harder for teams who’ve punched above their weight. There’s already been one seeding process to help ensure the biggest teams don’t knock each other out, and it should have been ample opportunity for them to get through. If France – who, ten years ago, were the best in the world – can’t top their group ahead of Serbia, why do they deserve any help now?

What’s key here is that France and Portugal are both unexpectedly in the mix, and FIFA is nervous that these two, who played each other in the semi-final of the last World Cup, will end up playing each other for the right to even participate in the next World Cup. Most worryingly, it could result in the world’s most expensive player not being involved. But fuck him. World Cups aren’t about that. How often do we see the most-hyped players have poor tournaments whilst others come from nowhere to play a blinder? The World Cup has survived without the world’s biggest players before – look at 1962, when Corinthians broke Pele with endless exhibition games, resulting in him limping out of the tournament when it had barely begun.

There’s a sense that the World Cup is somehow under threat; that international football has lost its lustre; that the Champions League is now considered a bigger draw; that the loss of a big-name player or two (hello, Lionel Messi) is genuinely damaging to the prestige of the tournament. But really, this is just something for the media to chatter about beforehand. Nobody gives a shit when the tournament gets going. The World Cup is bigger than any one player.

But I admit, there is something a bit daunting about a random draw. A team which missed out on the top spot by a hair’s breadth could get a tough draw, whilst one which stumbled into the play-offs might get an easy one. So this is my modest proposal: all nine second-placed teams will be ranked against each other, because the one with the worst record will be eliminated. So why not use this ranking – one based on how well they did in these qualifiers, not on how well they did in the last World Cup – to determine the draw? The top-ranked team plays the eighth-ranked team, second plays seventh and so on. It wouldn’t actually help Ireland that much, but it’d be better than the current system, which is tantamount to FIFA saying they’d really rather have France in the tournament instead.

Less than a week until the transfer window shuts, and one of the things that’s marked it out from previous transfer windows is that I’ve noticed fewer fans moaning about the transfer window. I don’t think this indicates any degree of acceptance whatsoever, just that fans have decided that moaning about the transfer window is an idle distraction from the more serious business of moaning about their club’s transfer policy.

I was recently amused by the comments thread of a News of the World story, where fellow Aston Villa fans were fuming at the report that Nigel Reo-Coker and Craig Gardner would be sold to fund a move for Jermaine Jenas. Now, this might happen. It might not. But IT’S IN THE NEWS OF THE FUCKING WORLD. Is it really worth getting so worked up about it? There’s a strong chance that it’s utter bollocks cooked up by an agent. But football fans clearly enjoy getting worked up about transfers. The plausibility of the story doesn’t come into it – any excuse will do.

This happened again last night, prior to the game with Liverpool. One Villa fan on the BBC’s home of totally reasonable football debate, the 6-0-6 forum, raged at Martin O’Neill’s failure to ‘build a team’ in the past three seasons. It was unclear what this actually meant, as O’Neill has built a team – the one he put out on the pitch in last night’s game, and which beat Liverpool 3-1 thankyouverymuch. One can only assume that the 6-0-6 poster (he’ll remain anonymous because I can’t be bothered to go looking for his post again) meant a better team.

It’s surprisingly hard to make a lot of football fans understand that the transfer market is not like a high street shop, where the things are just there and if you want a tin of beans then you just buy it. It’s like a high street shop where if you want a tin of beans, you have to convince it that the meal you’re making is something it wants to be a part of, and also hope that someone else doesn’t turn up and offer more money for it because it’s the only tin in the shop and you’ll have to have peas instead, which are OK but not really your favourite.

The plainly obvious fact is that clubs can only buy who’s on the market, and even then they often can’t get who they want. If a club isn’t buying enough players, or isn’t buying the right players, this is not necessarily because the owner is being stingy or the manager is an idiot. It’s not always clear to me who fans expect their clubs to buy. In Villa’s case, I think O’Neill has done extremely well to convince players like Ashley Young and James Milner to come to the club at all, since the promise of riches and glory have enabled a tiny number of superclubs to hoard all the best players in the world and not let anyone else have none. Fabian Delph was linked with Manchester City before we snagged him. I remember when our players were leaving citing ‘lack of ambition’ and then going to Middlesbrough, so this makes me happy.

A couple of years ago, one Villa fan on 6-0-6 was grumbling about the club buying Zat Knight, saying this was not the kind of big-name signing we’d been promised (we hadn’t been promised anything of the sort). To be fair, Knight wasn’t a roaring success at Villa. But when this fan was challenged by a more sensible poster to name some players he felt Villa should sign, he came back with Juan Roman Riquelme. Yes, the acclaimed Argentine international playmaker. In this fan’s mind, the fact that Riquelme was out of favour at Villareal for non-footballing reasons meant he’d be overjoyed to come to Villa Park. If that doesn’t convince you that he was quite mad, I’d also note that he wanted David O’Leary back as manager.

In its own stupid way, this is how some fans like to show their love for their club: of always having greater ambition than the owner, and failing to comprehend why players wouldn’t give their right arms to play for the team. But the rest of us can safely blank it out, or mentally replace it with the words I BLOODY LOVE MY CLUB I DO and move onto the next thing.

According to Arsene Wenger, who is a clever man and worth listening to, a full European league will probably replace the Champions League within ten years. Now, this suggestion is nothing new. But Europe’s big clubs increasingly get their own way regardless of the governing bodies, the fans, what’s good for football or, indeed, all that is right and just and moral. So if they want it to happen, then it will happen.

In a sense, this suggests that it won’t happen in the near future, because the idea’s been around for a while and if the big clubs wanted it to happen then it would have happened already. A bit like Douglas Adams’ theory that if anyone works out what the universe is for, then it will immediately be replaced by something even more inexplicable – which might mean that the baffling nature of the universe is evidence that this has already happened. But Wenger’s disturbing contention is that the Champions League will eventually no longer be able to supply the revenue which the big clubs need, and so it will need to be replaced by something even bigger.

This is not to criticise Wenger, who is simply calling it as he sees it – he’s always been a critic of excessive spending in football, so we can guess his opinion on this matter. But I’d actually be interested to know whether he agrees with me that this is self-evidently unsustainable. The Champions League has made the big clubs bigger, to the point where they need more money than the Champions League can supply... so the answer is to make an even bigger tournament? Won’t that just result in the same problem another ten years down the line?

And I can’t see how it’s better for fans – quite apart from the increase in time and money involved in following your team, it won’t necessarily result in better games. Matches between the big teams sometimes throw up a bizarre match like last season’s 4-4 between Liverpool and Chelsea, but more often they’re cagey affairs. This used to matter less when the match-ups between European sides were so rare: Manchester United versus AC Milan used to be a once-a-decade event, so it didn’t matter if it was teeth-grindingly dull, you’d watch it anyway.

Now, thanks to the big clubs demanding more such matches, it happens almost every season. Simple economics: make more of a premium product and the value goes down. Make it actually happen every season, and you honestly might as well be playing Tottenham or Everton – it’ll attract no more attention and, ultimately, no more money. It’s like building up tolerance to a drug – your idea of what’s a normal amount changes, you need more to get the hit. Are the big clubs becoming addicted to their own sheer bigness?

It seems like top-level football is turning into some kind of simple parable that parents will one day tell their kids to teach them why they shouldn’t eat infinite numbers of sweets. Football is on its way to becoming The Silly Greedy Monster Who Wouldn’t Stop Eating And Died. There must surely come a point when no further expansion is possible, and the whole thing will collapse. Nothing lasts forever, and these attempts to cash in on the football boom will only hasten its demise. Which might be good, actually.

I am typing this whilst watching the highlights of yesterday’s Community Shield. (I was just wondering why they changed the name from Charity Shield – hilariously, it seems there was a question over how much of the proceeds were going to charity. So obviously the thing to do was to change the name.) I know the result because I caught sight of a headline on the BBC website which read ‘Ferguson fumes at ref after loss’. Not that I was all that bothered about finding out who won the game, which is after all a mere curtain-raising bauble which only counts as a ‘proper’ trophy if used to exaggerate the success of an already-successful team. In fact, it was nice to know in advance that the game had been hard-contested enough for Ferguson to bother moaning about the result, given the number of half-arsed Shields we’ve seen in recent years.

Yet moaning is a way of life for Ferguson, and whilst it is often entertaining (his recent obsession with illustrating how little he cares about Manchester City has livened up the football pages this summer), he is the worst offender where referees are concerned. This makes a mockery of the FA’s fully justified drive to improve respect for referees. First of all: despite some referees being tossers, refereeing looks a bloody difficult job to me. It’s always going to be difficult, and I personally have no interest in seeing the game slowed down by referring every contentious decision to video evidence. But just as importantly, listening to managers drone on about how poor refereeing has cost them the game is incredibly tedious. We could all write the quotes ourselves. Nothing changes as a result of any whinge – they just hang there. In theory they make good headlines, but surely they’re so commonplace now that you barely notice?

If the FA really wants to do something about this, then I have a modest proposal. (This began as a joke, but the more I think about it, the more I think it might be a genuinely good idea.) All rights holders for football coverage should have it written into their contracts that they’re not allowed to broadcast comments on referees by managers and players. If there’s been a bad decision, let the pundits discuss it with a degree of impartiality. Take away the oxygen of publicity. There’s not much you can do about them moaning to newspapers and websites – but taking away TV and radio interviews might help slow the process down, create fewer heat-of-the-moment comments and make ref-slamming less visible.

Of course, it might have a negative effect – this impotent arena for special pleading arguably serves as a pressure valve, and without it there might be even more simmering resentment towards officials. Although it’s hard to imagine how there could be more than there is.

Despite repeated claims from managers, pundits and fans that the European Cup (it’s not a league and it’s not just for the champions) has overtaken international football as the loftiest arena for the game, I will always prefer the World Cup. In fact, as we are approaching one of those irritating summers without an international football tournament, I am currently looking towards my World Cup Highlights DVDs as a sort of methadone to get me through it. I am also keeping a close eye on England’s bid to host the thing in 2018: I would very much like the World Cup to be held here within my lifetime, and I think there’s a good chance of this happening, as long as we put forward a compelling bid and I remain in reasonable health.

I've been looking at the other bidding countries, and here’s my analysis. I may not be as well-informed as various other sporting journalists who’ve been writing pieces like this in the last few days, but I do at least know that the proper plural of ‘stadium’ is ‘stadia’.

I admire Indonesia for having a go, but it seems to me they have way too much work to do. Spain/Portugal and Holland/Belgium will be rejected because there are perfectly good single-nation bids, and Sepp Blatter has said that he’d only go to a joint bid as a last resort. Which does make you wonder why Spain has gone ahead with theirs, since they’re better placed to do it alone than many other bidding nations. Australia has a good case: FIFA likes opportunities to grow football in countries where it’s not the most popular sport, and unlike a lot of those countries, Australia has big stadia that can easily be adapted to football. However, I think FIFA is more likely to look at Australia for 2022 rather than 2018 because otherwise that'll be three southern-hemisphere tournaments in a row.

In addition, although there’s no longer an official system of continental rotation, the biggest TV audience for football is in Europe, so it would be surprising for FIFA to keep it out of here three tournaments in a row (although South Africa is conveniently in line with us in terms of timezone). This may also hamper the bids of Japan, USA and Mexico – all of whom have held the tournament relatively recently, and Mexico has hosted twice since England last did. It’s also worth bearing in mind that the modern game is played at a much higher tempo than in 1970 and even 1986, and is less well suited to being played at the height of summer in central America than it used to be.

It would be a bit controversial to go back to the USA so soon: football may be getting more popular over there, but does FIFA really need to give them another World Cup to boost the sport? They organised it well last time, but there wasn't much of a buzz about it: it’s one of the few places you can hold a World Cup without most of the population noticing. Japan’s bid is totally dependent on Tokyo hosting the 2016 Olympics, which could rule them out before it even gets to the voting stage.

The big rival, therefore, is Russia: the other credible European bid, and the one which would prevent England bidding for 2022 and, indeed, 2026. However, I’ve looked at Russia’s top-flight stadia (not in person, on Wikipedia) and they currently only have two that are big enough – the Luzniki in Moscow and the almost-complete Zenit Stadium in Petersburg. Many are below 20,000 and FIFA requires twelve stadia of 40,000 capacity, as well as one of 80,000 for the final. That's a lot of work to do, and look at how Ukraine is struggling to get just four ready for Euro 2012. Moreover, six of Russia’s 18 top-level clubs are based in Moscow – and you're only meant to use one stadium in each city, so nowhere gets overloaded. They might let really big cities use two – England seems set to advance both Wembley and the Emirates – but that still leaves Russia with the task of developing a lot of big stadia in places which might not need one when the tournament’s over.

England, by contrast, has nearly enough stadia to host the tournament tomorrow if need be. (In fact, we possibly do have enough, as I’m told that the KC Stadium can be expanded from 25,400 to 45,000 by lifting the roofs off and putting in temporary seating. I cannot possibly imagine how the hell this works, but apparently it does.) There are already several clubs making expansion plans regardless of the World Cup bid, so by 2018 there’s no doubt that we can have plenty of stadia ready – and we won’t need to build new ones, which doesn’t always go down well with the clubs who get saddled with them after the tournament (Juventus fans always hated the Stadio Delle Alpi, built for the 1990 World Cup – that’s being completely rebuilt at the moment until no trace of the original is left). And yes, our transport infrastructure isn’t great – something which isn’t helped by the fact that we’ve pointlessly rebuilt Wembley in one of the least accessible parts of London, when there’s a disused train yard just north of Kings Cross that would’ve been a superb location – but on the upside, we’re a small country and nowhere is all that far from anywhere else.

So basically, as long as we don’t fuck it up by being arrogant twats, we’ve got a very good chance. Although, as I just typed that sentence, it occurred to me that the FA is involved in this.

Dan Gosling’s goal for Everton last night with two minutes left on the clock was exactly what people mean when they burble vaguely about the magic of the FA Cup. Perhaps those commentators and pundits who vocally doubt whether all these foreign players and managers quite ‘get’ what the FA Cup is all about are right after all. If Rafael Benitez really ‘got’ the FA Cup then he’d have brought on a teenager who nobody had heard of too and let the Magic Of The FA Cup do the rest, wouldn’t he?

Of course, many of you won’t have seen the only goal of a match that, whilst reasonably compelling, was lacking in quality. This is because ITV accidentally went to a commercial break early, and in many parts of the country the next thing viewers saw was Everton celebrating.

Even before this happened, I’d been thinking that there’s something inherently wrong about watching FA Cup coverage on ITV. You feel like you’re watching a dodgy bootleg copy of the competition, or a Tesco Value version. It’s like being a kid and getting given Mega Blox instead of proper Lego by a well-meaning relative who doesn’t know there’s a difference. It’s not just that the BBC does the coverage better, although they do: their presentation team is better, their direction is better, their their graphics are better, and when it comes to highlights packages, their editing is better. Even apart from all that, it just doesn’t quite feel like the FA Cup.

I was one of the lucky ones who got pictures back just in time to see Van der Meyde cross to Gosling. But ITV’s blunder, a momentary error which quite simply ruined three hours of coverage, moved well beyond any sense of aesthetic preference for BBC coverage. It was apparently down to an automated system which failed to take account of overruns. Well, fair enough: I mean, who could have imagined that a game of knockout football might overrun?

Will the FA take note of this? Probably not, as it simply comes down to who pays them the most money – although it’s said the BBC pundits’ tendency to criticise the England team when they were playing poorly upset the poor lambs and led them to favour ITV. (This being the case, I do wonder what they made of ’Arry Redknapp laying into England’s mildly lacklustre performance against the Czechs last August, which was not only disproportionate but plainly self-interested as ’Arry had made it plain he wanted the England manager’s job.)

This was insulting to the BBC, which put a lot of work into re-establishing the reputation of the Cup when the FA was letting it wither on the vine: making Cup weekends into big events, introducing Sunday teatime matches and trailing it across all platforms. By contrast, the FA Cup/England deal the FA made with ITV and Setanta has gone poorly thus far. Setanta’s coverage is horrible and amateurish, opening England games with some right hackneyed patriotic nonsense depicting three CGI lions roaring over the White Cliffs of Dover and then some actor reading a cod-theatrical ramble about England’s recent travails. They also embarrassed the FA by demanding silly money for the England-Croatia highlights – no terrestrial broadcaster is going to pay seven figures for second-hand content that goes out after 10:30pm.

ITV’s splitting of the FA Cup, meanwhile, gives poorer value for non-Setanta subscribers than the BBC’s did, with two matches per weekend instead of three and no Sunday-night highlights package. Last night’s cock-up was a new low. I’d suggest that
Damn! I made an absolutely killer point just there to round off my argument, sorry you missed that. Technical hitch.

For a club who’ve often thrived on their underdog status, Manchester City may well be feeling the culture shock of being a team who people want to see fail. The press coverage of the Kaka deal-that-never-was demonstrates a substantial level of ill feeling towards the gauchely super-rich City: the media is happy to benefit from the lurid stories the club is generating, but happier to kick the club after a failure. A speculative attempt to pull off the most audacious transfer in football history has resulted in them being painted as bunglers.

The Observer reported at the weekend on rumours in Italy that Silvio Berlusconi had followed a strategy that had no intention of selling Kaka, but would provide good PR for Milan when the player stayed. (First news of the transfer broke on a Berlusconi-owned website.) This idea is given credibility by City and Milan’s differing accounts of what stage negotiations had reached before the deal collapsed: City claim they never talked to the player, but Milan claim it was Kaka’s decision. Kaka’s get-a-room statement of undying love for his present club seems aimed at emphasising this.

City’s chairman Garry Cook, who is fast emerging as a man so awful he makes Peter Kenyon merely look like scum by comparison, has been left to bluster about Milan ‘bottling’ the deal in a desperate attempt to make the situation less embarrassing for City. If Milan never planned to sell Kaka – and I agree with Mark Lawrenson (that’s a first) that the club wouldn’t have risked a £100m asset by continuing to play him if a deal was imminent – then it has undeniably worked out well for them. They’ve confirmed the loyalty of their best player and, although they had good reason to cash in on him (the fee would have wiped out the club’s debts), they have ultimately done what the fans wanted.

It’s also far from inconceivable that Milan were keen to put City in their place. However much Sir Alex laughs it off, City’s new spending power is bound to be of concern to Europe’s big clubs, who know that City have enough cash to unsettle any player. Milan have done themselves, and every other club with a player City might want to buy, a favour by embarrassing City.
Although Kaka might have seemed the obvious choice for such a massive bid, his image as football’s boy scout would have taken a heavy knock. Would it have been worth the huge piles of cash to play for a club which can’t offer Champions League football until the season after next at the very earliest, and is genuinely at risk of relegation this year? (It would be satisfying to see Cook’s reaction if that happened: he has stated that he would like promotion and relegation to be abolished. Added to the fact that Cook is a lifelong Birmingham City supporter, this tells you all you need to know about him.)

Milan have done the football equivalent of taking the nouveau-riche members of the country club down a peg or two. By emphasising the (possibly untrue) notion that Kaka himself made the decision, Milan have made it more difficult for other players to accept the City shilling. As they look to secure Premiership survival, City would do well to choke it down, stop playing fantasy football and instead keep looking for players like Wayne Bridge – a very good player, proven in the Premiership, who already has a few winner’s medals but would like to be first-choice somewhere.

‘We’re not anybody's fool,’ Cook said yesterday. ‘The perception that we are out there throwing money around is simply not true.’ City have just purchased Nigel De Jong for a fee reported to be £17m. The BBC notes that a clause in the midfielder’s contract would have allowed him to leave in the summer for £1.8m. Draw your own, presumably hilarious, conclusions.

Having watched a first-choice Villa team go out of the FA Cup in the third round to Man United for the fourth time in seven seasons, I feel particularly aggrieved by the practice of other clubs of a similar standing putting out less-than-full-strength teams this weekend. We're all aware by now that the big boys are likely to rest key players, especially if they're playing lower-division opposition - which is fair enough, as they shouldn't need their entire first-choice XI to beat a team from League One. It's also understandable that clubs sitting in the basement of the Premiership are going to concentrate on the league, because survival is worth a lot, lot more than a trophy.

However, this season it's been noted that clubs who are, surely, in no danger of getting relegated - the Evertons and the Blackburns - tried to get away with resting a few, and have got dumped out in amusingly embarassing fashion. It's been suggested that, for these clubs, getting into Europe is more of a priority. Yet it's unlikely that they'll make the European Cup (it's not a league and half the teams aren't champions), and even if they do they'll have to play a qualifying round - we all remember Everton's gargantuan effort to string together enough "gritty" one-nil wins to make fourth place in 2005, only to go out immediately to Sevilla (whom, it should be noted, a team like Arsenal or Liverpool would probably have avoided in the draw on account of their good recent European records: it's easy to forget how many good teams go into that qualifying round, because our representatives usually draw someone fairly beatable).

So teams who are prioritising "being in Europe" are, in effect, prioritising the UEFA Cup. Now... sorry, but how much does that really add to a season since the big boys decided they should all play each other every season rather than wasting time playing the champions of Luxembourg? OK, so the UEFA cup adds a bit of cash to a club's coffers, but is the opportunity to play Aris Salonika and FC Brann really that enticing - to fans or players? Don't get me wrong, I'm keenly hoping that Villa make it this year, but I'd hate to think we were sacrificing any chance of winning the FA Cup or even the League Cup for the sake of our efforts to make the UEFA Cup.

The game is about winning things, not "being in" things. Conspicuously, the only English club to have won the UEFA Cup in over twenty years is Liverpool, in the days before it was possible to be crowned the champions of Europe after scraping fourth place in your domestic league, and the only English clubs to have won any European honours at all since the Heysel ban was lifted are now members of the Big Four. The others have a habit of muddling through against teams you've never heard of (and who, frankly, often sound made-up), then getting beaten by the first genuinely decent side they encounter. I, for one, was far more enthused in the 1990s when Villa won two League Cups than I was when we went out of the UEFA Cup on away goals in a 1998 quarter-final against Atletico Madrid. In fact, I didn't even remember that we got as far as the quarters that season - I had to look it up on Wikipedia - but I clearly remember the League Cup wins. Which proves my point quite well, I think.

Well, here we go on another thrilling cycle of boom-and-bust expectations for the England team. After a few weeks of we-can’t-beat-anyone-probably-not-even-Kazakhstan type despair, we’ve got a new manager and we’re talking about winning the World Cup again. What’s doubly ridiculous about this is that we’re already hearing concerns that whilst Fabio Capello may win us some games (I hear he is quite good at that), we won’t do it very stylishly.

Let’s step back from that statement, to make sure we’ve really taken it in: some people are worried that Fabio Capello will destroy the England team’s propensity for playing attractive football. Apart from being a beggars-can’t-be-choosers situation on a par with a group of crack-addicted tramps wondering which Fortnums Christmas hamper to order, how often have you ever seen England play really attractive football?

We’ve only ever pulled it off intermittently. The 4-1 win over Holland in 1996, remember, was followed by the turgid 0-0 against Spain. The 5-1 against Germany (which, though a marvellous result, was full of comedy defending – Germany simply failed to punish ours) was followed by a scrappy 2-0 against Albania. I suspect that if you ask around, you’ll find that most people who aren’t England fans will not think of England as an exciting team to watch.

The fact is, teams tend to play more attractive football when they actually keep the ball, and regardless of any concerns about too many foreigners in the Premiership or players being paid too much, keeping possession has been the England team’s problem for as long as I’ve been watching them. The good performances usually come when we sort that out.

This is why I think Capello is the ideal manager for England right now, because I think he will put an emphasis on possession. I can’t see him going for full-on catenaccio, because England will never make a system like that work, but I think he will want to see tight possession football, and that’s more likely to win games for England than trying to play a sparkling, free-flowing game. Yes, the man was sacked from Real Madrid for winning too defensively. But that’s Real Madrid, who don’t buy defenders because they’re boring. And, lest we forget, Capello’s England haven’t even started playing yet, never mind winning ugly in the predicted fashion.

Apart from anything else, it’s not as if there are other potential managers who could get England playing attractive football – least of all the English candidates, who have had to master the conservative style necessary to hold your own in the Premiership mid-table these days. Harry Redknapp might have managed it, but only by bringing in a bunch of prodigiously talented Africans and Eastern Europeans who suddenly discover hitherto unsuspected English grandparents.

Worst. England manager. Ever.

That’s not just my opinion – the statistics back it up. He has the worst record of anybody to have done the job. He’s dropped 13 points in 16 months’ worth of qualifiers, compared with Eriksson’s 11 dropped in five years. For about two days I’ve had ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ by Joni Mitchell stuck in my head, and it’s suddenly become spookily relevant. I don’t want to say I told you so, but… actually, I do. Many England fans took qualification for granted and failed to see just how much Sven was delivering. This is the all-English alternative. Ah, the pride.

It’s hard not to feel that Sven would’ve got the necessary result against Croatia, given that he did so in the final match of every qualifying campaign and group stage he oversaw. In fact, Eriksson wouldn’t have needed the astonishing lifeline McClaren got. Many England fans banged on about Sven’s ‘passionless’ nature on the sidelines: at least he looked like he was thinking about the game. Against Croatia we saw McClaren stood with his brolly looking for all the world like a man waiting for a bus.

To be fair, Sven’s final matches as manager were deeply unimpressive: the World Cup was a disappointment in terms of performance, although arguably not in terms of achievement. The quarter-finals are about as well as we usually do in these things, unless we’re on home soil. But McClaren has totally failed to eradicate that hangover, offering instead empty gestures and meaningless soundbites. Of course, we’ll have the debate about just how good the team actually is, and we should examine the problems behind the team, but Eriksson did so much more with the same group of players and, Beckham aside, they should be hitting their peak rather than heading into decline.

Though I hate McClaren, I wasn’t one of those who wanted England to lose just to prove myself right. However, if I may take a leaf out of the big ginger fuckwit’s book for a moment and Take The Positives, this may well not be a bad thing. I’d rather we lost out on getting to a Euros, sacked the coach now, and started sorting things out, than stumbled over the line, had a crappy tournament (don’t forget, the group stages are usually harder in the Euros than in the World Cup), ‘kept faith’ with a rubbish manager and got found out in World Cup qualifying. We need a better coach, the ‘golden generation’ need a wake-up call and that’s what we’re hopefully going to get.

We will hear more about the need for ‘pride and passion’. I for one am sick of all this God-for-Harry bollocks that constantly surrounds any debate about the underachievement of the England team. It’s not pride or passion we need, it’s basic competence (although admittedly a bit of hard work wouldn’t go amiss). That’s what delivered our best performances of McClaren’s reign, the wins over Israel and Russia that convinced many people, myself included, that the coach had screwed the wheels back onto a faltering campaign (more by accident than design, given that the best performers were those covering for injuries). We passed and kept the ball well, something which we suddenly seemed incapable of in the final couple of matches. Other teams – Croatia, for one – seem to find this the easiest thing in the world.

That’s where the emphasis should be, and I think we’re more likely to get it from a non-English coach. Obviously, as a Villa fan, I have a vested interest in them not picking Martin O’Neill, who would nevertheless do a great job, I think – and surely the FA won’t want him unless he’s sharpened up those all-important PowerPoint skills. Given that O’Neill apparently doesn’t want the job now, and neither do any of the other prospective candidates, Fabio Capello is already looking a great bet. He immediately declared his keen interest, which proves once and for all that he is indeed mental. However, he’s available, he’s had a lot of success, he favours a creative but cautious approach and he wasn’t afraid to drop superstars when he came in at Real Madrid. He sounds perfect.

Instead of looking for a yes-man, the FA might consider the benefits of his Mourinho-style outbursts in distracting media attention from whatever embarrassing crap they happen to be getting up to that week. Because they will, because the FA never bloody changes. It’s probably too much to hope they’ve learned enough humility to not piss off all the decent candidates this time.

I must admit to being a little suspicious of all these stories about strife at Chelsea, just because it’s surely what everyone who isn’t a Chelsea fan wants to hear. No more money! Mourinho’s off! Terry’s going with him! Lampard’s agent has found an obscure clause that lets him off his contract for £8 million! Peter Kenyon’s restaurant expense account has been frozen! Etc.

On the other hand, I feel a little vindicated: I’ve been saying for a while that Abramovitch wasn’t going to fund unlimited big-money signings, but given that Abramovitch is unimaginably wealthy, it’s hard to tell. That’s the whole ‘unimaginable’ part of it, you see. My thinking, though, has always been that he’s a businessman and however much cash he ploughs into Chelsea, he does want to get at least some of it back. This judgement was partly based on the fact that I’ve heard talk of a ‘five-year plan’ at Chelsea (although not the kind that Stalin was so fond of), whereby Chelsea would be generating enough money to no longer require the massive cash injections Abramovitch has been administering with his massive cash syringe.

It now seems likely that the £30 million for Shevchenko was the last hurrah of Chelsea’s silly-money era (as it will no doubt be described in the history books), designed to give Abramovitch’s little mate the accolade of world’s most expensive footballer (which looks more like a double-edged sword all the time, but Roman probably meant well). Chelsea have gone from signing the biggest transfer cheques world football has ever seen to griping about whether to offer Bolton more than £2 million for Tal Ben Haim. Vive la difference. It’s hardly surprising if Mourinho is indeed irritated with Abramovitch – but then, as Mourinho was reportedly keen to sign Milan Baros, Abramovitch is also entitled to think that Mourinho has gone absolutely fucking mad.

Villa fans have been dreaming about getting shot of Baros for about a year, and we’ve just been hoping that we could get enough cash for it to not be too embarrassing (annoyingly he reached his 50th appearance for the club against Manchester United last month, thereby obliging Villa to pay another instalment to Liverpool and raising the overall fee to £7 million… sob). Indeed, Villa have taken a leaf out of Chelsea’s book on this transfer: when the tedious Ashley Cole saga reached an impasse, it became a swap deal, enabling both clubs to claim victory. Likewise, if John Carew performs reasonably well for Villa – and he’s made a great start, adding another dimension to the attack by being able to run towards goal and hit the target – it’ll look like we robbed Lyon blind by fobbing off Baros on them, regardless of how much money we wasted on signing Baros in the first place. Thanks for the tip, Kenyon.

Still, if Mourinho does depart as has been widely predicted, I will miss him. He seems to have annoyed more and more people as time goes on, but these people seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that football management is a dignified profession. He does his job well and he’s provided me with a lot of amusement: no complaints. As for Chelsea themselves… well, I don’t want them to go on dominating the Premiership forever, but they always had one thing in their favour as far as I’m concerned: they aren’t a member of G14. See the previous column for why this is a good thing.

This week the G14 – the cabal of European super-clubs who are diligently attempting to ruin football – could be heard bleating at the appointment of Michel Platini as UEFA president. Yes, he’s mates with Sepp Blatter and that obviously counts against him, but the G14 mainly hates his plan to modify the Champions League (remember: it’s not a league and half the teams in it aren’t champions). Platini wants to reduce the top allocation of Champions League places – the one enjoyed by Italy, Spain and England – from four to three. Given that pretty much everybody agrees that Champions League money has totally distorted the Premiership to the point where only four clubs can conceivably win it, the only people who think this is a bad idea are those involved with those four clubs.

Alex Ferguson bizarrely said he couldn’t see how this would work: either the tournament would have to be made smaller or other countries would get two places. Either he’d been at the red wine when he said this, or he couldn’t be arsed to give it more than two seconds’ thought, because surely it’s obvious that Platini’s thinking is that some clubs from smaller countries can be spared the qualifying round and go straight into the lucrative group phase. This would not damage the tournament at all: you could argue that there would be less quality teams in the group phase under this system, but given that qualifiers FC Copenhagen managed to beat Man Utd this season, they are clearly capable of holding their own.

The fact that the big clubs are complaining that they depend upon Champions League revenue is very telling. They can predict with reasonable confidence that they’ll make it every year and, generally, they do. That shouldn’t be what the European Cup is about. It should be a big achievement just to make it at all. And the UEFA Cup should be a desirable consolation prize, whereas now it’s frankly a load of bollocks: you slog all season to make it to fifth in the table and you’re generally rewarded with a series of defiantly unglamorous trips to Eastern Europe to face hard-tackling teams on churned-up pitches. It’s like playing lower league sides in the FA Cup, only you have to travel further and you’re more likely to get beaten. Forcing some of the big boys to slum it in the UEFA Cup would certainly improve it, perhaps even to the point where someone other than Channel Five bids for the rights to show it.

Being a bit of a tedious sentimentalist when it comes to football, I’d like to have some more underdogs in the Champions League. But the G14 has no interest in underdogs, because their motto is ‘Let’s make sure we win everything there is for ever and ever’. Probably. Outgoing president Lennart Johansson has warned against standing up to the G14, fearing a breakaway, but we can’t let them pull that threat every time something happens which they don’t like. Theirs isn’t the only interest that needs to be catered to. Maybe the underdogs should form their own pan-European cabal. And maybe Villa could form a cabal of formerly great teams with hazy memories of the good old days, along with Nottingham Forest, Ajax and Internazionale.

As noted in my previous piece here, the little bubble of smug liberalism in which I live my life has recently been pierced by the realisation of just how little the sexual politics of many involved in the football industry has moved on in the last few decades. The notion that the presence of women in the game is detrimental and should be resisted was implicit in the manner of treatment dished out to the WAGs by critics of the top players. Helpfully, Luton Town’s manager Mike Newell has now made the attitude explicit by lambasting assistant referee (this is where my insistence on sticking to the term ‘linesman’ falls down) Amy Rayner’s performance in yesterday’s 3-2 home defeat at the hands of QPR.

‘She shouldn’t be here,’ Newell said after Rayner deemed that a challenge on Eyal Berkovic was not worthy of a penalty. ‘I know that sounds sexist but I am sexist.’ It’s hard to know what to write when someone says something like that. Any commentary I could offer seems somewhat redundant. ‘This is Championship football,’ he continued. ‘This is not park football, so what are women doing here? It is tokenism for the politically-correct idiots.’

Newell’s suggestion that Rayner was only awarded her position in order to include female officials in the game would be worthy of suspicion regardless of how he couched it. It might have been reasonable comment had he stated that he was sure there were women who were capable of officiating at a professional football match, but that Rayner was not one of them (although it would still be a subjective judgement depending on how well one believed she had done her job, since opinion on a referee's performance is never unanimous). But no, Newell believes it’s entirely fair to come out and use the words ‘I am sexist’ as qualification for judging how a woman has done her job. This is surely reason to dismiss his opinion immediately.

What does Newell believe women lack that makes them unsuited to assistant refereeing? All you need is an understanding of the game’s rules, decent eyesight, sufficient physical fitness to run up and down the line for ninety minutes, at least one functioning arm to raise the flag with, and the ability to make decisions quickly. I have seen women demonstrate all of those attributes. Certainly my girlfriend often makes better decisions than I do. And yes, the Berkovic decision was probably a penalty, but I can see the room for doubt there – he went down pretty easily, the contact seemed minor and the keeper was looking odds-on to get the ball, so Berkovic probably decided to play for the penalty. It’s a long way from the worst refereeing decision I’ve seen this season – and it’s not as if the profession is renowned for ruthless accuracy. According to Newell, Rayner made a poor decision because she’s a woman. Assuming this to be the case (as I say, the quality of a refereeing performance is always a matter for debate), what excuse do all the other officials have?

Snooker has recently adopted female referees, and the game is generally very excited about this development. This is partly because the standard snooker refereeing garb gives a lady the aspect of someone Gertrude Stein might have tried to chat up in the 1920s, and this has a certain appeal. But the integration has also been easier because the sedate pace and gentlemanly atmosphere of snooker creates less pressure on referees and hence post-match criticism of them is rare, whereas in football the slating of the referee is background noise. Newell is just another manager lashing out after a defeat, picking up on anything he can find that vindicates his team – and letting some pretty unpleasant opinions seep out in the process. Cast your mind back to when the first black referees entered the game and ask yourself whether anyone would get away with saying ‘I know it sounds racist but I am racist.’

‘This one could not be blamed on the WAGs,’ declared Richard Williams in today’s Guardian of England’s game against Macedonia. What he fails to acknowledge is that Saturday’s lacklustre performance fairly conclusively proved that blaming the WAGs – as Williams, and others, did repeatedly during the World Cup – was never valid. To be fair, I don’t think anybody ever placed all of the blame at the feet of the England players’ partners, but the idea that it was an issue worthy of raising at all, let alone with punishingly tedious regularity, struck me as pathetic.

To an extent, the obsession with the detrimental effect of the WAGs was just another way of bashing Sven-Goran Eriksson. Thanks to the sterling efforts of this nation’s press, working tirelessly as ever to uncover information in the public interest, we knew that he was a bit of a shagger. It therefore followed that he’d be more indulgent towards the England players including their wives and girlfriends in the World Cup entourage. So if it was a Sven idea, it logically followed that it was a bad idea in the minds of his many, many, many critics, offering the most damning condemnation that one can make of a football manager: that he was not, first and foremost, a ‘football man’.

Yet are we seriously expected to accept the notion that letting women get too close to the team is automatically a bad thing? Are we seriously ascribing the failures of England to pernicious female influence? If you do believe this, then for God’s sake grow up. You sound like those whingers who blame Yoko for breaking up The Beatles, rather than blaming The Beatles for breaking up The Beatles. But why accept that your heroes have fucked it up for themselves, when you can just blame a woman for intruding on the boys’ club?

England’s shortcomings at the World Cup were their own. The suggestion that the WAGs were a ‘distraction’ makes the players sound like hormonal pupils at a mixed secondary school. They’re big boys – more than that, they’re big rich millionaire boys – and they should be used to having women around. If Frank Lampard was distracted by anything at the World Cup, it was brushing up on his Spanish and imagining how he’d look in a red-and-blue striped shirt.

As ever, England exist in a culture of extremes. Nobody can decide whether this England team is one of the best for decades and has missed a huge opportunity for glory through under-performing, or was simply never that good in the first place. Owen Hargreaves used to be considered (by most people who aren’t me) a clown who had no business in the England team, now his absence through injury is a major blow. The team either needs to modernise or go back to basics. Amidst all this, the WAGs have emerged as easy targets but now that the media circus around them has died down, and England have shown themselves perfectly capable of being a bit crap under ordinary circumstances, it’s time to drop it. If you’re irritated by the amount of press coverage they receive, then stop reading the tabloids and stop buying Hello! They’re not the most admirable human beings who ever lived, but neither do they deserve vilification from critics who refuse to accept that football, and indeed the world, has moved on since the 1950s.

It’s times like this I’m glad I’m half-Scottish, frankly.

With my usual lightning reactions – reminiscent of Jean-Alain Boumsong tracking back to pick up a striker – I’d like to comment on last weekend’s Newcastle-Everton controversy. (Sorry for not posting for a couple of months – I’ve been busy.) Yes, Shola Ameobi was blatantly offside for the Newcastle goal. But there are two points that should be made regarding this.

Firstly, offside is actually impossible to enforce 100% accurately. It’s obviously a very necessary rule, to prevent goal-hanging, and it’s hard to think of a better way of doing this. I can’t think of a way to improve it, other than forcing the BBC to abandon those stupid little flag icons that pop up after every decision. But think about it: the crucial point is whether the player is offside at the moment his colleague plays the ball. The nature of the rule means that the two players will never be perfectly in line – if they are, there’s no offside. This means that the linesman (and he is a fucking linesman, whose idea was it that they should be ‘referee’s assistants’? Sepp Blatter’s probably) has to be looking at two directions simultaneously.

ANY offside decision therefore involves a certain amount of guesswork, as the linesman can either look at the passing or receiving player and has to judge what the other might be doing based on where he was last time he looked. Oh, and he doesn’t necessarily know at what moment he’s going to have to apply this, and he has to decide in a matter of seconds. Y'know, I get as pissed off as anybody when a decision goes against my team, or indeed when a decision goes in favour of a team I hate who always seem to get the rub of the bloody green. But mistakes are understandable.

And secondly, Everton were playing an offside trap. It is impossible to claim the moral high ground after playing an offside trap. Offside – whilst, as noted, very necessary – is probably the most boring element of the game. The only entertaining things about offside are (a) watching somebody explain it to somebody who doesn’t understand football and refusing to help them out, and (b) that joke about the Subbuteo version of the early 1990s Arsenal side having a back four that was fixed together on a plastic rod so you could always move them in a straight line. Hence, attempting to cause offsides to happen constitutes trying to make the game more boring.

There can be glory in a well-timed tackle, a goal-line clearance, even beating a man to the ball to put it out of play, but nobody ever gasps in awe at a really well-executed offside trap. (If I am wrong, drop me a line and tell me what your all-time favourite offside trap was. You freak.) So I have no sympathy at all. And let me tell you, it’s rare that I sympathise with Newcastle United. Think on that.

Well, this is a novel experience: the manager of Aston Villa is somebody I greatly admire and respect. It’s not that I’ve particularly disliked Villa’s managers in recent years, except O’Leary when the club started to struggle, but they haven’t exactly been of the highest calibre (except perhaps Ron Atkinson, who should be given his due for the success he brought to the club, in spite of his subsequent efforts to earn himself the public image of an addled racist).

Yet Martin O’Neill would have been one of my top choices for the job – I lived in Buckinghamshire in my teens and he was a local hero for his work at Wycombe Wanderers, and aside from a short and rather poor spell at Norwich City he’s brought success wherever he’s gone (and at three very different clubs). Seeing him perform punditry duties at the World Cup reminded me of how astute and likeable he is. In fact, I rate him so highly that I didn’t think Villa stood much chance of landing him. He was, to my mind, the obvious candidate for the England job once Scolari had turned it down, but the FA’s twattery in appointing Steve ‘I’ve got the credentials’ McClaren instead has turned out to be Villa’s gain.

Judging from O’Neill’s lack of interest in the three north-east jobs that have become vacant this summer, Villa have partly benefited from geography. Reports suggest that he didn’t want to move or commute too far, allowing him to continue to support his wife, and Birmingham is within easy driving distance of Wycombe. Although O’Neill’s choice may have been dictated by convenience rather than any great love for Villa, few fans will complain. At a club where pessimism has become the default position, it was remarkable to see fans rushing to the ground yesterday as if they’d been told that the first twenty people through the gates would win a year’s supply of balti pies and the chance to give Juan Pablo Angel a slap.

Let’s not forget that Villa have been tipped for relegation, and this newfound enthusiasm could go down the pan very quickly and take O’Neill’s reputation with it if the results don’t start coming in. Until there’s some movement on the ownership of the club, O’Neill will be working under the same restrictions that have frustrated his predecessors. Doug Ellis has promised ‘some funds’, but in the past ‘some funds’ has meant ‘a couple of million for some journeymen from Sunderland’. O’Neill has made no promises other than to try his best. This is probably wise. If nothing else, though, Villa fans can look forward to no longer wanting to throw things at the TV as their manager bullshits his way through another post-match interview.