My hatred of football is no secret. It's one thing to have a bit of fun kicking a ball around, quite another paying an unhealthy ticket price to enter a screaming contest while a bunch of fashion dummies demonstrate the latest must-have sports wear. Later you'll enter a screaming contest with your kids who demand those fashions to emulate their sporting heroes.

It's all just marketing now, isn't it? People seem to worry more about what haircut these people have than the actual score. In the good old days it was all about skill. You had to have a talent for playing. After all, haircuts were pretty standard in those days and teams only changed their colours every century. Sadly my own talent for football was brutally swept aside by a games teacher who marked me as a failure because I wasn't in the school team, as if I was in any danger of being asked.

No, that's not correct, the rot set in earlier. I blame my junior school teacher. In Physical Education classes he would have two lads choose their mates alternately and eventually they'd grimace and decide which of the loser brigade was the lesser evil. Coming fifth to a bunch of overweight kids isn't fun. Then again he said I would never make a carpenter but I came top in my woodwork class two years later. Fat lot he knew. I remember bumping into him in a shop and telling him of my triumphal recognition of handicraft skills. Why didn't he believe me?

You see, the problem was that I was a clever kid. Clever kids do spelling, maths, homework, and zits. Not football. Being clever is only going to make you popular when your ability to spell certain long words lets the class out five seconds early, and since the average young footballer has that sort of attention span, my tip for any up-and-coming clever kid is enjoy it while it lasts.

Now I discover that I could have spared myself the loss of self-esteem by applying some physics to the problem of how to be a good football player. Of course what I actually did was draw some feeble cartoon series in the back of my exercise book, thus I never found out that a scientific equation exists to predict the flight of a football. Factor in the force applied by the foot... The amount of spin.... And there you go. Perfect goals, every time.

Well there you go. Scientific proof that football really is as monumentally dull as I always believed it to be. So if you'll excuse me, I have a shelf to mend. So far they haven't invented a mathematical formula for that.

Television of the Week

This accolade does not go to last nights Great TV Mistakes, a two hour catalogue of minor continuity errors that only a sad loner with a digital recording device and lots of time that could be better spent on Dungeons & Dragons could possibly notice. Never have I been so bored. And that was the first five minutes. Just imagine sitting through the whole show.

No, I agree, that was a callous irresponsible thing to suggest. I have a sneaking suspicion the television channel does that on purpose so you watch the football on that other sports channel, which of course you have to pay for.