My filthy habit

I don’t know what happened to me doc. I just tried one or two to start with, I thought I could handle it. All my mates were doing the same thing and it didn’t seem to be doing them any harm, but now I’m hooked. It’s the first thing I think about in the morning and I have to have one final fix before I go to sleep at night. Any chance I get during the day too, I’ll sneak away into a quite corner and…

Drugs? Don’t be daft. I’m talking about the transfer rumours, handily summarised and sorted by club on News.co.uk. I just can’t stop myself clicking on those seductive little links that will tell me what the latest gossip is about my favourite team. It’s a sordid relationship and I’m not proud of it. Maybe telling you will be cathartic and I can kick the habit.

What really gets me is the vast majority is such unadulterated crap. The printed press makes up stuff to fill its pages and aspiring sports journos (please God, tell me they don’t get paid for the dross they write) recycle it as though it had been handed down on tablets of stone from heaven. Every club in the Premier League is rumoured to have a couple of dozen players each as their number one priority in every transfer window, and any player close to the end of their contract, or whose had limited game time recently will be chucked into the mix and matched with a club name seemingly picked at random.

The language is clichéd and repetitive. I guess there are only so many times you can say that a team is “considering an approach.” First they “eye” a player, then they “monitor” the situation, then they “plot a shock swoop.” The other team is reported to have suffered a “massive blow” that another club might want their man or, if said player has failed to impress in recent months, they have the chance to “cash in on a flop.” I’ve been checking the Microsoft web-site, there has to be a wizard you can use in Word that generates this sort of tosh automatically. Just key in a player name and the team rumoured to be interested and it will automatically produce a hundred and fifty words of unsubstantiated drivel.

So why can’t I stop my fixation? I guess that’s the beauty of football, even with the World Cup coming up there has to be something that fills the void left when there is no game at the weekend for your favourite team. It’s a poor substitute but it’s all we’ve got.

The good news is that I’ve acquired a partial immunity. Those sites that insist in presenting their message as a bullet point list, “the five players that…” or “five things that…” then deliver a slide show where you have to click to get the next page. It gets their page click count up, but it does nothing for me. Unless it’s a superbly written piece, and that’s happened maybe twice, I close the link and move on. Maybe it’s the first step in finding a complete cure. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to… well… you know.