At a time when the sports loving public should be revelling in the brilliant performances of our cricketers, the seemingly unending spectre of football is taking up far too much time and space in the sporting media.   It`s still high summer, the cricket season has weeks before it`s over, but already the new football season is upon us.

They have already started up in Scotland and Rangers have already found time to bow out ungracefully by failing to qualify for the Champions League, thanks to a defeat at the hands of Malmo from Sweden.   This weekend sees the start of the Football League with my own club, Southampton, playing the damned Leeds United in a televised encounter at St. Mary`s Stadium.    Quite apart from the fact that the game is being shown live on Sky, I`m not sure I would have gone anyway.  I`m just not ready for it yet.

Football seems to encroach more and more into the cricket season - in fact, football hasn`t seemed to stop at all since the end of the last season;  there`s always some scandal, intrigue, super injunction, managerial merry-go-round, cattle-market transfer speculation to fill the back (and sometimes front) pages, along with hours of television.   There was a time, half a century ago, when there was a clear dividing line between the cricket and football seasons which allowed the likes of Arthur Milton, Chris Balderstone, Dennis Compton and Willie Watson to stop playing county cricket one week and start playing professional football the next.

I confess, despite being a Saints fan for 65 years now - my father having taken me to The Dell when I was seven - almost to a feeling of dread that the industry of football is kicking off once more.   I dread the start of the Premier League with its non-stop coverage, the screaming headlines, the foreign ownership of the game that was invented here, the influx of foreign players to the detriment of our home grown ones and its implication for our domestic and international progress.   I dread the myopic neolithic managers, bereft of any respect for match officials or any semblence of dignity.   But most of all I dread the overpaid players who live in a dreamworld of their own with more money than sense, with no concept of restraint or modesty and where excess and a false sense of their own importance are embraced at the urging of agents, hangers-on and assorted sycophants.   

Now, don`t get me wrong.  I still love the game I played, refereed and supported for most of my life, but it seems to me that the higher the echelons of the game, the less of a game it is and so the less attractive it becomes.  The Premier League is simply a business, a product whose avarice has seen it lose its place in the sporting calendar.   It`s all too much....and all too soon.   And it`s just not cricket!