Then, one day – in 2004, after eighty-six fruitless years – the Red Sox won the World Series. No one saw it coming, and just to compound their glory, they did it by beating the Yankees. After the celebrations, though, a withering sense of loss quickly took root amongst the people of Boston. Victory, they realised, had come at a price: actually getting a return on their support had compromised the very point of it. That point was a simple principle of commitment, something woven deep into their identities as Bostonians, a sense of endurance that’d always made them, somehow, better. If you walked into a bar in South Boston wearing a Yankees cap, and were planning on giving it the biggun’, you knew you’d be dealing with a more righteous, sturdier kind of person. Someone with more knowledge. More fight. More love.

Now, though, Boston were top of the tree. Number one. Life as a Sox fan had always been bittersweet, but empowering with it. Now they’d lost touch with the one consoling myth that had insulated them for all those years – them, their kids, their kids’ kids – against the teasing geographical possibilities of supporting the bigger, better, richer Yankees. New York had trophies and titles and power, but generally speaking, they were a casual armchair pursuit for people who didn’t have the guts, the constitution or the character to truly love something. Their successes had infected the fans with a fat, churlish sense of entitlement, left them intolerant and greedy, delusional and demanding. Because their support had never been galvanized outside of the spotlight, it was weaker, almost phoney. Because the Sox fans had so much less to show for the time, money, and pure, stupid commitment they’d given their boys, it naturally made them better fans. Better people.

This is revelatory. To many fans, a sense of moral triumph is just as enticing as actual, tangible glory and success: in their absence, it absolutely centralizes itself. Football, like most sports, is something transient and temporary, where dynasties are rare: most teams are only ever a bad manager, a thrifty owner or a few injuries away from disaster. No true fan supports one team because they were, are, or are likely to be better than another one(s). Perversely, support seems to best breed in a Petri dish of low expectations and disappointment – hence, fans across the land spend lots of time consolidating their love by letting everyone else know just how hard they’ve got it. Christ, even Arsenal and Liverpool fans spent most of last season complaining, and this is the entire point of forums and phone-ins: “yeah, alright Spoony, it’s Alan from Carlisle. Listen, about that Villa fan that was moaning, I’ve just driven three hundred miles…”

Notts County have had it hard for a while now. I’ll admit that, as a Forest fan, and I’ll also admit that it’s pleased me, because I’ve never really liked them. There’s no hair ruffling from me, and no little-brother condescension; I find them snide, cynical, bitter, jealous and hypocritical. They’ve also got the heftiest and most infuriating appetite for revionism this side of the Iron Curtain. Generally, though, the relationship between Nottingham’s two clubs is a one-sided, gnashing antipathy that has blossomed across three decades of Forest’s (relative) predominance – after a big money take over at Meadow Lane, and blustery statements of intent (many of them, typically, involving Forest), could it all be about to change?

In a word, no. And here’s why. Last week, Manchester City commissioned a billboard; a giant, sky blue landscape of Carlos Tevez, arms spread wide like Christ the Redeemer, underlined by the words ‘Welcome to Manchester’. A bit of triumphism and celebration that, embarrassingly, signposted City’s inferiority complex – one of biggest signings in their history, and they still couldn’t pass up on the opportunity to have a dig at United. City, Manchester’s team by popul(ist) consent, geographically in and of the town, welcoming Tevez to a place and a people superior to the suburbs of Trafford. A revolution is underway at Eastlands, yet City – hamstrung by rhetoric, and an arbitrary sense of what makes them ‘special’ – still insist on fighting the battle with the slings and arrows of yesterday’s tired, silly arguments. That billboard will (unwittingly, I suspect) become the motif of City’s ascendancy – overthrowing United, toppling them, the bigger picture of domain and empire somehow enveloped within a very private, very local battle. “It’s City, isn’t it?” observed Alex Ferguson in response, inviting the world to finish his sentence. They’re obsessed.

The parallels between City and Notts are striking. Like City, like the Red Sox, like Millwall and Orient and Grimsby and Scotland, they’ve been traipsing the path of the underdog for years, justifying themselves with a slew of pig-headed ‘facts’ that almost deny argument. Notts fans have achieved a huge part of their current identity through their antipathy: contempt towards a larger, oppressive power that smothers their city. Some rivalries are gentler, less partisan; but supporting Notts also abbreviates a hatred of Forest. It’s bespoke. It doesn’t warrant theories or explanation. Forest are a black, gluttonous tumour of a club, hoovering up fans and attention. Their supporters are stuck in the past. They’re fair-weather. They’re trouble makers. They don’t understand the game. They’d never admit it, mind, the significance of Forest in their thinking – that would just capitalize The State of Things, reinforcing the holding pattern of football in Nottingham. But it’d be the first or second wish of almost any Notts fan who stumbled upon a genie; doing those smarmy Red Dogs from West Bridgford.

Now, they actually have a chance. A good chance. Outside of the Premiership, the leagues have concertinaed together: in these days of salaried fairy-tales, with the ascendancies of Wigan and Fulham and Hull, resources – allied to able management and a bit of good fortune – could have any team shouldering quickly towards the limelight. It’s neither outlandish nor unreasonable to say that, in four years’ time, Notts County could be the best team in the East Midlands. But for Notts to be successful – truly successful, and to aim for anything less would be pointless – they’ll have to let go of a huge part of what makes them what they are. Because nothing pegs you as small-time more than assessing yourself, constantly, against another team. The difference between City and Notts is that, were City ever to topple United, then in a very ‘two birds with one stone’ kind of way they’d be on the doorstep of genuine contention. Notts’ perennial goal is to usurp a team slightly less crap than themselves.

In this sense, the chest thumping prattle wafting out of Meadow Lane these days promises less a revolution, and more an insurgency. It’s nothing new – it has been preached, promised, bawled and boasted by a pourri of owners, part of the oath for any new arrival at the Lane. The ghost of Fred West could win them over if he promised the same. And here, there needs to be an absolute shift in the whole mentality of the club, because it shouldn’t be Forest in their crosshairs; we’re a pretty insubstantial target, in the grand scheme of things. I’d imagine Adam Pearson’s goals for Hull City when he arrived were greater than breaking Grimsby’s stranglehold on the Humber region.

Ultimately, being truly ‘better’ requires two things; dominance on the pitch, but also the supremacy off it to affect a kind of casual – but sincere – disregard. Real Madrid no more care about Rayo Vallecano than Northampton fans do Rushden. It’s why Alex Ferguson isn’t batting an eyelid about the nouveau-riche freak show over at Eastlands, as City steadily undermine their soul and humility – the only things they had over United in the first place. Form, as they say, is temporary.

Weighing up that billboard, Alex Ferguson was bang on the money: “City are a small club with a small mentality,” he said. “All they can talk about it Manchester United – they can’t get away from it.” Notts fans will know they’ve truly made it not through the trips to Wembley, not when they’re packed into the stands at Old Trafford; their journey will only reach its end when they stop worrying about Forest. When they can stop considering themselves an underdog. And I wonder, really, if that’s what they want, because the Forest-as-glorying-idiots shtick is now so utterly hewn into their thoughts that they’d probably be lost without it. They’re only happy when it rains, Notts fan, letting the world know just what they have to put up with. One day, though, they’ll be better. Pure probability demands it. Outside of cartoon characters and international terrorists, though, underdogs just don’t make good villains, and they’ll be as lost then as the good people of Boston. “Screw the Premiership and sod the Champions League,” wrote one Pie fan recently. “All we want as Notts fans is not to be patronised anymore by the team we see as our biggest rivals. I look forward to a day when Forest fans once again stand united in singing hateful songs about us.”

You know, if it wasn’t for the Football League’s ceaseless commitment to self-parody, they might actually find the time to start sorting out football every now and again. Unfortunately, though, this commitment is hewn into the same rock that spawned Sam Allardyce’s jaw, a relentless pledge that is all-consuming. At Soho Square, doubt and uncertainty are not so much inclinations as magnetic compulsions: it is a swamp of ill-governed dawdling, where the simplest of matters acquires the windy palaver of a Womens’ Institute cheesecake seminar. Consequently, the Football League’s management of the domestic game has all the cogency, gravitas and influence of a harassed supply teacher.

Their latest reactionary spluttering comes in the wake of Southampton’s marvellously transparent attempt to slalom an administrative points deduction, simply by heaving their debts on to the shoulders of a parent group; to whit, a holding company so unconvincing, it may very well be run from a Harefield caravan. Despite pleading very public poverty for some time now, with the club lurching from one crisis to the next, the insufferably smug Rupert Lowe has so bamboozled the FL with his chicanery that they’ve been forced into an independent inquiry to ascertain the legal and financial position of Southampton FC, in the wake of Southampton Leisure Holdings’ collapse. In this particular case, ‘inquiry’ is a tidy euphemism for ‘curling into a tight, foetal ball, and stalling against the pressure of legal posturing that’s now looming ineluctably on the horizon, all because your rules have failed – again, unbelievably – to account for one of the most predictable manoeuvres in the realm of corporate delinquency’. The administration issue has been flogged raw for the last six years, ever since Leicester Etch-a-Sketched away a £30m debt in 2003: for all the cons, concealments and casuistries in the interim, you’d think the League could have cobbled together some halfway thorough legislation by now.

Southampton Leisure Holdings’ portfolio includes Southampton Football Club Ltd, St Mary’s Stadium Ltd, St Mary’s SPV Ltd, Saints Supporters Club Ltd, Dell Estates Ltd and Stadium 2000 Ltd: in short, the bulk of their holdings qualify as associate concerns of Southampton Football Club. It’s not unreasonable to assume, too, that the vast majority of SLH’s revenue is generated by the club. As such, the line between parent company and primary subsidiary is so thin as to be imperceptible, and it’s abundantly clear what Southampton FC are trying to do.

That’s not to say that their efforts, whilst dubious, aren’t within the remit of existing FL statutes. Southampton haven’t engineered a loophole; they’ve simply found one, as did Derby, Leeds and Leicester before them. They’ve tweezered a neat little hole in the Football League’s Maginot Line of legislation; a stocky, obdurate thing, incurably prone to the lateral onslaughts of lawyers, hounds and hustlers. Now the League are holding back on their judgement, waiting to see if Southampton can do the decent thing and get themselves relegated, without recourse for a punishment that wavers between moral and legal poles that are almost critically distinct. The League has bottled it, once again. Grubby and opportunistic the deed may be, but Southampton knew that the League’s response would be neither swift nor decisive: already, the delay is a tacit admission that the game’s governing body are unable to present a just and defensible punishment. Southampton have simply positioned themselves in one of the acres of regulatory grey that pad out the FL’s rule book – that no one at Soho Square could foresee one of the most basic aspects of creative accountancy transplanting itself into the world of football is the real crime here.

And so, on March 31st, in the two thousandth and ninth year of Wor Lord, there came news of a man begrudgingly shaking hands with his destiny. And whilst I may have strayed into somewhat narcissistic waters here, opening an article by quoting myself, what else can you say? Newcastle United dally ceaselessly with self-parody. They love a challenge. And so, it seems, does Alan, who appears to be the only person in the North East who’s actually thought this whole business through.

Because like all great strikers, the bloke is clinically selfish. Self-regard seems a necessary instinct for centre-forwards, along with a Machiavellian appetite for getting the job done, and as a player, Alan had both of them in spades. I remember a callow teenager at Southampton, writhing dutifully at the feet of Carl Tiler, who was dismissed for an ‘elbow’ that would barely have registered on the richter-scale of Alan’s own murderous jumping shapes. Southampton won 1-0, and he was never welcome back at the City Ground. Then there was a game against Sheffield Wednesday in 1999, when he snatched the ball off an excited youth teamer who’d won – and was preparing to take – a penalty. Shearer scored from the spot, his fifth goal in a game that ended 8-0.

Like all professional skills, greed is highly transferable. Newcastle United and the Shearer brand are today intractably interwoven; in the midst of the Toon renaissance, that bludgeoning reinvention of the club in the 1990s, one seemed intrinsically to begat the other. Whole teams were built to supply him. Ruud Gullit called him “the most overrated player I’ve ever seen”, and lost his job within the week. Thus, Shearer is now one of the city’s dominant cultural forces, having carved out an admirably lucrative niche on Tyneside as one of the Geordie nation’s true untouchables, venerated in the Ale houses of Bigg Market alongside Milburn, McDonald, and Xisco.

Much is made of the paucity of his achievements at Newcastle. What he can point to – not unreasonably – is the dazzling array of incompetents who’ve encumbered football’s very own Police Academy ever since he arrived at the club. Shearer was supposed to be the jewel in the crown, but hindsight shows that Newcastle, even at their dubious heights, were ill-equipped for success; that almost magnetic tendency to bottle big games, the ropiest defence this side of Nuremberg, and the virulent persistence of Keegan’s philosophy that it’s ok to lose, just so long as you score a few goals in the process. Shearer has always seemed antithetical to all that; an amorphous personality, he was hard working, almost viciously methodical, and bloody good at his job. If it weren’t for the accent, he’d have been dunked in the Tyne as a heretic long ago. The man is, legitimately – and I’m loathe to use this word as an adjective – ‘legend’.

So if you’re a member of the Toon Army, you’d be inclined to disregard that peculiar gushing sound, as the logic sluices fail, and the last reservoirs of sound reason come haemorrhaging out of St. James Park. You’ll overlook the fact that Shearer’s tactical reflections on MOTD are so startlingly prosaic, they trump even the BBC’s own standards of inanity; that he’s unlicensed, utterly inexperienced, and yet entrusted with the most critical eight (seven, now) games of the club’s recent history. You might even ignore the fact that, until last Tuesday, Alan seemed as inclined to act as a Hollyoaks’ debutant. Why worry about his chances with a gaggle of morally undernourished waifs, crocks and cripples, when you can just lather yourself instead in the foaming, romantic possibility of it all? As we learned in The Shawshank Redemption, hope can set you free.

Yet I’m still to see anything in this whole desperate endeavour to convince me it’ll benefit anyone other than Shearer himself. If he succeeds – and there’s still a big chance he will, what with a tax bill hovering immovably over Fratton Park, Sunderland plummeting towards the Earth’s core, and that indefinable Premier League moirai that insulates Big Teams from Bad Things – Shearer’s hero status will be consolidated forever. If he fails, then who cares? There’s no conceivable way, after the catastrophic mismanagement of Newcastle this year, that he could possibly be blamed. It’s perhaps the most calculated attempt at resuscitation on record.

I don’t dislike Alan Shearer by any means; as I said last week, what I dislike is that maddening tendency amongst fans to venerate their ‘own’ beyond all practical reality. There is absolutely no altruism or good will operative here, and Geordies are mugging themselves off pretending otherwise. There be monsters in those disputed territories between fan and employee, and Shearer – I suspect – is fated to err far closer to one than the other, accent or no, soulful declarations or otherwise. That’s why there’ll be an indisputably karmic element to Newcastle’s failure, should it occur. Whilst it may perhaps have hurt the man, Shearer has observed their descent from the Match of the Day studios with all the compassion of a disaffected in-law.

There are two small problems with this: one, it requires a quite staggering conceit to believe in the first place you occupy such rarefied airs; and two, you limit yourself somewhat as to who’s actually fit to represent your club, puritanical alcove of footballing integrity that it is. Either they don’t play ‘your’ way, or they’re too Southern, or they’re not quite Catholic enough… the list is endless. Hence, why Sam Allardyce lasted ten minutes at St. James Park, and yet the veneration of Kevin Keegan would have us believe that he is still the only man genetically equipped to manage Newcastle United. And that Alan Shearer is not only a possible choice as his successor, but a necessary one.

Unfortunately, it’s also much, much easier to pander to The People when their criteria are so publically defined. This is precisely how Mike Ashley, a sportswear magnate from south Buckinghamshire, had only to down some pints in Bigg Market in order to seduce an entire city. That flimsy, calculated show of ladishness, that badge-on-the-sleeve artifice and public chest thumping, was all that was needed to send the Toon hordes a-swooning.

They were duped. They were naive. But herein lies the whispered reality of the Toon Army – they’re a modern bunch. Keegan’s triumphs (one promotion) did not resuscitate a city’s soul; they merely eased the gravitation of manfolk in a large, one-club town towards the pioneering zeitgeist of a young Premiership. Football was already tumbling back into national vogue. With the same circumstances, the same investment and similar exposure, it could have happened in Stoke, Bristol, Bradford or Cardiff. Plymouth or Wolverhampton. Hull. Most of them one-club cities. All of them more populous. But by accident or design, Newcastle timed their ascent to absolute perfection. New recruits piled into the Toon Army, and the wheels on British football’s biggest bandwagon were set into motion.

Geordies often legislate for Keegan’s kamikaze reign by claiming that he turned them into everyone’s second favourite team. No he didn’t. People watched Newcastle then for the same reason that they’ll always watch the start of a Grand Prix; because of a very peculiar bloodlust, the promise of chaos on a Sunday afternoon, just before the paralysis of roast beef and dumplings kicks in. It is not craft or consideration that defines Newcastle United, but that chaos; a raw, clumsy, unfettered sort of excitement. In that respect, I suppose, this season can be considered nothing less than a roaring success. Beware the Chinese curse, lads – “may you live in interesting times.”

The Toon Army are heralded in these clinical, joyless times as a model for fans across the world. Still, they demand Keegan, the Dr. Frankenstein to their reawakening. But barring a couple of seasons under Bobby Robson, Newcastle have been mired in the inflexible guff of their own fans for years. Nobody can seem to understand how or why they expect to succeed, beyond smug little contentions that, as a cornerstone of their community, they ‘deserve’ it. This would be fine, if only there was some kind of consistency woven into their silly expectations. But there isn’t. It’s all well and good flogging the ‘Cockney Mafia’ horse, as if there’s something intrinsically trustless about anything south of Wakefield, but then we all know your average Geordie would have Al-Qaeda splashed across his XXL shirt, if that money then spawned a shot at the top three. Such is the myopia of your average football fan; principles are something to be dusted off only when things are going wrong. Mike Ashley and Dennis Wise are unwelcome in Toon because Newcastle are, currently, rubbish. Nothing more, nothing less. This imposition of creed and conviction – the ‘football town’ argument, the suggestion that so-and-so just doesn’t ‘get’ it, basic protectionism – is just a time-honoured rhetorical device for deposing the weak. It’s a powerful, almost inarguable contention, that’s dislodged bigger names from richer traditions. Reid from Man City. Souness from Liverpool. It was an absolute triumph of selectivism when Glen Hoddle’s Tottenham side “weren’t quite ‘Spurs’ enough.”

Another example of this parochialism is Leeds United fans, whose rabid insistence on ‘keeping it in the family’ wouldn’t be out of place in Deliverance. In West Yorkshire, where football attained perfection some time in the early seventies, ‘Leeds’ is now anchored in their sanctimonious prattle as the ultimate affirmative adjective, a mantle forged in the furnace of those old, embattled days, when they were hated and feared. ‘Passion is knowledge’ should be scripted beneath the club crest. Simply, you are or aren’t ‘Leeds’. As managers, Allan Clarke, Billy Bremner, Norman Hunter and Eddie Gray (twice) failed to do themselves or the club any sort justice, but crucially, they were of its fabric. All was forgiven. The same could not be said of Terry Venables or Brian Kidd, both onto losers from the start. Or Dennis Wise, for that matter, which is odd, because if ever two entities should have been able to reconcile their innate villainy, it’d be the Poison Dwarf and Dirty Leeds. A match made in Hades. Yet it didn’t work for Wise: whilst he was nasty, he wasn’t Nasty. Because theirs’ is a pantomime kind of knavery, a caricature of sorts, and without the legislative suffix of ‘Leeds’ lopped on the end, it just doesn’t work. He was, as my Wortley-born friend declared, “a cheap, cheating, Chelsea t*@t.” Alliterate and to the point.

When you look back across the absurd events of the past two years, it is not entirely unreasonable to assume that Trevor Brooking has been slipping things into people’s tea at Soho Square. Such are the dizzying levels of ignorance, incompetence and improvisation we’ve witnessed. Not least from Richard Scudamore, whose absolute dereliction of duty in the first place set this dreadful wheel turning. This is the man who terminally dallied over one of the most cut and dried disciplinary cases in modern footballing times. The man who actually believed that Media Sports Investment – the acknowledged owners of Carlos Tevez – would tear up a £20m business agreement, just so West Ham United could stay up. I mean, if West Ham had a mum – a gap-toothed Hackney market trader no doubt, who some 120 years ago heaved her bloodied runt onto the podium of footballing invulnerability – then even she would have struggled to swallow that one.

It’s been done to death, but let’s just get this clear, one last time; West Ham United acquired and played a footballer who was not, in accordance with Premier League rules B13 and U18, entitled to represent them. And then, having admitted as much, were found to have continued playing him under the very terms they’d acknowledged as improper. BY FIELDING CAROS TEVEZ, WEST HAM UNITED CHEATED. The extent of his contribution to West Ham’s survival, the seven goals he scored in their run-in, were immaterial: he could have been a goalkeeper, a winger, or a full-back. The point is, he wasn’t aloud to play for them, and as poor as Sheffield United were that season, however insistently they’ve since alchemized their failures into the shape of an Argentinean footballer, they were at least rubbish with legally registered players. When the Tevez faux pas was brought to light, West Ham should have been subjected – immediately – to the deduction of points that the FAPL’s code of conduct decrees. West Ham lied. West Ham cheated. Then West Ham lied and cheated again. For all the talk of what they would have done with and without Carlos Tevez, let’s just suspend the guesswork and imponderables that have swollen this very simple idea into an abject, touring carnival. West Ham committed a crime that, by the Premier League’s own statutes, within the grain of disciplinary action to date, was punishable with a points deduction. That would have seen West Ham relegated. On the merits of legality, Sheffield United would have survived.

But no, their misdeeds were massaged into a piffling fine, and a posthumous damages settlement. Some fantastically bleak precedents have been set as a result. Football now stands astride a new dawn of litigious hysteria, where a sport’s governing body is no longer its God, and the High Courts are the only meaningful recourse for the wronged and put-upon. Also, we now know that the current market price of a Premier League place is in the region of £25m, in easy-pay instalments if necessary. And when you can afford to drop a combined £20m on Kieron Dyer, Freddie Ljunberg, Louis Boa-Morte, Nigel Quashie and Callum Davenport, that figure’s a the drop in the ocean of footballing insanity.

These reparations aren’t even a public acknowledgement of guilt, as West Ham insist – still – on hammering the drum of mawkish blamelessness. They continue to plead poverty, but lads, you’ve got away with it. Good an’ proper. It weren’t exactly the stretched leather glove on O.J’s hand. Christ, Ronnie Biggs never had it this good, lathering himself in Factor 15 on the beaches of Rio.

Truly this was a settlement, in the fattest, most attritional sense of the word. Gudmundsson has been given three months to sell the club by the creditors of Hansa, West Ham’s financially-ailing creditors, and knew full well that the settlement figure would be necessarily absorbed into the Hammers’ retail price. So it’s not penitence, it’s appeasement; damage limitation tarted up as flimsy altruism. Whoever they may be, West Ham’s new owners will now essentially be £15m better off, thanks to some poor sods in Iceland. But in terms of West Ham’s ongoing ability to invest in players, and consolidate their ill-gained Premiership status, it amounts to the square root of dick all.

If you are considered part of the Premier League cognoscenti, different laws apply. Not for West Ham the punishments meted out in the forgettable backwaters of Bury, Wimbledon and the like, for similar crimes. The Football League can haul Luton Town to the very blink of oblivion, but the self-anointed Academy of Football goes, predictably, untouched. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, and what they can prove (or rather, ignore).

Football coverage today doesn’t cater for right-thinking fans. It births and feeds that breed of facile wannabe’s that first sprung up after Euro ’96, a swathe of uninformed tourists consolidating their gender credentials by reading ‘Supergoals’ as openly as possible in the office and 5-a-siding their way towards mercifully early heart attacks. Without football’s gluttonous self-flagellation in the media, these people would never have happened. Empty insights for a shallow audience.
To be fair, they haven’t an awful lot to work with, the football programmes. I mean, if you were charged with the job of humping so insistently into the grime interest in a league which has been won by four teams in fifteen years, you too might be prone to elements of hyperbole. But there is something rather vulgar about their mission statement: wherever SSN saturation is less than complete, wherever the man in the street can look over his shoulder without seeing a replay of Rory Delap shovelling a clearance into the stands, football will be there. The nectar of the youthful, salaried New Lad, in his pressed, steamed Arsenal shirt, scooping handfuls of dry-roasted nuts into his mouth, reciting Sun Sport editorials to his mates in a loud, breathless voice and stopping me from getting served.

Today, football is the neo-man’s cultural accoutrement of choice, an arbiter of lad-ishness, something to be brayed and boasted and bandied about. The game, accordingly, is everywhere, in easily digestible bites, never more accessible. But how much is enough? Are insight and enquiry doomed to a sad, inverted compromise with exposure? How long before Gary Lineker’s neon-ed face is looming over Piccadilly Circus at 2am, puddles of confused tourists pinned to the streets below, contaminated by that same, idiot fever?