For pity's sake even I predicted it and I'm so stupid I thought Manchester United would implode last season.

But even I've been taken aback by the sheer hilarity of the situation.

Keegan was an insane appointment made even madder by the recuitment of hate figure Dennis Wise to work above him. But it's the reaction of the Newcastle fans to every club crisis that creases me up – you'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at those Magpie muppets.

It always amazes me that so many of them are able to converge on St James' Park whenever there's a TV camera in the vicinty. Are they all unemployed or playing truant? Is there nothing else to do up there, but wail at their club descending further into farce?

It's great comedy TV for the rest of us though. So many of the poor deluded fools who get to talk in front of the camera believe that Keegan really was The Messiah and that the board represent the devil.

They should remember that Keegan was running a circus before he became part of a bigger one. He hadn't watched a football match for three years before his joke appointment, he may well have taken the job because he was skint and he was a supporter of hoodlum Joey Barton.

He's never been a Messiah. He has however always been a flouncing drama queen.



THE days of the football manager are numbered anyway. Football is now run by super-rich nonentities and their faceless henchmen playing a real life version of Championship Manager.

That's why we see West Ham manager Alan Curbishley undermined by his chief executive and some Icelandic dude in the boardroom, why Avram Grant was never viewed as the real Chelsea manager and why Keegan had players he'd never seen play before and who he'd never heard of, foisted upon him.



WELL what a shock as Dimitar Berbatov finally signed for Manchester United on transfer deadline day.

The deal was so inevitable I can't believe it wasn't concluded as soon as United's interest was known. It would certainly have saved us being patronised and lied to by the likes of the player himself, his agent, football managers and the absurd figure of Daniel Levy, the Spurs chairman.

Levy is so out of touch with reality, probably because he's so far up his own backside, he failed to see the irony in his public denouncement of United's transfer tactics when the entire football world remembers his own unethical pursuit of Juande Ramos and despicable treatment of his own former manager Martin Jol.

And as for Sir Alex Ferguson. Is there a more hypocritical man in professional football?

Fresh from bleating for three months as Real Madrid tried to seduce Cristiano Ronaldo, he drives Berbatov around Manchester before Spurs had given United permission to talk to him.

Clearly Ferguson believes the rules only apply to others.



THERE won't be a better football story all season than Chelsea losing out to Manchester City in the pursuit of Robinho.

I wish I had been present when Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon heard he'd lost his man. Just the other week he was smugly challenging other clubs to rise to Chelsea's level, knowing full well that money rather than good management on or off the field was the only reason Stamford Bridge had seen success in recent years.