Remember Red Adair?

He was larger than life.

A rooting, tooting, trouble-shooting legend.

Well, ladies and gentlemen.

I give you Red Ryan.

A rooting, tooting, laser-shooting legend.

Ryan Giggs has rescued Manchester United twice in the last week.

Each time, he has changed the game, as second half substitute.

He inspired the retrieval of a two goal deficit at Blackpool.

He was the catalyst of another comeback at Southampton.

His pass for Javier Hernandez’s winning goal at St Mary’s on Saturday evening was sublime.

No wonder Fergie did one of those bad-Dad-at-the-Disco dances.

He knows he has Giggs’ signature another one year contract.

The Welshman is a force of nature.

At 37, he has the equivalent of a solid gold senior citizens bus pass.

He has grown old gracefully, adapted his game intelligently.

He has been brilliantly managed.

Fergie’s hairdryer reputation masks his subtlety and sensitivity.

His next job is to persuade Paul Scholes to eke out his career for another season

That might be a little more difficult.

Scholes craves a civil servant’s anonymity.

He hates the bells and whistles of the football circus.

He admits: “When I go I will miss football, not the life of a footballer”

If Giggs helps to win Scholes around, United’s future will take care of itself.

A PR puff, purporting to be serious survey, lands on the City desk.

Apparently, nine fans out of ten feel footballers are overpaid.

You don’t say, Sherlock.

What next?

The revelation nine out of ten bears relieve themselves in the woods?

Statements don’t come more obvious.

I sensed a tipping point, in attitudes, during the World Cup.

England’s performance was hard enough to endure.

The players’ snivelling self-pity made a bad situation worse.

The average Premier League footballer earns £33,000 a week.

That’s £7,000 more than the UK’s average annual wage.

In case you hadn’t noticed, doom mongers are predicting a double dip recession.

Gaps are beginning to appear on the terracing.

There’s elbow room at the corporate troughs.

Even Manchester United are texting prospective customers with ticket offers.

No surprise really.

With tickets, travel and refreshments, it is estimated the average fan spends £101.67 at a single game.

That’s when body and soul is kept together (somehow) by a grot burger, rather than a prawn sandwich.

Everyone talks about football being a business.

There are still some within it, who fail to recognise it is an entertainment business.

Times are changing.

The world doesn’t owe football, and footballers, a living.

It is about time they woke up, and smelled the Bovril.

That’s all most of us can afford.

What’s wrong with football?
A pertinent question this week, of all weeks.
What’s right with football?
Let’s join yesterday’s congregation, at Bolton Parish Church.
The funeral of Nat Lofthouse was, in its respectful way, a folk festival.
Strangers mourned a legend, and a lost way of life.
Lofthouse signed for Bolton Wanderers, the day after war was declared in 1939.
He sprinkled star dust on ration-card Britain in the forties and fifties.
He represented the values of a tight, working class community.
Honesty, humility, fellowship.
Statistics – 255 goals in 452 league appearances for his hometown club – did him scant justice.
His nickname, the Lion of Vienna, will outlive memories of 30 goals in 33 England appearances.
That was coined in 1952 after he was knocked unconscious, in scoring his second goal against a celebrated Austria team.
Lofthouse never earned more than £20 per week, and was allocated wartime work as a coal miner.
Grainy newsreels underplay his power, pace, and percussive heading ability.
He belonged to a truly golden generation, and returned football’s favour.
He was, by his own admission, not the greatest of managers.
But he gave everything of himself.
He was also a Bolton coach, scout and president.
It’s an old line, but I make no apologies for using it.
We will never see his like again.
Unfortunately.

Be careful what you wish for.

It should be football’s first Commandment.

Bored with Premier League survival?

Fans of Charlton, Leicester, and Middlesbrough will never again be so presumptious.

Want to flog the family silver to live the dream?

Not the greatest idea, as Leeds United supporters will confirm.

Desperate to find the new Messiah?

Four words of warning: Newcastle United. Mike Ashley.

Frustration does funny things to football clubs, and their followers.

Accession to the Premier League is tinged with desperation.

Look at Cardiff City.

The grapevine suggests they are losing £1million a month.

Yet they are indulging in some serious retail therapy.

Seven loan players have come from Premier League clubs.

Two – Aaron Ramsey and Craig Bellamy – would walk into most Premier League teams.

That won’t deter manager Dave Jones from buying a top class striker and defender before the transfer window closes.

The trauma of defeat in last season’s Championship final endures.

Blackpool, a club with a fraction of their budget, cashed in at Cardiff’s expense.

Ian Holloway is The Man.

He has a plan.

Feed off the hunger of underestimated players.

Trust your eye for talented waifs and strays.

Talk to them in headlines.

Tell them they matter.

Bond them to a common cause.

One thing should be certain: they will never take a thing for granted.

Football, we have a problem.

It’s called sexism, and it’s not confined to the broadcast booth.

Club directors are not noted for their libertarian leanings.

Boardrooms are men’s dens, as claustrophobic as golf club reading rooms.

The “little ladies” dispense the teas, and do a mean ham salad.

Powerful women like Delia Smith and Karren Brady are treated with icy courtesy.

It’s probably as well they don’t hear what is whispered behind their backs.

Trust me, I’ve heard worse than the dribblings of Richard Keys and Andy Gray.

It’s a delicate area on which to comment, when, like me, you are from Mars.

Or is it Venus? (I can never remember)

Political correctness can discourage honesty, but here goes.

I’ll admit I had a greater sense of horror when Ron Atkinson used the ‘n’ word.

Stupid slurs on the professionalism of assistant referee Sian Massey are not so sinister.

In another life I helped set up and run the English Institute of Sport.

The majority of the senior management team were women.

It was a fantastic working environment – the gender balance curbed macho excesses which define other sporting organisations.

I’m not referring to the FA, by the way.

Hope Powell, England Women’s head coach, would make a good club manager.

Kelly Simmons, Head of National Game, is pouring £200m into grassroots football.

They’re good at their jobs. That’s all that matters

Empires crumble from within.

They decline slowly, expire suddenly.

Most are undermined by flaws in human nature.

Greed, narcissism, anger and duplicity.

Some simply reach the end of their natural lifespan.

We all know Roman’s Empire is in decline.

When will Stamford Bridge fall?

When will the concept of Chelski be exposed?

Soon, if we are reading the runes correctly.

Tonight’s match at Bolton has the look of a definitive fixture.

Carlo Ancelotti has conceded as much.

He’s also admitted no one can match Manchester City in the transfer market.

What goes around, comes around.

Jose Mourinho – remember him, Chelsea fans? – is on the scene.

He’s picked over the entrails, and spotted a juicy morsel named Didier Drogba.

That transfer might have more legs than some of the Blues’ more celebrated stars.

Frank Lampard, Mr Reliable, is afflicted by injury.

It is only a matter of time before John Terry’s body gives up on him.

They are the heartbeat of the club.

They set its tone and reflect its spirit.

They are raging at the dying of the light.

Chelsea failing to qualify for the Champions League for the first time in nine years is unthinkable.

But it is not impossible.

Ultimately, it comes down to a simple choice: who do you want to be, and what do you want to represent?

Do you want to be branded as untrustworthy, someone who betrays basic values at the first glint of silver?

Or do you want to ­challenge life’s imperfections, stand for something more than deceit, greed and elegantly disguised desperation?

Don’t look now, but spin ­doctors and charlatans are taking liberties with your reputation.

You are about to be found guilty by association with those fighting over the ­Olympic Stadium like mangy strays, rummaging through a discarded chicken ­dinner.

The contest is portrayed as a London derby between ­Tottenham and West Ham, who have a pickpocket’s eye for the main chance.

But it’s more than that.

It is about whether we ­believe in the concept of fair play, and fulfilling ­promises.

It’s about how we, as a ­nation, are viewed by the world.

As liars, or leaders.

The Olympics are ­compelling, because they ­enshrine sport’s capacity to reveal the best, and worst, of human nature.

Watching a Steve Redgrave plough his way through ­pre-dawn training or a Chris Hoy riding a stationary bike to the edge of consciousness in a physiological test is uniquely inspirational.

These are the role models we, as taxpayers, had no ­option but to buy into when bureaucrats allocated ­£9.3billion to the 2012 Games.

It’s not their fault the Games are underpinned by the ­falsehood that they will ­galvanise the apathetic and shame the overweight.

Mass participation in sport is guaranteed by good people at grassroots level, rather than political investment in a 17-day corporate bunfight, beamed to billions of couch potatoes.

Those people, the little ­people, need a platform.

They need a true ­Community Stadium to rally around.

They need the original ­promise of a 25,000 seater venue dedicated to athletics and the next generation to be kept.

Tottenham’s intention to raize and rebuild is naked ­opportunism, a demonstration of football’s noxious ­arrogance.

Getting Pele to prostitute his legend was PR poison.

Spurs chairman Daniel Levy is a notorious ­negotiator, who would haggle over a penny with a schoolboy ­selling a half-sucked gobstopper.

West Ham are claiming the moral high ground, which must be a new experience for their ­owners, who cannot be trusted to run a whelk stall.

There is a third way.

Protect athletics, and invite Leyton Orient to become the tenants. Challenge the ­entrepreneurial instincts of their owner, Barry Hearn.

He specialises in hopeless cases.

He’s taken darts from a ­nicotine-stained bar to a ­Palace and made fat men feel good about themselves.

He’s in the process of ­reviving snooker, a parlour game whose only identifiable personality is a manic depressive.

He doesn’t lack ambition, or imagination. He even tried to convince us that angling was sexy.

Securing his club’s future, and making principles pay could just be his life’s work. He wouldn’t mind having his ego stroked. He’d relish his ­inevitable portrayal as sport’s answer to Richard Branson.

The attack dogs would be unleashed, during the six weeks or so it would take the government to confirm its ­preferred bidder, but that should be no problem

Look behind Hearn’s ­burnished smile and ­remember he pitted his wits against Don King, the ­Lucifer of boxing.

He’d see the advantages in offering to share the stadium with Dagenham & ­Redbridge, a similarly impoverished club with a great community ­spirit.

The alternative is ­accepting our word is not our bond, ­falling for the half-truths and innuendos of the spin cycle.

Allow Spurs or West Ham to hijack the Olympics?

Not in my name.

More importantly, not in yours

Press conferences can make the brain melt.
There’s a rash of them in January, to introduce new signings.
The player gives anodyne answers to anodyne questions.
He talks about dreams with all the passion of a Dalek.
His manager insists he has a bargain.
Everyone then troops to the edge of the pitch.
Or the directors’ box, if it is wet.
They pose for photos with a scarf.
Someone rustles up a club shirt, with the newbie’s name on.
It’s dull, formulaic, and fills a hole.
Thank heavens, then, for someone like David Bentley.
When he turned up at Birmingham, platitudes were off limits.
He was fed up with his portrayal as a poor man’s David Beckham.
He insisted he wasn’t a spoiled brat.
Then he addressed the hack pack directly.
“You lot know you can make a pile of s**t look like gold” he said.
No offence was taken.
Bentley was honest, humorous, refreshing.
Perfectly balanced, with a chip on each shoulder.
Good copy.
It’s now down to him.
On Saturday he steps out at Old Trafford.
He’ll tell you it is his sort of stage.
Grand, imposing, exciting.
I hope he responds to the occasion.
He has a simple choice:
Picking up the money, as a multi-millionaire journeyman.
Or being the player he could be.

The phone rings.
It’s a club chief executive, in apologetic mood.
“Sorry we’ve been missing one another. It’s January.”
No further explanation required.
This is the month the game listens to loony tunes.
It’s mad.
Look at me I’m a teapot, bonkers.
The CEO had just come off the phone from a TV presenter.
He’d called, during a commercial break.
He wanted confirmation of a transfer involving the club’s star striker.
It was nonsense, an agent attempting to start an auction.
Situation normal, all fouled up.
January is when contract negotiations get serious.
A player is under pressure from his family.
A move will mean new schools for the kids, yet another house.
A club has a number of things to factor into the equation.
It’s about rationalising income streams, and cash flow forecasts.
It’s about a player’s resale potential, and his value to the brand.
It’s about the strategy of rival clubs, which use perceived weaknesses for their own ends.
If you believe players are not tapped up, give my love to the fairies at the bottom of your garden.
It can be a dirty business.
You rarely hear a good word said about agents.
If they don’t engineer some action, they don’t get paid.
It’s all about money, spondooliks, dosh, dough.
I wouldn’t have the CEO’s job for the world.

Ah, bless.
West Ham are “committed” to Avram Grant.
In what way, exactly?
In the way I’m “committed” to the chewing gum on the sole of my shoe?
In the way a flea is “committed” to a dog?
In the way Elizabeth Taylor was “committed” to each of her seven husbands?
Answers on a postcard, please, to Upton Park.
Address it to the Chuckle Brothers and the Wicked Witch of the West.
Don’t worry if they don’t get back to you.
They’re slightly distracted.
There is a mole hunt to conduct.
There is an alibi to construct.
The media is a useful scapegoat.
But we don’t always set the agenda.
There is more off the record briefing, against managers and players, than ever before.
That’s a fusion of PR, politics and personal enmity.
It’s pure poison.
To be fair, no one is quite sure what Grant does.
He’s not the greatest coach.
He couldn’t motivate a starving man in a kitchen.
His agent Barry Silkman looks after transfers.
Grant is in an impossible position.
Every defeat – and there will be many – will focus on him.
And no one will believe a word that comes out of the club.
“West Ham United is a club that does the right thing” insists co-owner David Sullivan.
In what way, exactly?