Blackburn and Newcastle - the neutral's choices for oblivion

Football is silly.

Come on, who else is big enough to admit it?

It is a game where grown men run around a field, often whilst wearing garish shirts (for, if you were to look up "garish" in an illustrated dictionary, you would find a picture of Fulham's current away strip, which is the colour of a Fulham home shirt after it has been put in the wash with the underwear of a man with e.coli food poisoning), aiming to put a ball in one net whilst stopping other men from doing the same thing. It is a game which some of these men are paid the GDP of a small country to play. It is a game watched by thousands, many of whom are quite pleasant, humble, unassuming people the other 99% of the time, but whilst attending the football match become horrible, threatening, vile, dislikeable morons.

Sometimes, it is difficult to see how it could become more silly.

Then I read about Blackburn Rovers bidding for Ronaldinho, and it turns out it could.

PT Barnum famously said that there's one born every minute. That referred to customers. Increasingly it refers to those providing the custom. You've got to love the quote given to the BBC by Anurhadra Desai, who is the public face of Venky's, the Indian owners of Rovers - "The impression is I've never watched a football match. I've not watched in a stadium but I have been watching the World Cup in India."

Okay, we all stand corrected; she is obviously fully qualified to run a football club and decide transfer policy. By applying the same logic she might also suggest that ownership of a box set of Grey's Anatomy is all you need to become a doctor. I actually thought that, after years of idiotic men running football clubs, a woman might bring a degree of common sense to the whole thing - turns out they are just as dumb as the rest of us. Having sacked Sam Allardyce, they appointed his coach, Steve Kean, to replace him, apparently on the simple grounds that he told them he will play attractive football. Kean has never managed a club before. But apparently he said the right things, so he got the job.

Why is it that successful entrepreneurs, with their remarkably successful companies and the years and years of sound business sense which has led to their millions, suddenly completely lose the plot when they take over football clubs? Still, Blackburn are yet to emulate Mike Ashley's lunacy at Newcastle - there is grounds for sectioning a man who appoints Alan Pardew as manager of his football club.

And so neutrals everywhere are quite up for the Toon disappearing back into the Championship, having treated Chris Hughton quite abysmally, and for Blackburn, once a club run by the very dignified Jack Walker, to follow them. In such a close season, where there are probably thirteen clubs who could be relegated and 40 points might be required to stay up, where Blackpool are yet to do "a Hull" and collapse, where battle-hardened teams like Stoke, Aston Villa, Everton and Fulham are likely to grind their way up the table, there is every possibility that Blackburn and Newcastle could take up two of the three relegation spots.

And that's even if Ronaldinho ends up in a Rovers shirt. But doesn't that idea just sound silly?

L.