As the Aussies make a fight back in the Ashes and the school summer holidays begin in earnest, what do we get? The bloody football season starting halfway through the first decent summer we have had in years.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a good old game of football and though I regard cricket as my number one sport nowadays, a feisty old game of football is great entertainment, particularly on a wet and windy autumnal afternoon when there is little else to do.

Once again, under pressure from friends and the club itself, I have purchased a season ticket at Reading FC, my local team, and I am moderately looking forward to competitive Championship games, rather than weekly battering’s at the hands of the clubs who keep all the riches to themselves as the gap between the haves and have not’s continues to grow at an alarming rate.

However, I am not going to the Madejski Stadium tomorrow and I’ll tell you why. Tomorrow is, as I am sure you are aware, the 3rd of August and I have an obligation to play for my local village cricket club that is already bereft of players due to the fact we have many young members who are off on holiday.

Reading FC are back in action tomorrow halfway through the cricket season

Sky TV do a lot to hype up football and indeed cricket at the top end of the game but the fact is, a football season that drifts into mid-May and starts again at the beginning of August, is doing huge damage to the numbers at village cricket clubs that have suffered so badly on the back of five consecutive wet  and cold summers that have wrecked fixture lists up and down the country.

I know I am being an idealist rather than a realist but football should, for the lovers of all sports, end with the FA Cup final in the first week of May and commence again on the first Saturday in September. Instead we have Play- Offs at the end of May followed by multiple pre-season tournaments and endless transfer speculation. Yesterday, I even witnessed on TV a SKY helicopter going around to check on the clubs in pre-season training in scenes reminiscent of when there was a SKY camera at every ground last November to witness how clubs responded to the November 11th minutes silence.

To make matters worse, we have to put up with daily transfer bullshit as “Deadline Day” approaches on the 31st of August, an event that SKY have somehow managed to hype up to biblical proportions as they televise moronic supporters outside the gates of Premier clubs as they await the arrival of an average footballer who is about to obliterate the wage budget of their club as they try to keep up with mega marketing machines like Manchester United. Stupidity, gluttony and endless hype is everywhere you look.

Sometimes I wish football would just fuck off and leave everyone alone until September, a time when cricket players can put away their whites for winter and go and watch what used to be known as the beautiful game.

Or with regards to the English national side, an over-hyped jolly jamboree of ineptitude personified.