Gareth Bale

I have really not got in to football this season. It seems inevitable that Chelsea will win the title, and they'll win it by no more or less than a moderately tantalising 5-7 point margin. I felt the same last year, but thought Man Utd were only slightly less good and went through the motions of anticipation. Now I feel they've slipped. Part of my apathy so far is the fact that The Blues are no longer my Bete Noir, an honour now held by Man City, and also I generally think that Essien, Malouda and Hiddink make quite a cool cosmopolitan set up.

There's another reason for my lack of interest, one held my many fans. Wayne Rooney. The machinations orchestrated by his agent leading up to his contract renewal are possibly a good case study in game theory, but they're also incredibly slimy, disloyal and greedy. With all his other problems, you can't help feeling that we'll look on his case as an example of the impossibility of extreme wealth providing contentment. Man Utd have got him though, but I think he's a a mistake. Rooney's a bad apple and I can't believe he'll help the team and unless things are really much nicer than we think, Fergie has totally lost grip of his own adage that no player's bigger than the team. Things are bright in his absence: the new Mexican guys looking good and Berbatov's been on form and they've won in his 'injury' absence.

But not everything's gloomy in British football. The new golden boy superstar is of course Gareth Bale, who has emerged for Spurs in juxtaposition to Rooney, Terry et al. He seems like a normal modest guy. Then also, at eighteen is another star in the making, Jack Wilshire. When he was about 8, and I was 14, the young Wilshire ran humiliating rings round me during a football encounter in Hitchin. For the sake of football in this country, I hope they survive the media and they live up to expectations of them.