Feeling deflated about football these days?

ToePoke's resident moany bastard, Cynical Sid, asks the question...

What a week it has been in football. There have been some great games in all four divisions, the return of the Champions League as well as the opening fixtures in the inaugural Europa League. There has been great action, skills and goals galore, plenty for our hungry sports hacks to fill their pages with. So it came as no surprise when the sports journos decided to ignore all of this and continue to focus on 'Adebayor-Gate'. For those of you unaware of the circumstances of the saga, it can basically be summed up like this.

Lanky Togolese waster Adebayor once played for Arsenal. Then he realised that they didn't pay as much as other clubs and cunningly used a loophole to try and engineer a move away from The Emirates ie. 'Arsenal don't win things, I want to go to a club that will challenge for titles like Barcelona, or Milan or Inter. It's not about the money - honest!' (see also Thierry Henry, Ashley Cole, Alexander Hleb, Matteieu Flamini).

So up pop Man City, not exactly synonymous with title glory, and offer Ade a weekly salary worth more than annual GNP of the country of his birth. The super-ambitious striker heads to Manchester faster than you can say 'players feeling any sense of connection to a football team when millions are waved in their face will instantly disappear and the fans who once idolised them and the history of the club they once claimed to be moved by will be forgotten like Farrah Fawcett dying on the same day as Michael Jackson'.

Then, as often happens in these situations, the Premier League fixture computer generates an early season meeting between the two sides and eveyrone is psyched up for it, no-one more so than big Ade. In a desperate attempt to try and prove his allegiance to his new employers, he then tries to kick lumps out of his former colleagues to send a 'this is how much I hate Arsenal and this is how much I love Man City now' message to the Eastlands faithful. The fans who have travelled from London take exception to this and give their former player dogs abuse.

Spurred on by the vitriol, a super-charged Adebayor continues to throw himself around before heading the home team's third goal. Suitably delighted at sticking one in against his former team, Ade sprints the entire length of the pitch, covering the distance in a speed similar to a pre-clean Dwain Chambers, and celebrates his goal in front of said fans who were giving him pelters. The Arsenal fans, who on normal occasions would boo their own granny, go absolutely ape and try to charge the field towards the player. Some have looks on their faces like they want pull him limb from limb and eat his body with a nice bottle Lambrusco.

The Man City players drag Ade away from the scene, the ref gives him a yellow card and the stewards calm the fans down. After the game, Adebayor apologies for his actions, the Arsenal players and manager attack his performance and the Man City players and manager defend him. The Premier League look at the tape of the game and decide some of his challenges were out of order and ban him for three games.

And that should have been that.

Except it wasn't. What ensued was an all out media frenzy of almost biblical proportions. Current players, ex-players, managers, journalists, fans, lawyers, agents, politicians, rabbi's, referees and even Graham Le Saux were wheeled out to pontificate on the biggest issue ever to occur in football. Even bigger than the previous issues we were told were the biggest to occur in football like Eduardo diving, the 'Carlos Teves affair' and the '39th' game.

Does anyone out there remember when football used to be about the actual game of football? When you would turn to the back page and find a report on a match where there was a tremendous volley or a brilliant passing move or a great performance by a rookie player. Turn to the back page these days and you will find stories about Premier League player quotas, foreign takeovers, Chief Executive resignations, multi-million pound sponsorship deals, managers moaning about fixture congestion etc. etc. etc....

Have the halcyon days of talking about the actual game of football gone? On recent evidence it seems so and with the Premier League, especially, becoming ever more money orientated, it seems that there is no end in sight to this depressing cycle. And the worst thing is, it's only bloody September.

God help us.