It’s almost not worth discussing West Ham’s performance this weekend. They were beaten by Wigan. Wigan? Where the hell is Wigan? Anyway. It would almost have been enough to put me off football if not for the extent to which I found myself enjoying Match of the Day on Saturday night. Yes, I said that. I enjoyed Match of the Day. I think I like Match of the Day because it boils out all of the boring bits from football and only shows the exciting bits, including the exciting things that happen to teams that are not your team. And thus, it’s all about the narrative of football and much less about the actual endurance challenge of sitting through the game.

I also think I liked it because I was eating some delicious cake while watching.

Now, the big story on Match of the Day on Saturday was this player at Man City who used to play at Arsenal but he doesn’t any more and so then he scored a goal against Arsenal and then he ran all the way down on the field and was all, like ‘OH YEAH’ and then the Arsenal fans threw chips at him.

[Please note that the previous sentence is incoherent and run-on because I was resisting the urge to google to make it more accurate, preferring instead to demonstrate what the current extent of my football knowledge is. So, for example, I didn’t actually catch what his name was, although I noted that he had quite a good hairdo and is from Togo.]

What I find very curious about all of this is that it seems that the player - ah, now I remember, his name is Adebayor - is in big trouble for the running and ‘OH YEAH’ing and may indeed be fined or otherwise punished for ‘ridiculously over-excited goal celebration’. Because it incited a riot in the Arsenal fans. Now, as far as I can tell, it was maybe not very polite, but it is really possible for the league to legislate the amount of celebration that the players can indulge in to ensure that excitement is never ridiculous? And should there not be more onus on the fans not to throw their chips and rush the stewards and so forth? I’d think so.