Even the sober BBC has caught hold of this much-hyped competition between Oliver Kahn and Jens Lehmann, on the subject of who should be the German goalkeeper at the World Cup. Yesterday Jürgen Klinsmann decided on the tall, flapping Lehmann over the inspirational teutonic madman Kahn. They are both of course unbearably arrogant idiots, but that's okay. Like I said in a post a long time ago, blogging does so easily tempt you to easy sarcasm, and this blogger yearns for a more benevolent blogosphere. A new dawn. Call me a namby-pamby nincompoop, then. See if I care.

Still, with these two - and with football in general, if you take a look at an average day's reporting - it's difficult to stifle one's hooting mockery, and to enjoy, for instance, Kahn's recent mistakes, as the pressure of the pending decision clearly got to him. Even the patriarchs of Bayern Munich - Franz Beckenbauer, Uli Hoeneß, Felix Magath - couldn't help commenting on the cracks appearing in their titan's statue. Now it's over, and Kahn, whose victories cannot easily be counted, will have to deal with a large defeat. Why do I care? Football is my laxative. Picture me as the decadent painted aesthete at the Roman circus, chattering about airy nothings as the gladiators beat bloody hell from each other's bodies.