Not Very Sporting

Is it just me, or does Steven Gerrard come over as well dodgy in those adverts? You know the ones I mean - where he hangs around kiddies playgrounds saying he wants children to get more involved in sports and tells us he's backing Persil's 'Be my Coach' programme. Is this really projecting the image Persil originally envisaged? Some bloke sitting on a swing watching pre-pubescent children play? A bloke with a scouse accent, at that - we all know scousers are well dodgy; on the rob, and all that, I've seen Brookside. All it needs is for him to start taking illicit photos of the kids with his camera phone and the picture would be complete. Presumably he'd be sending the photos to his mate Sven - another dodgy-looking geezer if ever there was one. I mean, with those frameless glasses, the receding hairline and that creepy avuncular manner, he comes over like one of those 'Uncles' you remember from your childhood, who were always wanting to take you 'swimming'. It doesn't take a great stretch of the imagination to conjure up nightmare visions of Sven slowing his Saab down outside schools and asking under nines 'Do you want a sweetie, little girl?' as he rustles a dirty paper bag at them, (or even worse, 'Do you want me to be your coach, little girl?).

It's no good, this is veering dangerously close to libel. For the record, I don't think that either Steven Gerrard or Sven Goran-Eriksson are nonces. Eve if they do look shifty. Mind you, that Sven was always keen on bringing in the younger players, wasn't he? First of all a teenage Rooney and more recently Aaron Lennon and Theo Walcott - and there's no denying the inclusion of seventeen year old Walcott in the England World Cup was very strange. If Sven had no intention of letting him play, just why was he there, eh? In any other walk of life the word 'grooming' might be brought up to describe such a relationship between a teenage boy and a middle-aged man in a position of authority. There, I'm doing it again! Sven is not a nonce! But it so easy to make such allegations and come up with 'evidence' of this kind to back them up. Let's face it, if either Sven or Gerrard lived on a council estate, by now their houses would be besieged by baying lynch mobs egged on by the tabloid press and opportunist right-wing politicians!