Fantasy Football, the way it should be.

Something strange happened to me last weekend. 6^th August 2011 marked the start of the new football season. After months of being sick of seeing the words Modric, Lukaku, Sneijder, Fabregas and DNA on the back pages, I thought 3:00pm Saturday afternoon and the dawn of season 2011/12 would create a wonderful feeling.

Let’s be honest, in so many ways, football is rubbish now. These days there seems to be so much to hate in the game. I’ve long been a lobbyist of supporting your club instead of wasting that same energy on hating everything and everyone else in the game, but now I feel I’m falling into the same trap as the negative types you see bemoaning their club’s new signing/the manager’s tactics/the chairman’s lack of spending, as their betting slip cascades as confetti to the floor of the George and Dragon. Is it cynicism creeping up on me with middle age looming on the horizon, or is my new-found anger towards the game I’ve spent 29 years in love with justified?

5pm Saturday, where the sound of 1000 hopes and accumulators get destroyed.

The nouveau riche. Television companies keeping you in the dark as to whether you need to book Saturday or Sunday off work for the match. Players cheating. Monotonous, bland, predictable press conferences, taken by journalists who know it’s more than their career and reputation is worth to ask controversial questions, and tow the club’s line at all times. The Respect campaign that doesn’t appear to have any attributes or objectives. The Old Firm being more about violence than football. Marlon King having a job. WAGs. The demand of instant success. A luxury burger that costs double the hourly minimum wage. And a pie that, well, there aren’t any these days.

Missing. Last seen at a football game near you.

As FIFA continue their dictatorship of football, with Sepp and his colleagues recreating the opening credits from Duck Tales as they splash around in bathtubs full of Swiss Francs of a weekend, the game is taken further and further away from the people who care about it. So what do we have to look forward to? Is there anything that might be able to raise a smile in the annual round of arguments about tapping-up, not-that-kind-of-playerisms, frame-by-frame replays of decisions so that pundits in tight trousers can inform us in glorious high definition about how the referee is wrong, and fans berating the chairman for ignoring all of their player knowledge gloriously acquired from Football Manager and YouTube.

Beautifully, there remain a few rays of sunshine in our game. My mind drifted their way while creating my fantasy football team this year – and let me tell you that creating a team under the blanket of ‘fantasy’ while weighing up the comparable merits of Hugo Rodallega and Abou Diaby is not easy – as I started to make a much more interesting dream team. A team that would make football fun again. Fortunately, the last few years have seen a few characters appearing on the football landscape that it’s sometimes easy to hate, but frustratingly they make you smile, gasp, talk or laugh in the sea of monotony, anger and frustration that surrounds Sky’s sport. So I did that instead.

Owners seemed like such a simple choice. While La Liga is full of chairman as erratic as Joey Barton’s Twitter feed, and Manchester City’s Arabs deserve a mention for their sheer bull in a china shop, scattergun mentality, there can only be one winner, so step forward, Vladimir Romanov.

Mr. Romanov’s antics at the helm of Hearts need no introduction, but I will anyway. After accusations of bribery regarding referees and the Old Firm clubs and threatening to sell each and every member of his playing squad to “Whichever club would take them”, he decided that wasn’t enough, and proceeded to show an unnerving amount of sympathy to the game’s sex offenders, firstly by bringing Graham Rix out of the wilderness, and then by sticking by Craig Thomson as the judge’s gavel still echoed.

As nutty as a box of squirrels, but from an outsider’s point of view, he is car crash management. The manager simply has to be Jose Mourinho, bursting into our consciousness via a sprint down the Old Trafford touchline which would have made Usain Bolt proud, he followed that up by taking his amateur philosophy and tales of conspiracy across four countries, leaving a trail of plaudits, critics, enemies and silverware in equal measures in his wake.

Hi, I’m Jose Mourinho, and I’m better than you.

But every successful manager needs a strong assistant, and they don’t come any stronger than Joe Jordan. Anybody who can follow a win in the San Siro with a tête-à-tête with Genaro Gattuso deserves all the credit he gets. It was once commented that Jordan’s only role on the touchline at White Hart Lane was to wind up the opposition coaching team and fourth officials. Now that’s a job title to be proud of. He’s in.

With a strong backroom team, it seems only fair to challenge them, so how about some strong egos for them to control? Oh yes, that’ll be you, Mario Balotelli. Love him or hate him… no, actually, I won’t have that. How can you hate him? So what’s a few darts at youth team players between friends? His actions since joining the Premier League have been the cause of much bar room conversation, and no small amount of laughs. He’s as far as can be from the “Well, I think the lads did great, it was tough out there but we’re delighted with the three points at the end of the day” bull that we are force-fed by thousands of others in the football spectrum. How many other footballers drive bullying victims back to school in a Maserati in order to thrash out a cure with the headmaster? I’m sure we can all agree that his alleged “Tweet that, you dick” comment to Rio Ferdinand after dumping Manchester United out of the FA Cup is particularly worthy of substantial praise on its own.

On the subject of ego, it seems only fair that we have a mention of Nicklas Bendtner. A man whose self perception of his own ability to actual ability ratio runs into treble figures. His tales of interest from Europe’s elite, before finally being linked with a Premier League team who have the sole goal of surviving relegation are matched only by Adel Taarabt. While they claim to be weighing up the prospective merits of offers from Barcelona, Inter Milan and Manchester United, it’s easy to imagine they’re really at home playing Football Manager, offering themselves enormous lucrative contracts to ply their trade at the Nou Camp.

Hi, I’m Nicklas Bendtner, and I’m not as good as you.

A goalkeeper would be simple, assuming we can talk Jens Lehmann out of retiring for a few years. A wonderfully ridiculous human being, Jens’ calamitous goalkeeping combined with his fondness for ripping off the hairbands of opponents, throwing opponent’s boots into the stands and disappearing from the pitch to relieve himself during open play in a Champions League match have caused hilarity to ensue throughout Europe over nearly a decade. His encore at the Emirates at the end of last season gave us all what we wanted, and I would love to see it continue further.

Franck Ribery? Underage prostitutes aside (hey, we all make mistakes, right?), the idea of taking the team bus for a spin before crashing it in spectacular fashion is an idea that may not be the brightest, but certainly one that offers us something different to read in the sports pages.

Marko Arnautovi? is another who deserves a place. Aside from the expected nightclub bust-ups (which once earned him a ban from both club and country), he decided to vocalize his opinion that Werder Bremen is “a dump”. While he played there. Right into a TV camera. Another who seems to have a permanent clutch disengaging his brain from his mouth, he’s also celebrated goals by kissing hard-hitting opposing defenders on the head, fallen out with Jose Mourinho, and stormed off of the pitch.

Arnautovic not being a mental case.

Speaking of unwise comments to cameras, Wayne Rooney can have the number ten shirt. Fresh from causing talking points with his elbows, he’s certainly not impartial to cheating on his wife with those three times his age, having wedding-day brawls or indeed, partaking in a small monologue with a television camera, thanking the fans for their continued support in the World Cup, or requesting the fans at home to go away.

Anyway, I’m not here to give you a list of football players. But I have noticed that my team includes a host of attackers. Now that’s the kind of football we can get on board with. Why mess around with 4-2-3-1 when you can stick eight up front and be done with it? But I feel some questions are still left unanswered. Will it be down to people like these to finally give us something to smile about in the game again, or is there anything else that can be done to save football?

For now it feels that I’ll have only the excitement provided by a select few in the game to keep the football fire burning bright in my belly.

Please come back, football I once knew. Where did you go? You were so important to me. Your work was my life.