Ah, Bless. Poor dears.....

"The collateral damage this decision will do.... we're all going to be hit by this..." said the man interviewed on the News.

He was bemoaning the regulator's decision to tell BSkyB it must charge less for allowing other TV providers to show its content. Well, yes, I rather think you will be, and I am glad to hear it. I very much hope that it is the start of what will be a hugely sensible process of reducing the amount of money poured into sports.

The 'stars' will have to put up with earning a bit less - say only four or five times as much in a year as some folk can earn in years (even in the prosperous West). Poor things.

Sport ceased to be real when competitors began to earn huge sums of money. Long ago, the caretaker of our old village institute was a chap who had once played for Doncaster Rovers, in the days when you finished your shift at the Pit, changed, grabbed your boots and caught the bus to town (sometimes 10 or 12 miles away) to practice. And spent your day-off (if you got one) cycling off to play in the team for the princely sum of about 10 bob (shilings) !! And all that in the days of heavy leather boots; heavy leather ball; and mud pitches in ice and hail.

They - he said - played the game for the love of it in a way folk have lost today. None of this fancy 'professional fouling' either - for when you tackled a man, you had to remember that he had week-day work to do and a wife and children who depended on him.

No, it was not all perfect and lovely. But it was somehow possessed of integrity, in a way that sport today no longer can be. Sky really take the biscuit, too - for they will actually end up profiting more from the proposed new rules. But as one of their former executives has observed, their trouble is they don't like losing control of things. And of course there is always pressure from a huge greedy sporting lobby, anxious to protect its place in the gravy train trough.

I do not think everyone in sport is wicked. But the culture has become skewed. As ever, there is nothing wrong with money or wealth in themselves. But the misuse of them, is a source of much evil. Pity our poor cricketers and footballers who may soon, I hope, only be able to own one car and one house at a time....