The Old Testament prophet Hosea was ordered by God to marry a prostitute, so that by seeing his wife going off with other men all the time, he would understand how God felt about the unfaithfulness of his people. These days he’d just be told to support a lower division football team.

Football, it seems, is back and as far as my Rovers are concerned, it began with a defeat away to Peterborough. I was hoping for a good start this season as we rarely seem to get going before October, but I won’t panic; of the other two fancied teams in the division, Bristol City drew at home to promoted Torquay, and Sheffield Wednesday were trounced at home by Colchester. We’re bedding in half a new defence and midfield and all the pre-season friendlies in the world won’t make that much difference away to an unpredictable quantity like Peterborough, especially where a born man-manager like Barry Fry is involved. Quality will out- once Simon Haworth is match fit after his broken leg and Jason McAteer and Iain Hume have worked out how to play alongside each other, we’ll be a different prospect. This is the phoney war- there’s no such thing as form at the moment, and it’s just a case of doing our best and picking up points so we don’t find ourselves bottom at the end of September. Brian Little has nerves of steel and knows what he’s doing.

It may be a vain hope, but now that we’re actually playing football it’d be nice if all the behind the scenes stuff quietened down for a bit. Unless you’re Greek, Euro 2004 was a bit of an anticlimax- all the major footballing nations of Europe seem to be past their best and England as ever seem to find it hard to break down weaker sides, often having to go a goal down to find themselves. Given the mediocre seasons that most of the England players had had, I didn’t really have any expectation of the side. It’s become standard practice these days for national coaches to fall on their swords following failure in a major championship and this seems to be at the root of the current problems with Eriksson- after four years, England under Eriksson have done slightly better than under previous managers, but not much more. In the 1998 World Cup we made the second round; in 2002 the quarter-finals. In Euro 2000, we failed to qualify from the group stage and Gary Neville was offered Romanian citizenship; this year we made the quarters. It’s not so much a case of being in the shadow of 1966- more pertinently, it’s the shadows of 1990 and 1996 when we were mixing it with the best that now haunts the England camp.

However, Sven wants to go on, and he’d be a fool not to. Having been courted by club management towards the end of last season, he was offered a very lucrative long-term deal by the FA immediately before Euro 2004 and it’ll cost them a fortune to pay him off. So in an attempt to get rid of him, it seems as if somebody had the idea of putting together a trumped-up misconduct charge, which backfired as it turned out that FA chief exec Mark Palios had also had a fling with the same secretary. While it isn’t a hanging offence for a chief exec to shag a secretary, Palios could have been compromised if Sven had been found guilty of misconduct. Palios might then have been obliged to fire Sven for something he’d done himself, so clearly resigned to avoid that situation. It’s a shame- Palios was perhaps uniquely qualified to hold a senior position within football, having had a few seasons on the wing at Tranmere while studying for his accountancy degree (well, it beats pulling pints) and so could look at situations from the money point of view and also from a knowledge of the position of the smaller clubs. He’ll be hard to replace- there aren’t that many people with his background, and in the event that somebody buys Tranmere, I’d like to think they’d give him a seat on the board. But if nothing else, at least we know now that Sven is only in it for the money.