Diving for sardines

Welcome to my brand new blog. If I had a pound for every time I've written that, I could buy a football club. Not Chelsea or Arsenal, but I bet I could stretch to Wigan. Mind you, I could stretch to Wigan if I nailed my beer gut to a tree and fired myself due north in a rocket.

Which places me, as alert readers with access to Google maps will have already worked out, somewhere between Warrington and the Ivory Coast. Actually I'm in Bristol, England. If you're wondering which way my local loyalties lie, then I can reveal that I support the football team that remembered to organise a new stadium before they sold off the old one, rather than just squatting on the rugby club then nicking their ground while they were looking the other way.

Yes, I'm a Bristol City fan. Expect many panegyrics on the virtues of all things south and west in Bristol football, interspersed with fake pity and real laughter every time the Rovers fail to deliver on their fans' embarrassingly limited expectations.

My previous readers will know all of this. They will also know that I normally start with a range of topics, then let football gradually elbow out the competition like knotweed in a water meadow. Well not this time. This time I'm going to write about football from the get go. It'll save time in the long run.

And for once I've managed to do things with some sense of timing. The new season at Ashton Gate kicks off on Saturday with the visit of Ipswich, and at the end of the season there's the European Championship to look forward to. Happy days. Bollocks to summer fun, football is where it's at.

So why did I call my first post Diving for sardines? It is of course a reference to Eric Cantona's most notorious press conference, the one after he'd got sent off at Crystal Palace and then karate kicked a fan who was taunting him. I was going to say Man Utd legend Eric Cantona, but to be honest if you don't know who Eric Cantona played for you may be in the wrong place.

Or not. For I do like to sprinkle my football writing with references to non-sporting subjects, and you may be interested in some of those. In the past I've namechecked the Iliad, Planck's Constant, sodomy, Daleks and nematode worms. If none of those float your boat I despair for you.

Again, and do feel free to cyberslap me when my habit of wandering off the point exceeds the tolerable, why the Cantona quote? Well, he was talking about the gutter press. When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea, he said. He meant that the assorted hacks (a more fitting name for a sleazy journo than the person who coined it probably realised) were gathered at his press conference in the hope that he might chuck them a tasty line or two, that they could turn into a column. Of course we know now they were probably listening to his phone calls anyway, but at the time he probably imagined he had some level of control over the story gathering process.

His line impressed me for two reasons. Firstly, it was a gratuitously obscure way of saying something fairly straightforward. Secondly, and this is the crucial bit, he'd made no effort at all to tailor his remarks to his audience.

For these weren't just any old hacks, they were unreconstructed football hacks, and football hacks make your average hack look like C P Snow. If you aren't moaning about losing the dressing room early doors after the referee missed the blatant handbags, they're as reluctant as they are ill-equipped to make the cognitive leap into your world. They'll have to ask the guy from the Guardian what the hell you're talking about, he'll tell them it was a simile when it was actually a metaphor just to see if they print it, and by the time the dust settles you've made more enemies than Rowan Williams in a gay bar.

And therein lies the genius of it. Cantona's sublime indifference to his audience. I would so love to make him my role model for this blog, if only I could affect such gentlemanly disregard for all of you.

Unfortunately I'm the one scrabbling for titbits, not the one chucking them out, which is why I've called this Diving for sardines rather than Trawling for a better class of fish whilst mysteriously discarding the sardines you've already caught even though people are perfectly willing to buy them in tins. Despite the commercial unwisdom of Eric's piscine rhetoric, there's just no avoiding the fact that I'm a few steps down the food chain from him.

So the next time Craig Bellamy refuses to play until somebody gives him an ice cream, or Alex Ferguson gets enough of a lather up to froth his own lattes, I really wouldn't expect me to rise above it. Their frightfulness is my material, and your momentary distraction.

It's going to be a great season.