Cretins won't damage the beautiful game

Go anywhere in this country this weekend, anywhere at all, and you will not be far from an organised game of football.

You will probably not be far from several, since parks and playing fields are colonised from early light until dusk by football folk, and some scraps of land even stage several games side by side.

The matches vary from seven-a-side friendlies between small children on small pitches, to full-scale games in front of proper grandstands and all of them will attract spectators. Even if they are only between Sunday morning pub teams, games are watched by knots of parents, partners, supporters and interested passers-by.

And, despite the difficulties faced by ITV's Premiership coverage and by ITV digital, football is still by far the most popular televised sport. Audiences have been fragmented because there is football on TV every night, but big matches still attract figures which make advertisers drool.

So it is clear that playing and watching football is the preferred leisure pursuit of a huge swathe of the population.

For many of us, it is more than that. It is a passion which has stayed with us and sustained us since we were first able to toddle after a ball; a cathartic release capable of evoking every emotion we possess. Are we mad, or just stupid?

Clearly, some people think we must be. It has been apparent this week that some people just cannot fathom the appeal of football. That is their loss but it is arrogant of them to assume that the millions of us who love it are all part of some lumpen subspecies worthy only of disdain.

And why do some of them hate football so much? It is one thing not to like it, but why does it provoke such vitriol? It cannot be entirely because the critics remember the humiliation of being utterly useless during games at school. It can't be, can it? The hatred is certainly not based on any logical appraisal. Ranting on about football because of the drunken yobbery of a few Premiership oiks is as silly as to suggest that newspapers are rotten to the core because of the alarming alcohol abuse by some journalists (although the last person I saw urinate in public was not a footballer, he was a newspaper man).

Yet because football has been betrayed by a few men behaving extremely badly, those of us who love the game have been put on the defensive this week.

We need not be. The game is too strong to be seriously damaged by Lee Bowyer or newspaper columnists.