Silly Sepp's at it again

'Penalties remain the best way to decide a game in the case of a draw, but if anybody has a better idea, I am ready to listen to it.'

At least that is something. The problem is, football has been listening to the 68-year-old Blatter - and his stranger-than-fiction ideas - for far too long. Theories which, were they ever put into practice, would turn the Beautiful Game into instant chaos.

Whether it be playing four quarters instead of two halves, larger goals or banning the sliding tackle. Then there was his proposal to stage the World Cup every two years instead of the present four - a suggestion which was met with horror from everyone outside FIFA's finance office.

Blatter retracted that proposal with greater speed than his whistle-stop, filled-brown-paperbag visits to countries with FIFA council voting delegates ahead of his dubious re-election to the presidency in 2002. Still the crackpot cranium has kept on dreaming and the visions of a football world to call his own have kept coming.

Remember the one about suspending a player who had been sent off from the following match, even if his appeal had not been heard? Thankfully, the FA refused to toe the line.

Or his 21st century man approach to the women's game? Skin-tight hot pants, that will bring the fans and the television viewers in, according to Sepp the Strange. His Zurich office is still reverberating with the cries of outrage from women's groups over that one.

And what about the discarding of the throw-in in favour of a touchline kick-in - a policy which even made it as far as England's semiprofessional footballers of the Ryman League and which they were soon happy to boot out.

Talk about flying in the face of logic and the views of the majority. While most people in football accept that video replays have a part to play in the game of the future, the Swiss yesterday also vowed to oppose any such move. Progress towards absurdity, but not common sense.

Blatter's term of office ends in 2007, although he has already dropped hints that he may seek a third spell in charge. That means we may have another decade of dodgy decisions ahead of us.

Of his biennial World Cup idea, he famously later said: 'I have put the idea into a safe and have lost the combination to that safe. Let it stay there in peace.'

If only all his flashes of dubious inspiration could find such appropriate resting places.

Better still, let Sepp enter the vault with them.