91Èȱ¬

What you can't deny is the entertainment provided by this weekend. I'm not talking Shearer here, mind. How he's going to mend that shenanigans of a defence I do not know. I doubt Dowie does, but I'm glad he's back, if only 'cos his face looks like it must have been formed from undersea volcanic activity.

, so dependable early doors, is looking less like a footballer and more like one of them frothy cappuccinos with cinnamon sprinkles all over it. He tackles like one, too. It's a miserable consolation but at least the Magpies are coming down with us.

No, I'm talking about that immense five-goal thriller. You didn't see Shame on you. I swear that cup should be a massive silver plated five-litre tin of brilliant white emulsion with a five-week-old dried up brush sticking out of it. But I shouldn't jest. The Boro'll be playing for it soon enough.

was almost as good. At 2-1 down, with United playing like numpties and Carew vs Neville looking more like Godzilla vs a Vauxhall Corsa, the game looked up.

, after Liverpool had hit the woodwork more times than Gepetto, seemed to be too much for the flailing champs. Fergie was sitting there on the bench Allardycing his chewing gum like a sheep who's whiffed a Rottweiler at the end of his field.

Worse still, he'd looked in his reserves and found that the cupboard was bare. Not a Forlan to be seen. So he sends on some 17-year-old no-mark who no one's ever heard of. said me mateTony Thompson, "Isn't that some sort of Spanish cheese?" Some spod muttered darkly about the lad having scored a hat-trick against Newcastle reserves on Monday - but having seen the first team, just imagine how easy it would be to score against a bunch of second-string barcodes.

The ale flowed, as did the sniggering behind the hands, as Man U didn't so much attack in waves as in ripples and Davies and Cuellar looked fine and dandy. But then United do have the. (A lot more gel than tumble on Sunday I'm pleased to say).

As I've said before, the lad's a pouting little prancer and about as charming as a pickled egg, but by heck he's a threat. He did nowt except score two cracking goals. If he does go to Real there's no one to replace him.

But the suspiciously middle-aged looking teenager was the superstar. It was one of them goals that you won't forget. Like Rooney's winner against Arsenal when he was nothing but a hairy 16-year-old. And Gazza lifting the ball over Colin Hendry and leaving the defender flat on his back like a slapstick vaudevillian's stooge before driving in the volley.

Goals that make you sneak out on to some dirty lump of open ground in front of a slumped and rusty white rectangle of a goal, and make your mate be Giggsy so you can be the glory boy. Looks like the lad enjoys a bit of limelight too, although I could do without this kissing the camera malarkey. I'm still having nightmares about Gerrard's full-frontal snog on my telly (although I'm guessing the average Liverpool fan has got it as a knee-weakening screen-saver now).

But these late twists just go to prove summat that I've known since I was able to shape me own jumper into a goalpost. Football is the greatest game on earth. And even though them herberts who go out there and for the cost of two terraced houses in a Northern town a week, pose and plummet and whinge and wail, they're still just trying to stick a pig's bladder between two sticks.

Some people say that to devalue the sport. To me it makes the whole thing way, way better. 'Cos anyone - from a porky lump like meself to a cocky Roman adolescent - can enjoy that unbelievable feeling.

Of the three goals I have scored for the Blue Bell, one was a ricochet off me knee, another one had me team-mates saying it was converted by the Hand of Sod, but the third... oh dear readers the third...!

A cleared header came looping out to us - some say it was at the edge of the penalty box but since when have penalty boxes been 40 yards long? As it dropped I was being closed down by the full force of a midfield populated by inhabitants of Acklam.

Suffice to say it was like sidestepping a slow angry traction engine. With my left foot I flicked it up and with the right I delivered the whipcrack thunderbolt that dipped and swerved and picked out the keeper's top corner with a pinpoint accuracy that would make blench.

Now if you ask regulars about it, they'll just lie about the distance, power of the shot and the weight and height of their keeper. But if you'd have been there, boys and girls, you'd all be trying to recreate it in your local park as we speak.