World Gone Wrong

By a yawning margin, this has been the dreariest season Foul Play has sat through in living memory. Man United are walking away with the league on the strength of about four good performances all year, the Scottish title race has been wrapped up before the arrival of the first cuckoo of spring, Ireland aren't going to the European Championships, and the most entertaining team in the Champions League so far has been Bayern Munich, which rather says it all.
Even Euro 2000, in keeping with the general mood of the season thus far, kicks off with an enticing-looking fixture between Belgium and Sweden, the Stereophonics of international football.
If individual seasons can be recalled in the mind's eye with recourse to one particularly enduring image Man United's disgraceful indiscipline in the 1993-94 campaign, Robbie Fowler's week-by-week avalanche of goals in 1995-96, the wizardry of Bergkamp and Overmars in 1997-98 then this particular campaign has been decidedly short on memorable visual signifiers.
The sight of Mickakl Silvestre continually defending like the proverbial cat on a hot tin roof might remain in the memory, given that by general consent he is the worst player to pull on a Man United shirt in living memory he must be in possession of polaroids of Ferguson romping with a Friesian heifer to have remained in the team this long.
But generally, I'd hazard a guess that most fans will hark back to the sight of Leicester humping it up to Matt Elliott and Emile Heskey again and again. Repeated according to taste.
They are ubiquitous. And with each new appearance on the TV screens of the nation, they haunt my dreams with ever greater intensity.
Since December, these blue-shirted bolloxes have taken up valuable television schedule space against Everton, Sunderland, Arsenal and West Ham in the league and again with a seemingly endless slew of cup replays against the Arse and Aston Villa, all of which dragged the viewer through interminable periods of extra-time before the merciful release of the penalty shootout.
There were also the myriad grotesqueries of their Worthington Cup final appearance, which I really don't want to think about any more, because it makes my head hurt.
It is not necessarily Leicester's fault that they seem to take up about four hours of prime-time TV every week, but it is their fault that, once they get in front of the cameras, they seem to take a perverse delight in serving up some of the foulest football witnessed since Iain Durrant and Derek McInnes were running Rangers' midfield.
And once the Worthington Cup final was done and dusted, just when you thought you'd seen the last of them for two weeks at least, back they come the following Sunday against Sunderland.
At least that one had a couple of nice goals in it. Which proved that, to paraphrase Morrissey, there is more to Leicester than the hopeful up-and-under tactics they inflict on the public but not much more.
You'll be pleased to hear that they're on Sky Sports yet again in a couple of weeks, against Spurs. Mercifully, it's a league game, so at least it can't go to extra time. Still, that's never stopped Leicester before.
Since depression seems to be the main dish on the menu this week, there can surely be no better way to wrap up the column than pondering the inadequacies of our good friends at Celtic Park.
Impressive as they were last Wednesday night, there was a sickening inevitability about the way they left their defensive stations unmanned with four minutes to go, allowing the increasingly portly Rod Wallace to nip in for Rangers' disgracefully undeserved winner.
Was Foul Play the only onlooker who sensed what was coming when Celtic's big Swedish stopper Mjdllby was hauled off and replaced by a striker (Burchill) mere seconds before the goal, in the process leaving a defensive hole the size of Wallace's not inconsiderable arse?
At least we were relatively inured to it by this stage. After all, the Huns spent the entirety of the Nineties vanquishing Celtic in this manner, nicking a late goal after playing like dogs. The best you could say about the latest catastrophe was that at least it didn't take place at Ibrox.
At the weekend, Celtic picked themselves up to defeat St Johnstone in typically high-handed manner, with the mysterious Rafael Scheidt making his long-awaited debut.
Scheidt (or Rafael as we've been ordered to call him) will at least keep the unamusing likes of Ally McCoist and Alistair MacGowan in cheap gags for a while. But all the bizarrely-named Brazilians in the world cannot compensate for the fact that the Celts face a rebuilding job and a half this summer. Apart from Larsson, Stubbs, Viduka, Moravcmk, Boyd and the incomparable Paul Lambert, this is the worst Celtic team since the dark days of Lou Macari.
Something resembling a midfield would be nice, not to mention an authoritative goalkeeper, a wide player who can cross the ball for shit, a striker who isn't humming and hawing every five minutes about leaving the club, and, perhaps most pressingly of all, a left-back with a firm grasp of the basics of defending.
I await the call.