Scruff and readies

With four days left to go to the end of the transfer window, no doubt there will be such a madcap, pell-mell scramble to bring in new blood it will feel as if a legion of voracious vampires will have arisen through Hell’s gate to be let loose among the game’s grounds.

And you can bet your crisp £100 note that supervising all the blood-letting with a celtic yelp and a yee-haa will be chief bloodsucker hunter himself Jim White, the Van Helsing of Sky Sports, who soars into his own hyperbaric chamber of hyperbole for his satellite telly paymasters as the high-tech clock tick-tocks its way to the final toll.

For all the feverish speculation and fabrication, the souped-up scoops and earth-shattering breaking news-bars just don’t do it for me.

What’s really doing me ’ead in this week is just how scruffy the top-flight game has got.

It’s not exactly a new phenomenon. Fans have got used to seeing the men-kids they follow bedecked in about-turned caps in which they resemble a considerably thinner crowd scene from an American gridiron crowd.

Then there’s the accessories.

Multi-coloured trainers with the heft of your average Hummer and wrist-watches that should be renamed elbow-watches given their diamond-encrusted faces of Big Ben dimensions. And what about the ubiquitous headphones the size of dustbin lids, for those of you out there who can still recall what a dustbin lid actually looks like.

Our top-flight footballers are often espied clad in such a fashion before and after matches. If avaricious accessory companies had their way they’d probably still be sporting such ostentatious wares on the pitch.

So the tradition of rank shoddiness is not new.

But it reached new depths this week with Samir Nasri, the new adornment to the sky blue Manchester City project.

There he is pictured arriving at the club’s Eastlands, sorry Etihad Stadium, and he looks as if he has not long risen from the pit and has decided to go and collect his GCSE results, rather than a four-year multi-million mega contract with the world’s richest football club.

T-shirt – no doubt designer, natch, – jeans – designer again – and a pair of loafers – yep, surely carrying another exclusive label. Now I know said apparel will have likely cost more than you and me would earn in a month, sorry make that three months, but come on.

At the risk of sounding like I’ve just completed my first purchase of Werthers to slip ever so comfortably into the voluminous pocket of my beige Greenwoods’ cardie, I still believe Monsieur Nasri could have made a bit more of an effort.

Effectively he was going to a job interview, admittedly aware he had been head-hunted from the Premier League’s new selling club, Arsenal, and also basking in the knowledge that his prospective new employers had not only pursued him for weeks on end, though it felt like light years, but had dangled wads of wonga in front of his Gallic gaze.

But still and all. He could have arrived at his new place of employment not looking like an extra from the cast of The Inbetweeners.

Scrutinising the picture closer, I do believe the mercurial midfielder – footy-speak for someone with ball skills who can often drift out of a game for long periods – is not even wearing any socks.

Listen Samir, you’re in Manchester now, not Malaga or Malibu or the bloody Maldives. No socks, pah.

It’s a far cry from those days when transfers were first conducted in hush-hush talks at a motorway services station – you couldn’t get past the concession stands, booming amusement arcades, cuddly toys and fast-food outlets nowadays.

From there a suited player, wearing a nervous smile for the cameras, would then hold the chairman’s fountain-pen above a contract flanked by a gurning manager and the self-same chairman keeping his beady eyes on where the pen is going once the deal has been inked.

No, now you just turn up – Sky Sports cameras in tow – looking as if you’ve interrupted a summer holiday on some exotic beach to complete the boring task of being showered in yet more cash.

Scruff and readies – the new dress code.