SOMETHING for the weekend? Yes sir, if it means sports where dissent is not the norm and where physical collisions remain, in the main, sheer in their commitment, but eminently fair in their execution.

High-profile rugby league and rugby union battles will break out this weekend and what a contrast to the weekly, nay almost daily, snarl, sneer, grimace and grind of football.

Now, don't get me wrong. Football is, will always be I suspect, my numero uno sporting passion. It's ingrained, has been since I was a nipper, will likely remain so until I expire. It's a cradle to the grave thing.

But for all that it has its hooks in me, football nowadays is increasing in its sheer mean-spiritedness, its grasping venality, its cash-inspired lurch towards treating the public like so much dog crap on the undersides of Gucci shoes.

It's as if all players now parade their talents, some not rising much above mediocre, pock-marked by permanent scowls. If ever there was a perfect example of the modern footballer - loaded, lacerating in expression, and loud in inflated measure of their own ability - it's Craig Bellamy.

Few of these present players are fit to lace the boots of a Best, Law, Mackay, Baxter, Crerand, Banks, Moore, Bremner, Smith, Keegan, Giles, Bell, Dalglish, Worthington etc.

Then there are those who went before existing on what were nothing other than serf's wages - Dean, Finney, Carter, Lofthouse, Edwards, Liddell. Now there's speculation that Steven Gerrard - hewn from my own birthplace - is poised for a summer move to Chelsea for the outrageous sum of £120,000 a week. I bet Tom Finney never pocketed that much in all his distinguished decades of playing for his only club Preston.

Yet for all the riches the current stars are trousering, they don't seem to express much joy in the so-called beautiful game.

If evidence were needed of such disenchantment with football you only had to point to two of several examples in the recent Carling Cup duel between Manchester United and Chelsea.

United's prodigy Wayne Rooney was flagged for straying offside and his close-up remark to the referee would have left dockers red-faced. The future of football? Yes, but you might also get your pint curdled at 500 metres by an expression more venomous than viper vomit.

In the same game there was a clash between United's Quinton Fortune and Chelsea's Didier Drogba after which the latter might well have been shot by several snipers behind the grassy knoll.

Roy Keane, himself no stranger to bulging veins in foreheads, quietly suggested that Drogba was not so much making a meal of it as a banquet complete with silver service and attended by flunkies with white gloves.

That's why I am more than ready to embrace this weekend's action with the oval ball.

First off, Leeds Rhinos - Great Britain's rugby league titans - tackle the Canterbury Bulldogs in the World Club Challenge on Friday night.

Ironically, the game will be at Leeds United's Elland Road, but any resemblance between football and league will be fleeting.

The collisions between the respective opponents will be awesome, bone-shuddering and brazen. But the respective protagonists will just get on with it, shrug off the big-hits and play on. The referee and his touch judges will be spared any foul-mouthed outbursts too.

Similarly, respect for the officials will be to the fore in rugby union, whose Six-Nations tournament kicks off this weekend.

Here amid pulsating patriotic fervour, no-one bellows obscenity after obscenity at anyone bearing a whistle or a flag, let alone screams red, white and blue murder anytime someone dares breathe on them.

Come on football. Heed the respective and respectful oval codes otherwise there may yet be more serious defections from your infected acres.

Updated: 09:12 Tuesday, February 01, 2005