Super hyped

As Sky Sports try to inflict upon us, the watching public, the tedium that is Super Bowl, something truly worthy of the word super' is about to resume hitting the nation's screens.

A week today rugby league's elite game, engage Super League, roars back with the clash between Leeds Rhinos and Hull KR getting the new season of duels of daredevil derring-do off and running. Put your house on it, the boys with the ploys and the poise are back in town.

If anything it should at least put to shame the phoney shenanigans that go by the way of gridiron football, which is yet another American pastime that is being palmed off upon us like so many inflated pumpkins and over-inflated egos of Yankee businessmen - Aston Villa's learned owner Randy Lerner apart - invading our football in the hope of making a fast buck or few million or so.

Even back in the days of William the refrigerator' Perry and the then all- conquering Chicago Bears when gridiron's mastodons were a British television novelty, I just couldn't fathom its so-called popularity.

I even remember clubs springing up all over the place, including in my time as a sports reporter further along the A64, the Scarborough Warlords.

Oh come on, pur-lease. That's when American football was over-rated, over-hyped and even worse, over here.

Over time, some semblance of sense seems to have seeped back into the British sporting psyche as there are not that many gridiron clubs to shout about and thank the lord for that.

Even given the bewildering formations and tactics of what appears to be little more than an explosion of grunting chess on grass, let's say it's hardly a sport for the poor. Besides having to be built like titans to thrive, there's also a range of equipment enough to kit out the various militias of banana republics. No jumpers for goalposts here.

It's a game about money and for money. Just think of it's conclusion, the so-called Super Bowl and its self-important tag of so many Roman numerals. Okay the winners get to wear a Super Bowl ring and are feted within their own capacious shores as heroes, but in essence the sport is divvied up to maximise the most out of prime-time television advertising.

And I don't see why we should have such dubious attractions Detroit Rammed down our throats on the other side of the Atlantic. Okay, David Beckham has been exported, but he is no longer in the realm of football as a sport, more in the domain of fantasy la-la-land so suited to the land of the dollar free-for-all.

So let's embrace our own sports and do away with this unhealthy obsession with gridiron, especially when on our own doorstep there is the glorious, gung-ho, go-to sport of rugby league.

It may well be the start of Super League XIII, but it's a number that will not be unlucky to all those diehard fans of the 13-a-side game and all those who take up the chance of being newly acquainted. You will not be disappointed. The Super League scene is a thriving arena of gladiatorial combat in which the protagonists continue to put football's elite prima-donnas to shame.

They get hit - and boy do they get hit - but they then get up, shake themselves down and inevitably move on to the next collision. There's no rolling over like so much pampered tumbleweed trapped in a typhoon. They do not berate officials as if the men in black are their most mortal enemies, they do not contest decisions. They do not - either home-grown or imports - feign injury to get an opponent into trouble.

So as I said at the outset, hoist your arms and bring it on.

SPEAKING of signals, Manchester United boss Sir Alex Ferguson somehow escaped censure from the FA or Premier League after his none-too-subtle arm movements in the direction of Reading fans after his Red Devils secured a hard-earned victory over the Royals.

When he does eventually retire from Old Trafford, maybe a job as an air traffic controller could be an option. No pilot worth his wings would cross the direction accorded him by the Man U boss.