CONFESS if you think the Matt Prior windowgate incident was an unnecessary pain. Cricketer smashes window. Big deal.

Okay, someone may have got injured, but they did not, save for a scratched ankle.

Even if there wasn’t a strop or a misdirected glove/bat/box/cap/shoe – insert appropriate offending article/missile – any window can shatter should a door be flung shut too powerfully after being caught by the wind.

What happened was an accident, not malicious, not intentional, just accidental. One of those things.

Prior was contrite, rightly so, and apologised but to make it almost a subject for a parliamentary inquiry was scratching at a molehill underpinned by a conviction that somehow it would transform into Everest proportions.

Unfortunately, that’s what’s happening in sport all the time. Every incident, every action, every reaction, every twist and turn comes under the brightest of spotlights, is subject to the keenest of scrutiny.

If it’s not in the papers, or on the telly, or on the radio, it’s on the pox of tubeface or in the orbit of the trite and tripe domain of tweetery.

Even the most banal by-product of sport attracts an undue, unwarranted, undeserved volume of attention. I mean Wayne Rooney has a hair transplant. Cue pictures of fledgling follicles. Yee-haa, or should that be yee-hair.

Whatever, it does not mean a jot what the clot spends his gotten gains on. If he wants to waste £30,000 on trying to defy mother nature or deny the ageing process then go ahead my son – ’ave it.

Meanwhile, Roo-Roo’s England peer Rio Ferdinand comes under attack for his errant vocabulary used in his twittering broadcasts. Look, he’s Billy’s Boots not Billy Shakespeare. What do you expect, the poet laureate?

Elite sport is unashamedly and irrevocably snared in the realm of celebrity. Pandora’s box has not only been opened, it has been violently jemmied with a bling-encrusted crowbar. Contents have been cast to the free-for-all, the container discarded as so much landfill. In all likelihood Pandora is probably a wag.

Whether it is how much a betrothed couple will betray to a glossy magazine for exclusive coverage of their nuptials, or whether it’s the more insidious ascent of the Giggs, that is a super-injunction rendered super-useless and mega-expensive by social networking phenomena, it’s all out there in inglorious high- definition and at the casual flick of a digit.

Regrettably, such flummery and fluff will only get worse over the summer.

With no major international football tournament at which England can flop – it’s one of those barren years – the gaping maw of the media has to bite on something and so it will be excesses of football and more on the sins rather than wins in the traditional summer sports of cricket, tennis and athletics.

No wonder Andy Murray, Scotland’s greatest tennis player since William Wallace kept volleying the hapless English back over the border, looks so miserable.

Knowing full well he has a Macbeth-type coven of Rafa Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer to negotiate before being anywhere near getting a grip on any sort of grand slam silverware, he will also have the prying prurience of the media spotlight to cope with.

For any home-grown player Wimbledon’s All-England grass championships morph malevolently into the biggest glass fishbowl on earth.

Big-fish Murray, small fry wildcard specimens – it matters not, they will all get the treatment should they last a mere afternoon, or somehow (Murray being the only one in this pool) survive to the end of the flim-flam filled fortnight.

What they eat, what they don’t eat. What they should eat. Who they meet, who they shouldn’t meet. Who they greet. The state of their seat/feet/sheets – it’s all fair game in that tree-lined, well-heeled and prosperous corner of south London.

I bet Britain’s number two Jamie Ward was even relieved that his best ever victory, toppling world number 14 Stanislas Warwinka of Switzerland during the current warm-up tournament at Queens, escaped too much attention.

In a classic case of BBC sports bulletin nonsense they hailed Ward’s triumph only to admit their cameras had not stayed long enough to capture said win, but, the announcer added: “here’s some footage of Andy Roddick winning instead”.

Priceless, but at least Ward remained elusive, though you suspect not for long as the summer-time jackal-pack try to sate their appetite starved of the diet of football.