Perspective Please

Sport is by definition an artificial situation. Tennis is impossible if you ignore the lines. Likewise football doesn't work if the ball and the players don't stay on the pitch. That is the point of sport - it is pretend. If it weren't it would replicate real life, thus losing it's most popular appeal.

That's why managers standing in front of advertising boards in suits answering questions about 'their feelings' doesn't quite work. Suddenly everything's just a bit too serious.

Arsenal are, as I write these words, 7 points behind Chelsea who are at the top of the Premiership. Yet in his post match interview Arsene Wenger was asked whether he thought his team were still in with a chance of winning the title.

It is moments like these which confirm Roy Keane's observations 2 weeks ago as being accurate. Sport, and football in particular, has become such a large business, so blown out of all proportion, that the continual media narrative surrounding it is beginning to be shown in its true colours.

Obviously Arsenal can still win it (please note can not will). Of course they were never out of it. Last season it only took a draw and a loss before Alan Hansen proclaimed Man Utd were in crisis. This season the big shout from MOTD HQ is that this could be Liverpool's year.

"They're trying to sell something that's not there", was Keane's response to the supposed pressure Wenger was under via sections of the media following a run of poor results in November.

Similarly, Sky Sports have tonight opted to go for the headline: 'Scolari Blasts officials' following the Chelsea managers' relatively mild complaint about the referee in his post match interview.

But so long as sport remains big business, with big shiny coffers then this phony analysis will continue. An injury update will still merit a 'breaking news' strap, and men in suits will go on sitting around the MOTD table, discussing in the most somber of tones, the situation that Chelsea now find themselves in.

One point from three home games against their main title rivals - surely an opportunity for the pundits to deliver some cataclysmically over-hyped expertise on the dangers facing the team.

But we must remember the sports presenters' most frequent assignment is to talk about the trivial parts of sport: to find within them some kind of wisdom. Some kind of meaning.

Not every game can be a thriller. Not every goal a last minute pile-driver. What myself and Mr Keane crave, is just a little bit more perspective the rest of the time.