Football when I was a kid: A hotdog, packet of roasted peanuts (30 pence a bag), 22 players, a referee, two linesmen and a ball. For more than 100 years it was enough, and football was the biggest game in the world.
But the mentalists at FIFA can't leave it alone. Next season, the Champions League will be home to the ridiculous experiment of six referees in a game.
It seems that it was such a roaring success in the Europa League last season that they want to try it out on the biggest stage of all. Except it wasn't. Anyone who saw the farcical last few minutes of Fulham vs Roma, when the referee tried to send off 9ft 12in(ish) blonde Brede Hangeland for a foul committed in the box by 4ft 5in(ish) brown-haired Michael Brown, will know the extra officials merely caused masses of confusion, a 10-minute delay and made a joke out of a competition which, let's face it, really didn't need any help.
Why can't they just leave the game as it is? Controversial decisions and human error are part of what makes football so appealing. I'm the first to get mildly irritated (!) when we're robbed of a Champions League semi-final place by the scousers thanks to two terrible penalty decisions over two games (still bitter). But we've benefitted from a few bad decisions ourselves in the past, and you shouldn't want to change football's controversies for all the virgins in Steven Gerrard's address book.
And I'll tell you why: it's these things that fuel the talking points after games, get the arguments going among colleagues and friends, give the pundits and the phone-in shows a reason for being. It's also these incidents which give you an 'out' for your team's shite performance. How many times have Arsenal had a total shocker but the only talking point in the boozer has been how we were robbed by a corner that wasn't, a linesman's flag or a sending off? I bet there was many a game where Phillipe Senderos longed for a bit of controversy to take the focus off his game.
More than this, though, it's the current refereeing set-up that gives me those few nano-seconds of hope, that briefest chance of salvation, that glimmer that all is not lost when the opposition pops one into the goal down below me. Just as it hits the net but before the faint sound of the opposing fans' celebrations reaches the North Bank, I always catch myself glancing to the linesman for that signal that he's seen an offside or a handball that just wasn't there - thereby ruling out the goal and preserving our title credentials. It's like a second chance at the lottery... you know it's incredibly unlikely, but all hope is not lost. You still check in hope.
I wish they would stop looking for ways to take that away from us, and leave the beautiful game as it. If you take all the controversy out of football, you might just be left with something that's not very interesting at all. Then people will lose the passion for it, the people at home will stop watching, and Sky might take its money elsewhere. Then where will we be?
If they have to clamp down on something, forget about the one 'goal' a season that did or didn't cross the line, and instead clamp down on Rooney swearing his face off down the camera through which kids are watching, or the players who break other players' legs because they don't have the ability to beat them fairly?
That's a cause much more worth fighting for.
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