SO THIS is what football has descended to!

The big pre-season issue is not who has signed which player, or is your team looking in good shape? No, it’s are your club allowing vuvuzelas into the ground?

So far the outcome appears to be marked along the lines of rich and poor.

If you follow a rich club (Chelsea, Tottenham and Arsenal) then you will not be allowed to bring those horrible plastic horn things to the game and lower the tone.

If you follow a poorer club then you will be able to turn up and annoy everyone around you with your silly trumpet – so long as you have paid your entrance money.

Rumour has it that at Wigan Athletic you could bring a 76-piece orchestra, a Mariachi band and a 50-strong French avant-garde art group who sit on whoopee cushions without them batting an eyelid – just so long as it puts bums on seats (which is a bit of a prerequisite really for the French performance artistes, obviously).

But I do think there is unnecessary panic in certain quarters.

At the World Cup in West Germany in 1974 everyone was deafened by the drone of klaxons.

Again there was concern that the following season the klaxons would become prevalent in our game – even though England hadn’t reached the finals – but it did not turn out to be the case.

In fact what happened was that only one supporter per club seemed to be able to afford one – or maybe fans just clubbed together given the expense – and the klaxon would be used in isolation as the basis for the ‘parp-parp, parp-parp-parp, parp-parp-parp-parp CITY!’ chant.

The only sport in which klaxons really took a grip was rugby league and to this day they are used at many clubs to designate when 40 minutes are up and anything that happens after that is solely the referee’s fault.

But while our players are rubbish on the world stage, I feel we have no need to worry about droning trumpets when our fans are still the world leaders in singing and chanting.

No other country is better at quick-witted chants and no other country has such a rich history of football songs.

As we all know clubs are known by their songs – Liverpool’s ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, Leeds United’s ‘Marching on Together’ and Stoke’s ‘Delilah’ instantly come to mind.

My favourites are Cheltenham’s tractor song, the Halifax Town (go on surely you remember them?) anthem ‘The Football League is upside down’, Sheffield United’s ‘Greasy chip butty’ to the tune of Annie’s Song, and Town’s reworked rendition of the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy In The UK’.

A bit of rubbish plastic from Africa will never kill off an art-form as strong as this.

GREED seems to be a big problem when it comes to modern-day sport.

Almost as soon as a wonderful new way of raising revenue has been discovered, someone somewhere has already got plans to take that particular golden goose and force feed it in the hope of foie gras for life.

Instead what happens is that the golden goose chokes and you are left with chicken and chips again.

Currently cricket’s Twenty/20 revolution, which at one stage was a five-star restaurant of sporting fun, seems to be heading towards being a Kentucky bucket in a skip.

Initially it pulled in the fans and caught the imagination of youngsters to an extent where as a dad you no longer felt you were torturing your kids by taking them to the cricket.

But this season the bubble has well and truly burst and there is only one reason for that – the game’s governors trying to milk the competition to death (sorry I seem to have started mixing my metaphors – unless of course you can milk a goose).

But in this summer’s competition the counties played six more games in group matches than they did the previous year and, guess what, attendances have suffered accordingly.

As exciting a product as Twenty/20 is, I have to say that over the seven years of the competition I have only ever really been driven by the urge to watch the Roses clashes home (Old Trafford) and away (Headingley) and I had a trip to the finals day at Edgbaston in 2004 when Lancashire sank lamely in the semi-finals.

While for the average punter the novelty now seems to have worn off, for those running the game the novelty of actually getting crowds in has become an excuse for overkill to the extent that killing the shortest form of the game off would appear to be what they are about to achieve.

There have been comments that an Indian-style competition with franchises – for example Manchester Maniacs v Leeds Lions or London City Slickers v West Country Wurzels – could save the day, but to be honest all the men in blazers need to do is be realistic about the appeal of this form of cricket and take what they can get by putting together a fixture list that appeals to the punters rather than trying to ram it down our (or those of the geese) throats.