You really couldn't make it up

Meanwhile, back down to the Wessex Stadium for the latest edition of 'Seaside Scummersiders', a soap opera in the setting of a small, unfashionable, non-league side with delusions of grandeur and ideas way above their station.

In the last episode fairy godmother Stephen Beer waved his magic wand and in a puff of smoke magicked up a cheque for £300,000, complete with tippexed out bits, which the board accepted gratefully as it enabled them to keep their jobs carry on saving the club. In a dramatic final scene we saw the fairy godmother smiling bravely from a hospital bed attended by anxious club directors before cutting to a locked door with a sign on the handle saying: 'press conference cancelled due to sudden illness'.

Unfortunately the bank wasn't quite as impressed with the tippexed bits on the cheque as the board were and returned it forthwith. Stephen Beer promptly had a stroke, in inverted commas, and was driven to hospital - it later emerged that this wasn't the first time he's been taken to hospital after receiving or giving some bad financial news, last time it was a suspected heart attack in similar inverted commas, following a similar economic embarrassment.

Actually, you really couldn't make this stuff up. The Muff fans are righteously aghast at how badly their club's board has handled the situation and their forum has erupted in fury at their incompetence, whilst suffering collective amnesia over their own effusive "thank-you's" and "welcome to the club, Stephen's" they were showering on the fairy godmother himself only a couple of short days ago.

The question is, where is all this going to end? The club owes around £500,000, staff haven't been paid in months and the vast majority of players have left, leaving them fielding teams of youths and triallists prepared to play for nothing for now. The board rejected one bid from a consortium of 9 local businessmen, and another from a different 3-man consortium which included former owner Ian Ridley, in favour of Beer's magic beans - though how the board were taken in by such an obvious Walter Mitty-type character is unexplained, though the suspicion is that Beer's 'offer' was the only one available that enabled two of the board at least to keep their well paid jobs. Both other consortiums would have started from scratch with a new board. The Muff fans only hope now is for one of the unsuccessful consortiums to resubmit their offer, and even then it will almost certainly mean administration and relegation. The only alternative appears to be liquidation and beginning again at a much lower level as AFC Weymouth... I'm not laughing now, I wouldn't wish this kind of mess on any set of fans. Well, that's not true either. I'd laugh my cock off if it happened to Leeds, or Arsenal, or Man Utd, or Liverpool.

Anyway, this one's going to run and run. Watch this space....