What do you do in your spare time? Do you have any spare time?

Because there’s a lovely picture in the paper of Arsenal player, Jack Wilshere, doing visits at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. Ahhhh. But Jack has lots of spare time. Nothing but spare time. He’s almost retired from football now, having not played since… well, long time. And I don’t know what the going rate is, pay-wise, for a chain-smoking, tattooed, night-club loving, permanently-injured midfielder, currently, but I reckon its gotta be 50 to 80 grand a week. So well done Jack.

Whereas West Ham star striker Diafra Sakho prefers going out in his spare time, driving round in his £200,000 Lamborghini Hurrican, and visiting fans. Rather unconventionally maybe, but the wall he smashed through in his supercar (apparently writing it off) belonged to a family of West Ham fans, who were (almost) thrilled that of all the garden walls, and cars in driveways (that got rather damaged too) in the country, Sakho chose to destroy theirs. What an honour.

Who said ‘there’s too much money in football’? Come on. Own up, who said it???

The second music star to die in 7 days. The third serious ‘celeb’ to engage in bucket kickage occurred when Glen Frey died yesterday. The man (co-)wrote ‘Hotel California’. You can’t be more brilliant than that. And he invented The Eagles himself. Created them, kept them together through the drink, drugs and women years, brought them back again after the inevitable ego/power/artistic difference/royalty wrangle break ups and was, by all accounts (that’d be Don Henley then) was the driving force behind the band. Great singer, wonderful guitarist, brilliant songwriter, what a fucking loss that is. And only 67. He didn’t even wait the extra 2 years to be the third in the ’69 Club’ with Bowie and Alan Rickman.

There again; he was always his own man.

Gambling corruption in tennis? Whatever next? Cricket??? Oh, done that already. Football? Been there. Athletics? Rife with it. Snooker? Pretty much every tournament.

I’ll come clean. In 2003 I played a tennis match against me mate Gersh and I threw the first set. Just like that. Threw it. A far eastern syndicate (Mr Chan from the take-away down the road) had bet a fiver with his mum on me to lose it and he gave me £1.24 to do so. Well, an extra portion of special fried rice. Which was never really that special anyway. Such is the constant pressure on us sports stars.

RIP Don Henley. You can check out any time you like; but you can never leave.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx