Preposterous! Diego Maradona the coach of Argentina? What can they be thinking? The guy has virtually no coaching experience, after all -- so does this make any sense?

So the Beckham saga -- if that's what it is -- staggers on, Failure after failure, mistake piled upon mistake, a farcical sequence of laughable bumblings and ineptitudes that have long since blotted out the basic fact that Beckham came here to play soccer and -- his words -- to help "make the sport as popular here as it is in the rest of the world."

It is utterly perverse, and quite typical of soccer, that the French -- the only country with a national anthem worth listening to -- should come up with this choice example of utter buffoonery: if, when the anthem, La Marseillaise, is being played before a soccer game, someone boos, then the upcoming game should immediately be called off.

Well, well, there was I thinking that Jon Conway and Jeff Parke were just two average guys putting in average performances for the Red Bulls every week. Heavens, was I wrong! Turns out these guys are dangerous types, real desperados. Just listen to what they've been up to: they're guilty of buying, and then ingesting, a dietary supplement. Gulp. As if that isn't bad enough, they might even be in cahoots, so there may even have been a conspiracy to feast on dietary supplements. Gulp, gulp.

I suppose you could argue that Toronto coach John Carver had an excuse for making an ass of himself at the end of the Dallas vs. Toronto game on Saturday. His team, denuded by international call-ups, had played a remarkable game in Dallas and with only one minute left, was heading for an unlikely 2-1 win.

Survival soccer. An English term, of course. They invented it to describe the abysmal stuff played at the end of each season by the bottom clubs in all the divisions -- the clubs that are trying, desperately, not to get relegated.

Michel Platini has had a vision that he finds unacceptable. He sees an English soccer club -- Liverpool -- with "an Arab sheikh as president, a Brazilian coach and nine or 11 African players." He asks: "Where is Liverpool in that?" English clubs, he says, risk "losing their identity. We have to make some rules."

Edward Grayson, a lawyer who died in London last week, was a problem person for the sport of soccer. He specialized in sports law -- indeed, was the pioneer in the field. His book "Sport and the Law" has marched on through four editions, and is the definitive work on the subject.

Admittedly, there was reason to wonder whether Arsenal coach Arsene Wenger was in full possession of his faculties this past weekend. His team had been sensationally upended by Hull City -- at home, in Arsenal's Emirates Stadium, no less. A result that ought to have been impossible, but there it was -- Hull City, a newly promoted club, playing its first-ever season in the top league, with a bunch of players who can be politely described as non-household names -- and they'd got the better of mighty Arsenal.