After going along with his sister to watch her fiance play in last weekend's North Devon League match between Torrington and Barnstaple Amateurs, Daniel Sutton didn't take a lot of persuading to belt home and grab his boots and gloves when only six of the home side's players showed up for the game.
Always keen to show what he can do, Sutton, who has conceded just one goal this season with his regular team, started well but, given that this was a senior match and he is 11, it always seemed unlikely that he'd hang on through to the end without letting one slip past him.
As it turned out he lasted five minutes after which, he told the Daily Telegraph "they just kept coming straight up the field from the kick off and blasting the ball into the net".
After 90 minutes the score was Torrington 1, Barnstaple Amateurs 41 and Sutton had missed out on a place in the Guinness Book of records by just four goals. Still his confidence seemed to have survived intact for he told the paper's reporter: "I spent most of the game picking the ball out of the back of the net but I made a lot of good saves and I reckon they would have scored twice as many if I hadn't been there."
Daniel supports Arsenal and hopes his hero, David Seaman "does better than me in Rome". His dream is to wear the England jersey himself and if he could just produce this sort of display on a regular basis, there'd doubtless be plenty of people on this side of the Irish sea wishing him all the best with his ambition.
When the new Labour government in Britain asked four Premiership soccer clubs to help them in a pilot programme aimed at improving child literacy only one refused. While Chelsea, Newcastle and Sheffield Wednesday all agreed to get involved in the project, which involved encouraging kids to do their homework by linking it to meeting their favourite players, Arsenal had bigger things on the agenda.
In fact, Arsenal, who have been embroiled in an ongoing battle with Islington Council over planning permission to expand their Highbury ground said their current 38,500 capacity stadium was simply too tiny to allow them to participate.
"We needed somewhere to put the children to do their homework but we haven't got it," said a spokesperson with a rapidly-growing nose this week.
Doubtless permission from Islington to knock down their art deco stand and rebuild with an extra 7-10,000 seats would result in just the sort of space required becoming suddenly available.
It's hard to imagine big time sports stars having to bother with the mundane, day-to-day stuff of setting aside taxi and restaurant receipts and the like but in Japan, it turns out, most major athletes are considered to be self employed by the authorities and so every penny (or yen for that matter) that they can account for means a little less tax to pay.
One business consultant to come up with a novel way for a number of the nation's baseball stars to take fuller advantage of their status was Noriyuki Sakamoto, a 41-year-old adviser who is based in the city of Nagoya.
Sakamoto's brainwave, it turns out, was simply to bill the lads for a whole ton of tax deductible consultancy work that hadn't actually been done. Brilliant, eh?
Well the players he advised thought so until this week when his offices were raided by the tax people. Now a dozen players are being questioned by the authorities over more than £5 million in lost revenue. Some of the players involved already are likely to be charged while many more will doubtless be on the look out for any spare receipts their friends might have... just in case.
On the subject of big in Japan, the country's sumo wrestlers have apparently been coming under fire for their ever increasing weight. Latest statistics show that their average weight now stands at 24 stone and senior officials are blaming their bulk for poor performances by some competitors and falling attendances at recent tournaments.
"Some young wrestlers are too heavy to keep up with the training. They're breathing heavily all the time, some even have trouble walking. They're too fat," says Japan Sumo Association chairman Sho Sakaigawa.
Another problem he puts down to the growing size of wrestlers is the number of injuries being suffered with nine out of 66 forced to sit out the most recent event. "It looked liked a hospital in the ring," says Sakaigawa.
Many thanks to Louis Mullen of Riverstown in Dundalk who this week sent in some cuttings from the San Francisco Times (his local newspaper, apparently, before moving to Louth). Mullen highlights several stories which he feels might be of interest to Side- lines readers, particularly one involving Carolina Panthers wide receiver Rocket Ismail who recently received the greatest honour 20th century American society can bestow on a man when McDonalds named one of their burgers after him. Well, the McDonalds in the greater Carolina area did anyway.
Ismail subsequently promoted this culinary delight with the memorable phrase: "It's the primest, choicest cut of beef... cooked to make sure nothing else is living in there." Mmmmmmm!
Also mentioned in Mullen's communication is David Arias, a baseman picked up by the Minnesota Twins in a trade with the Seattle Mariners. That was some time ago and by the time, last month, that manager Tom Kelly attempted to call his new man into action it turned out that his name had somehow changed to David Ortiz. "Maybe he got married or something," remarked Kelly.
China is, as we all know by now, the fastest growing market for just about everything in the world. Sales of cigarettes, cars and just about anything else associated with the affluent west are rocketing in the People's Republic and next to take off there may be golf.
In a few weeks a major exhibition will be held in Shanghai aimed at attracting potential investors in the game there. At the moment there are just 38 courses in the country (one for every 31 million people the organisers enthusiastically point out) but one sign that things are already changing is the fact that 50 are already at the planning stage for the Shanghai area alone.
While the newly launched In- side Sport appears to be the most serious attempt to launch an indepth sports magazine for the British and Irish markets since Sports Illustrated flirted with the idea a few years back, in the United States there is new competition for the undisputed champion of the market.
Disney-owned sports channel ESPN is planning a new magazine to take on SI in the States with the parent company believed to be setting aside between $50 and $100 million to get the new product going. The launch will be the most expensive by an American magazine for nearly a decade.
The editor of ESPN magazine will be former SI boss John Papanek who hopes to prove that his former employers Time Warner were wrong to get rid of him after just 18 month by eating into the market leader's 3.3 million weekly circulation.
On the subject of big bucks, British broadcasters are paying through the nose for this evening's big match in Rome. Sky Sports are coughing up around £2 million for live coverage of England's crunch game while ITV are adding a further million to the Italian FA's coffers in return for the right to run the entire game at 10pm - just as Sky go off the air.
The latter company, along with senior government people, has been putting considerable pressure on Murdoch's gang to give up their exclusive rights for the greater good. More amusingly, they tried the same stunt for the Moldova game at Wembley after the death of Princess Diana, when it had been the FA's decision to go for the money alone that had resulted in live coverage of the game going exclusively to satellite.
This time, however, Sky has been rumoured to be thinking of allowing the switch as they want to butter up the government before the Test and County Cricket Board requests the delisting of certain events in their calendar which could then be sold to the boys at Wapping II.
Andy Ripley, the former England rugby international and BBC Superstars champion, hopes to row for Cambridge in next year's Boat Race at the age of 50.
Ripley, who will be 50 on December 1st, will enrol this week for a one-year M Phil in accountancy and trade finance and his attempt to become a part of the Cambridge eight has already begun in earnest. Last week, along with another 45 hopefuls, he underwent extensive physiological testing both in the gym and on the water.
Late on Sunday evening he was informed that he had made the 28man training squad from which Cambridge will ultimately select their crew.
"Last week was the first hurdle and I didn't want to go public unless I cleared it," said Ripley "I needed to know I was not just a sad old man going through a mid-life crisis - which is what my wife thinks.
"The testing went well enough but I know the real hard work has not even begun. The most positive aspect of the week was the attitude of all the other guys - very gratifying considering I am older than most of their fathers."
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