Can I click it? Of course I can, and I have been all summer. To explain: the cricket season is a time when we footie fanatics are reduced to shadows of our winter selves. With the nation's footballers doing a collective impersonation of Tottenham's Darren "Sicknote" Anderton and taking extended holidays, it is not so much a case of in the back of the net my son, more a case of trawling the net to find some transfer minutiae the papers might have overlooked.
Nailing my colours to the goalposts, that means I have spent a lot of time at the home of Leeds United, www.lufc.com, in the vague hope that Elland Road's finest might actually sign a player or two. Fat chance. Instead of welcoming multi-million pounds signings, we Leeds fans have had to make do with silly season news about a new Elland Road tropical fish tank, apparently to calm match-day nerves. Bet it won't stop Alan Smith upsetting opposition defenders.
Not that Leeds' management is unique in feeding fans such inconsequential items. A look around the clubs' official websites - from Aberdeen, www.afc.co.uk, to York City - reveals much the same pattern. Manchester United's gargantuan site, for instance, features player profiles, stats, ticket information, the opportunity to buy a club shirt that will probably be replaced with a new design inside six months, and the links to the sponsors needed to pay David Beckham's hairdressing bills.
Thankfully, escaping the clubs' corporate hospitality is a simple matter of jumping to the myriad fan sites out there. Some of these are gloriously and barkingly specialised. The Gloucester Gulls site, http://website.lineone.net/~gloucester.gulls , for instance, is put together by "Torquay United supporters who happen to be living in the Gloucester area", and thus spend unfeasible amounts of time travelling around the country to watch division three football.
At the other end of the scale, the Big Daddy of fan sites is Kop Talk. Perhaps because Liverpool were the last Premiership side to get themselves an official website, this is infinitely better than the Reds' official online home, www.liverpoolfc.tv and features opinionated columns from former players such as Tommy "Hardman" Smith and Barry "Haircut" Venison.
You can, of course, look for such sites via the usual search engines, but it is more fun to go to www.rivals.net, a sports portal largely compiled by fans. The result is a decidedly idiosyncratic window on footie culture. In the Chelsea section, for instance, you will find Blues' fan Juvenile D reflecting on the recent sale of Jon Harley to Fulham. It seems Juvenile's daughter Urchin had a crush on Harley and Juvenile now has to watch sadly as his child learns a bitter life lesson. "I'm left to pick up the pieces and explain to Urchin that it is better to have loved and lost than to never to have loved at all," reflects Juvenile.
At least Urchin can console herself with the thought that, if Harley's star continues to rise, he will soon have his own personal site similar to those at www.icons.com. Here you will find the personal sites of the likes of Dennis Bergkamp, Robbie Fowler and Marc Overmars, sites increasingly quoted by jaded journos who presumably can't face actually talking to footballers.
For a more objective look at how players are doing, you can't go wrong with the Opta database, www.opta.co.uk. There are, of course, those who reckon Leeds' pass completion rate of 69% is an insubstantial piece of information, but these are people totally devoid of pub conver sation and to be avoided.
As indeed should the online home of the English FA, a site so slow to load that I can only suggest its webmaster looks at the Scottish FA's site, for a much needed lesson in design simplicity, or Uefa's clear site at www.uefa.com.
Not that any of these sites are destinations for breaking news. If you absolutely need up to the minute football information, try News Now, but be warned this is a site that aggregates every slice of trivial gossip you can imagine. For a filter between you and the news feeds, try the BBC or Teamtalk. Best of all, if only for Danny Kelly's pithy columns, visit Football 365.
Still can't find that elusive site devoted to pre-war Lithuanian away kits? Then try the links page, www. soccer-links.com . And finally, as a reminder that football really isn't more important than life or death, visit the Christmas Truce Football Match Haiku Friendly page - a compendium of three line poems devoted to the day in the first world war when British and German troops had a kickabout in No Man's Land.
• Two companies are now offering footie update services via SMS for mobile phone users. Boltblue costs £3 a month and covers the Premiership, while Teamtalk (as above) covers all the English and Scottish leagues but costs £5 a month for news, and another £3.50 more a month for scores and results too.
