The tunnel of life is a many-portaled passage

For most of us life is a long, dark, descending tunnel. We progress along it, sometimes fitfully, sometimes confidently, but always moving downwards, always in the dark. And always alone.

As we fumble and pad towards death, we encounter the occasional door along the way. These doors are labelled. If we're lucky we chance upon a door marked Love. We open it and emerge out of our tunnel into a meadow suffused with colour, from the deep green of the grass to the azure blue of the sky.

But sooner or later the sky clouds over and the grass turns yellow, then brown. A man appears over the brow of a hill, wearing white gloves and a serious expression (think Max Wall). He rests a hand on our shoulder and ushers us back into the tunnel.

The more fortunate among us pass other doors on our inexorable path towards non-being. There's a door bearing the legend Alcohol and another labelled Mind-expanding hallucogens. There's also a door marked God (see earlier blog).

Among the commonest is the door marked Cigarettes. Step across it and you find yourself in a friendly, noisy, smoke-filled room. And what's particularly interesting is that it’s a room many great footballers have passed through.

In fact, you could compile a World XI of great footballing smokers to give any team a run for its money. Nearly all goalkeepers smoke (Dave Brooks a rare exception), so you can take your pick from your Yashins and your Zoffs. Gascogine, Cruyff, Greaves, Maradona, Bowles, Ginola (a rogues gallery if ever I saw one) were also all partial to a puff.

So to what end these dark musings? Well, I was just wondering whether, over a 90-minute game played in the cauldron that is the Hawker Centre, a team comprising the Dinton smokers would outplay the clean-living Dinton non-smokers. Here are your squads –

Smokers: Poulton, Gordon, Moore, Woods, Cross, Edwards, Rogers, Banghu, Giblin, McCann (cigars). Substitute: Ratty.

Non-smokers: Brooks, Mole, Lehmann, Copeland, Ruiz, Sankey, Greaves, Davies, Doyle, Stafford. Substitute: Perry.

A dashed close-run thing. And even if the smokers edged it over 90 minutes, you’d have to bet on the non-smokers’ additional reserves of fitness should the referee (a non-smoking Dave Rose or Roger Barnes) take the game into extra time. And then back into the tunnel.