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There are few things more irritating than someone interrupting an interesting conversation about football by saying: “It’s just 22 grown men, kicking a piece of leather about.”

How ridiculous. For one thing, the ball isn’t made of leather. Or not since the days when it gave me concussion at school anyway.

All the same, I’m beginning to warm to that opinion. Are we inclined to elevate what blokes do with a ball above its proper station? Increasingly the adverts for sporting events are reaching a level of bluster I can only aspire to in my lectures about post-modernism in history.

Last year, and repeated this January, the BBC began screening a trailer for its coverage of the Six Nations rugby internationals.

In a deep and ponderous voice, and against a backdrop of 30 grown men throwing a ball about, the voice-over meditates on words like “loyalty” and “patriotism”, and “rivalry between nations”. Stuff more suited to the Declaration of Arbroath or the Hundred Years’ War than 80 minutes of mud wrestling at Murrayfield.

But the Six Nations commercials have been capped and surpassed by the recent – and deeply pretentious – adverts for the Winter Olympics.

For one thing they’re in rhyming couplets, always a mistake in sports commentary. Is this, I wonder, a prelude to Alan Hansen doing his post-match analysis in iambic pentameters ?

Of woeful defending at the back I have