However, even I can see that something which appeared in last week's Free Press is lunacy – a football team won 24-0 and got a ticking off.

Although they have been disciplined under the guise that they did not put publicity in the hands of the press officer, effectively they have been punished for being too good. Which is a nonsense.

Had the team not won 24-0, national media would not have picked up the story and no-one would have said anything.

Would the same team have been punished if they had won by three or four goals and a small report, which hadn't been seen by the league, appeared only in the Free Press? Of course not

So basically, a team has been told off for scoring too many goals. How absurd.

If the losing team had been derided in all the reports you could understand the league bosses getting shirty. But the concentration was on the winning team's achievements.

When are we going to stop wrapping kids in cotton wool?

In sport, someone wins, someone loses.

You can't pretend otherwise.

And losing is character building.

What next? Junior Mastermind having five contestants but only showing the top three in case the bottom two got embarrassed?

Bizarrely, a friend who lives in another part of the country tells me that one kids' football league had a rule where newspapers were banned from reporting scores over 9-0. Even if a game finished 20-0, it had to appear in public as 9-0. Which is a lie.

Surely, if anybody deserves a rap on the knuckles, it is whoever allows two teams which are so mismatched to play each other.

Maybe one solution would be to stop a game when a team reaches a certain score, regardless of how many minutes are left to play. When it gets to 10-0, shake hands and call it a day.

The kids who are losing are obviously not enjoying getting a thrashing and the kids who are winning are not gaining anything.

There is no challenge for them, so they are not learning anything, it is all just unnecessary humiliation.

Maybe people should tackle the problem of why big scores happen in the first place, rather than passing the blame afterwards.

Paper Clip

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