IT WAS Jimmy Greaves who supposedly coined the phrase "It's a funny old game" but there's not a great deal to laugh about in the beautiful game these days.

Overpaid primadonnas scrapping on the field of play, supposedly "professional" players diving as if they've been shot by an elephant gun and regular tawdry tales of drunken debauchery involving these sporting millionaires.

It's very easy to splutter that it wasn't like that in my day... but to be brutally honest, it wasn't. Indeed, everything has changed about the "beautiful" game.

Ask the world's greatest footballers where they learned their magic and they won't cite expensively-created football academies or FA-trained super-coaches with heads stuffed full of tactics, statistics and hi-tech training methods.

They will - as Ronaldhino did last week and as George Best revealed in his many books - simply say that all the skills they possessed were learned in the school playgrounds, the local parks and even waste grounds of their youth.

Yet I walk our dogs across many parks in this county and do I ever see 20 youngsters kicking a ball around a field, muddied up to the eyelids and ready to play until darkness forced a halt?

Do I see jumpers laid down at either ends of a patch of grass and footie wannabees showing off their skills to their mates with not an adult in sight?

Not a chance.

And why? Because somewhere along the line, adults hijacked the formative years of budding players and brought way too much organisation and control into the process.

If you see 20 10-year-olds on a patch of grass these days, you can guarantee that there will be just as many adults trying to organise them into neat little training groups so they can run around in little spurts between plastic cones - because that's supposed to be the way that we create great footballers.

I have news for you. The England football team's "achievements" have more to do with stifling creativity than encouraging it.

Great footballers are created by giving them the opportunity from a very early age to do anything they want with a ball.

If they love doing it, they will want to do more.

Only last week, Sir Trevor Brooking, the FA's director of youth development, talked about a pilot project to prevent enthusiastic mums and dads haranguing their children and referees.

We should be ashamed of ourselves if the country's football gurus have to spend time, effort and money on teaching parents how not to verbally abuse their children, who are actually trying their best.

I don't envy Sir Trevor's job, but perhaps banning posh little cones and replacing them with sweatshirts and T-shirts might be a start.