The drama of Deadline Day – when reason goes out the window

Sky Sports viewers will be very familiar with a man called Jim White, who is about to come into his own for the one day of the year that his station turns him into a star – just because he has a plethora of mobile phones.

The secret is that, on these phones, he claims to have the numbers of all of the managers, agents and footballers in the Premiership – as well as the ones who might be on their way in or out.

And the reason this is important for just one 24 hour period a years is that Deadline Day is on the horizon – and if you’re not a football fan, that means absolutely nothing to you…..but if you are a fanatic, it’s a day worth taking off work just so you can vegetate in front of the telly.

This year’s Transfer Deadline Day is next Monday week,  and when the curtain comes down on this day of days at 11pm, millions will have been spent on stars and journeymen, all in the hope of winning – or at least staying in – the Premiership.

It’s the day when the football world goes into overdrive, when millions are paid for players you’ve never previously heard of but who have suddenly become the dynamo of your team’s Champions League aspirations.

It’s already happening of course and it’s a strange phenomenon; this week, for example, it looked like my old team Liverpool were going to sign a Brazlian called Willian, who frankly I’d never heard of before two weeks’ ago and even then I thought he was the Black Eyed Peas guy off the UK version of the Voice.

But Spurs nipped in at the last minute to secure his signature and you suddenly felt slightly bereft over someone you’d only recently even heard of.

And as ridiculous as that sounds, it gets even worse on Monday week when the football world is gripped with more rumours than the Dail bar on budget day.

Jim White is the man officially charged with whipping all of this into a complete frenzy, so much so that his arrival at work on this day of all days becomes in itself a news story.

There is a camera positioned at the entrance to Sky Sports to capture Jim talking simultaneously on three phones, and smiling that smile of reassurance that tells football fans they are in safe hands now.

Jim will breathlessly report the covert arrival at a Midlands airport of the flying winger (previously unheard of outside of his own house) from a French third division club who might just be the answer to some Championship outfit’s prayers.

Fans get into the mood by texting in reports of spotting Messi outside Highbury or a bloke with a nose like Zlatan Ibrahimović hovering with intent around Old Trafford.

Fans get wind of a centre-half from the Ivory Coast who didn’t warrant a reference on FIFA 14 two days ago – but now he’s the solution to that leaky defence, according to someone who knows someone who saw a video of him training at the African Cup of Nations.

And given that there’s dodgy Russian and Arab money sloshing around the football world now like detritus on the top of a treatment plant, these previously unheralded stars of the football world are signed for the price of a small country.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.