There was a fracas in the highly important world of Transfer Deadline Day when the footballer Peter Odemwingie turned up to a football club, QPR (I thought you said football club!! LOLZ), saying he was there to sign for them. Only the team that owns him, West Brom, hadn’t sold him and hadn’t given him any permission to go to QPR and agree how many pounds they would pay him to be mainly ineffective.

This in itself is the behaviour of someone who is perhaps not concerned with the to-ings and fro-ings of what we call reality. It was exagerrated by the media coverage of Transfer Deadline Day by the Sky Sports News channel. Which in turn was exagerrated by QPR being managed by reclusive savant Harry Redknapp – a man who shuns the media at the best of times, come transfer deadline day it is like trying to get hold of Willy Wonka, pre-Golden Ticket exposure.

The result was that Odemwingie was interviewed on camera where he talked as though his transfer had gone through. It hadn’t. We have all misread emails. Clearly Odemwingie had read “Transfer to QPR scoobied – you’re staying at QPR” as “Your move to QPR has gone through – drive to the ground and proudly announce it to the assembled press.”

All this made me think of David Boon. Not the squat former Australian Test batsmen who once drank 193 cans of lager on a flight from England to Australia. No, another David Boon.

On the first day at my secondary school a lad called David Boon turned up. He wasn’t meant to be there, he hadn’t applied or anything. His older brother was a fifth year at the time* and it seemed his parents had just assumed he could go to the school. It wasn’t David’s fault, of course, but he shouldn’t have been there. People were turned away from my school because of the number of people who applied, or rather the number of parents who placed a decent academic and sporting regime above developing the ablity to talk to women (all boys school).

But they just let him stay. Yes, he had ignored the prescribed process of applying. But he had bought the tie and was here now. There was no real way he could go to another school now was there? In many ways he was probably a drain on resources over the next five years. But that extra strain on the teachers was just ignored because it was a bit awkward for anyone to have a conversation about it.

If only Odimwingie was less brash. If he had just turned up meekly at QPR today wearing their shirt everyone might just have let him get on with it.

*His older brother was quite the big man on campus, academically speaking anywway. David was not. David was one of those people who was the very button of meekness. I always feel a bit sorry for people who are deservedly in someone else’s shadow. Oddly enough I couldn’t care less about people who are unfairly thought of in favour of a sibling or colleague (unless it is me).