Welcome to this week's Off the Ball, which says yes - yes - yes, yes, yes, yes, yeeeeeesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss!!!!

And, thanks to work commitments, I missed it. The first home game I've missed in a year, and it's the one we won. Typical.

Baby talk
But enough of my moans. Congratulations to David and Victoria on the birth of their third boy, Cruz. And, ever quick to spot an opportunity, bookies have already begun offering 1,000-1 against all three Beckham offspring playing for England, which is slightly better than the odds you'd have got on Brentford being west London's sole representatives in the FA Cup 6th round draw.

Anyway, in case you're wondering, the latest addition to the First Family has not acquired his moniker because he was conceived on a cruise - nope, Cruz is Spanish for cross. Presumably David got the name from hearing thousands of Real supporters screaming "Cruz Beckham!" as he ran down the wing hogging the ball while Michael Owen waited forlornly in the area, and he mistook it as a suggestion for the new sprog's name. Well, whatever the reason, the toddler will be pretty cruz when he finds out what a stupid name he's been lumbered with.

True Blues
I know I've written on here before about Chelsea fans, but honestly, what a bunch they are for whinging. They make Ellen McCarthur sound like Little Ms Happy from Happyland after an overdose of happy pills. Here's just a selection of the (absolutely genuine) drivel they spewed out on last Sunday's 6-0-6 after the FA Cup loss at Newcastle (and each of these pieces of nonsense was from a different twerp):

· "He (Jose Mourinho) is cracking up!"
· "By the end of the season our fans will be praying for the return of Claudio Ranieri"
· "We've five players in midfield who are all the same - there's no balance in the side at all"

and, and this is possibly my favourite,

· "He's (ex-St Jose again) just blown our entire season in one game".

Yep, it must be awful having to support that bunch of losers week in week out, it makes your heart bleed. Thank goodness Cambridge aren't as bad as Chelsea, eh?

How to become a fan
A few weeks ago OTB received an e-mail from a U's fan in Australia, Wayne Bynon, on the subject of his favourite grounds. At the time I assumed he was, like the other U's fans who contact OTB from abroad, en ex-pat. But nope, Wayne replied to say he was, in fact, not just Australian born and bred but a seventh-generation Aussie. Which did rather beg a question (no, not about convicts and stolen sheep. Tsk, unworthy of you).

Anyway, it turned out that, several years ago, Wayne bought a football management computer game called Premier Manager '98. However, rather than take charge of a top Premiership side, Wayne thought he'd give himself a real challenge and see if he could take a lower-division side to the top.

For no other reason than that he chose Cambridge (well, he did say he wanted a challenge!) and before you could say 'We stuffed Cheltenham, yesssssss!!!!' he was smitten with the old Cam fever. He soon became a fully fledged fan and now follows each U's match on the CUFC website and the BBC, wearing a home shirt as does so.

Which in my book is a pretty cool reason for becoming a fan. I mean, it's obviously great to support your local side or the side in your town of birth, but I must admit I'm a sucker for stories of fans who follow teams through thick and thin for the most bizarre of reasons.

It may be because my own love of football came through an odd route. Having been born around 130 miles from the nearest English club, I had no particular affinity with anyone. However, when I was about seven, I had a comic that gave away a wallchart, one of those charts that you pinned on your bedroom wall and used to plot your team's progress throughout the season. Well, I liked the idea of that, but didn't know any football teams, so I asked my very wise father, sitting in his armchair, to name me a team.

"Leeds United" he instantly replied, and that was that. Seconds later he added "Or Liverpool". "Nope, Leeds is fine, thanks dad". I carefully wrote Leads You Knighted on my wallchart, wishing he'd said Liverpool first as it was easier to spell, and thus fell headlong into the most enduring of all my love affairs (aawww, bless!).

It also saved on decorating costs for my parents, as within weeks there were so many pictures of Billy Bremner, Alan Clarke, Peter Lorimer, Johnny Giles and all the rest of Don Revie's legendary team on my wall that wallpaper became superfluous. And to this day I still give thanks to the Lord every night that my father had the good taste and wisdom not to have said "Manchester United", though whether that was through Divine intervention or just the fact that ManUre were rubbish in 1970, I'm not sure.

Anyway, that was then; having moved to Cambridge back in the 1990s I now naturally follow my local team, the Mighty U's, every week. But what I'd like to know is your unlikely reasons for following the teams you support or keep an eye out for, either now or as a kid. I'm sure there are some great stories out there, so let me have them at the usual address and we'll publish them in a few weeks' time.

Problem solved
Yes, United's financial problems are finally over, and all thanks to the overwhelming generosity of three OTB readers. The trio, two of whom are exiled from Zimbabwe in South Africa, with a third in Nigeria, have all e-mailed OTB recently offering to make vast payments. All I have to do in return is help each of them move about $35,000,000 from their bank accounts into one in the UK.

In a tragic coincidence, it seems that all three have recently lost incredibly rich and very well-connected fathers who had fallen foul of their country's government. However, such is the growing worldwide fame of Cambridge United and Off the Ball that they've decided we're the people to help them resolve their problems.

Well, I must admit, the $16,000,000 OTB stands to make from the three will come in handy - I mean, I could become the Roman Abramovich of the Fens. And just think what we could do with that money - buy back the Abbey; buy back Dave Kitson; we could even buy... YES, the LDV Trophy!

Funny thing is, and I can't quite put my finger on it, I can't help thinking there's a catch somewhere...

Well, that's about it for this week - and you'll be devastated/mildly disappointed/hugely relieved/really couldn't give a fig either way to learn that there's no OTB next week. I'll be down in London celebrating my birthday, so anything I would have written would be even more incoherent than usual. But fear not, we'll be back next month, you betcha.

In the meantime, if you have any unusual reasons for supporting a club, have heard anything stupid uttered by a Chelsea fan, or would like to send me large sums of money for my birthday, you can contact me at cufcofftheball@aol.com - actually, thinking about it, forget the first two, just send me the dosh.

Neil Cole

If you missed Neil's previous 'Off The Ball' columns, you can find them here

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