WHITHER now Sir Trevor Brooking’s reputation as a safe pair of hands? In a shocking and unprecedented mishap, while compèring the draw for the first round proper of the FA Cup, the hard-to-ruffle West Ham United and England legend misheard King’s Lynn’s number (53) as Barnet’s number (3) and called the tie accordingly.

For a moment, Barnet, already facing a trip to Gainsborough, were suddenly facing another one, this time away to Dover or Bishop’s Stortford — a prospect that would have stretched the club’s limited resources to snapping point, one assumes.

And Brooking was left pointing helplessly at the plug in his ear and muttering the words that no one commanding a lottery-style draw, live on television, wants to hear himself saying: “I think we’ve already had that one.” Let no one doubt the responsibility broadcasters face on these occasions, or the genuine consequences hinging on their actions. With one slip, Brooking had wiped out King’s Lynn.

In fairness to Brooking, the balls did seem to be coming out of the regulation plastic tumbler a bit quickly and serious questions will need to be asked about the wisdom of appointing two former rugby union players to perform this critical portion of the task.

No disrespect to Will Greenwood and Neil Back — fine sportsmen in their field — but a televised FA Cup draw brings a different level of pressure from international rugby and there is no reason why either of these outsiders should have had an instinctive feel for the event’s natural rhythm. As a result, it should have surprised no one that Greenwood and Back seemed to be pulling out the homes and aways — or, as they would put it, “recycling ball” — with an urgency that was, at best, unhelpful.

The policy of bringing in celebrities from beyond football — and there are plans to involve Geoffrey Boycott and Amir Khan in the draws for future rounds this season — suddenly looks gravely unsound and we shall probably hear, in the coming weeks, people urging the authorities to give the job back to Ian Rush or someone sleepy in an FA blazer whom we’ve never heard of.

It could even be maintained that an impersonal, fully automated, National Lottery-style system is the way forward. The twice-weekly Lotto draws have always unashamedly utilised machinery involving various, not strictly necessary Perspex chutes and funnels, thus circumventing the possibility of human error, or rugby players going too fast.

There is no reason to think that the FA couldn’t fund the building of a couple of similar draw machines, even now, after paying all that money for Wembley. And if it can’t be bothered to stump up itself, it could always apply for Lottery funding, which would have a nice synergy.

The fact that cannot be ignored is that the National Lottery has been in business since Saturday, November 19, 1994, and it has never lost King’s Lynn once. Think on that, Trev, and weep.

No costly slips from Mark Ramprakash on Strictly Come Dancing. In the paso doble round, it was the cricketer making all the running and looking the most likely of the three sports-based celebrities to inherit Darren Gough’s dancing crown come Christmas. “The strong, taut buttocks — you have it all,” Arlene Phillips said. You’ll watch an awful lot of cricket on Sky with David Gower before you hear a Surrey batsman described in those terms.

Retrospectively, it was a smart decision, on Ramprakash’s part, to wear a shirt slashed wide to the navel. The overt machismo of that top enabled him to steal a march on Matt Dawson and Peter Schmeichel, both of whom were in catastrophic, filmy black vests, apparently cut from the same pair of tights.

Designed to offer tantalising glances of the chest beneath, these shirts, in fact, as the result of an adverse reaction to the cameras and the lights, turned strangely kinetic and ended up resembling a live ultra-sound of the wearer’s internal organs.

Although the judges routinely urge the dancers to “put some heart” into their performances, this may not be precisely what they mean.

Dawson somehow rode it out, but Schmeichel was not so fortunate. Within seconds of the former Manchester United goalkeeper taking the floor, it was all too agonisingly apparent that the paso doble is not the dance he was born to perform, in whatever kind of vest. He was accused afterwards of being “rhythmically challenged” and told that his “arm control was poor”. No goalkeeper wants to hear that.

Unsurprisingly, Schmeichel was left on the bottom of the pile after the judges’ scores and only the trailing wind of the subsequent public phone vote blew him into the next round, where, one senses, he will need to pull out the Viennese waltz of his life to survive.

The glory of the Dane’s week three tango, when the judges’ purred over his “flexed knees throughout”, seems a distant memory. But that’s pro- celebrity ballroom — a ceaselessly shifting world in which you are only ever as good as your last vest.