The Manchester City story - where will it end? And how soon? We're agog. News broke this week of the club's ambition to become “the Virgin of Asia and the world”. City buses, City energy drinks, City mobile phones ... it's all ahead of us, potentially. Trains, planes, automobiles; all kissed with that charismatic, melt-your-heart City branding. Brilliant notion, no? Eat City, drink City, sleep City - even if you don't support City.

One initial problem, though: Virgin has Sir Richard Branson, whose genius has always extended beyond business and into the important realm of keeping the brand in the public eye, embodying it, even. It's of boundless commercial value to Virgin that people feel that they know Branson: unbuttoned, refreshingly unbound by stuffy protocol, one of us - although a bit posher, probably, and, admittedly, with his own island in the Caribbean.

The key point is, if City are going to be the new Virgin, who is going to be City's Branson? Garry Cook, the executive chairman and former Nike marketing manager? Clearly one of our time's great blue-sky thinkers (he's behind the whole “new Virgin” thing, apparently), but not really Branson-style material.

No need for despair, though. Run your eyes down the staff list at the City of Manchester Stadium and there is one obvious, stand-out candidate in situ: Danny Mills.

With his ready smile and earthy good humour, the former Leeds United hard man has a natural way of engaging with the public. Plus, let's face it, he is not going to be seeing too much in the way of first-team action once those promised big names start flooding in. No better moment, then, to issue him with the all-important roving brief as ambassador for the brand.

If it were up to me, I would send Mills up in a balloon at the earliest possibility. Preferably one of those really strong, silver balloons that gets up to the limit of the earth's atmosphere, just so there's a proper element of risk for those of us back here on the ground to engage with. Let's not, at this stage, rule out the possibility of a role for Shaun Wright-Phillips as ballast.

Then, when Mills gets back, they can stick him in some kind of patently vulnerable boat with somebody Swedish and gets him to circumnavigate the globe. Daily updates on Mills's whereabouts on the club website, video podcasts from on board - the sea's the limit.

After that he can needlessly traverse the Channel in an amphibious car and then cross the Serengeti in a City-branded Mini Cooper. No reason why we shouldn't bring Africa into the global picture at this stage. They're gasping for uplifting City-related material out there in Tanzania.

Whatever shape these brand-driving initiatives take, the important thing is to think worldwide, something that City have signally failed to do before this brave, new, Abu Dhabi-financed dawn. It's like Cook said a while ago: “There's something not right about watching us in a bar in Beijing or Bangkok or Tokyo and seeing 'Fred Smith's Plumbing: Call 0161...'” Absolutely. Don't you just hate it when a football club seem to be connected with their local community? It's just embarrassing.

Although, thinking about it, they need plumbers in Bangkok, too. But then Fred's call-out fee would likely prove prohibitive. And he probably wouldn't be able to get out until Friday morning at the earliest.

Anyway, the news that Fred, and the likes of Fred, have got to take on the chin is that they are not wanted at City any more. They're not City's kind. The club have got bigger fish to fry and bigger plumbers to advertise. Hell, they'll launch their own plumbers. City U-Bend, anyone? Again, I'm sensing a role for Wright-Phillips...

John Hopoate puts hand speed to good use

It is given to very few sportspeople to change the language. Dick Fosbury, the American high jumper, left us with his flop. Ulrich Salchow's name will sound forever more through figure skating for the leap the Swedish champion devised in the early years of the 20th century. And then there's John Hopoate, the former “bad boy” of Australian rugby league, whose controversial practice of poking his fingers into the backsides of opponents as he tackled them, gave rise to the Australian passive verb “to be Hopoated”.

Hopoate's career fairly shimmered with controversy. He specialised in the abuse of match officials and was known to turn up for training somewhat over-refreshed.

Manly, the appropriately named NRL club, shredded his contract after an horrendous tackle left a player concussed and bleeding from one ear. (A “reducer”, Ron Atkinson would have called it.) Hopoate served nine suspensions and was banned for a total of 45 matches. But the transgression for which he will always be remembered is the one in which he, as it were, completed his personal switch-over to digital. It earned him a 12-week ban and then a sacking, necessarily in that order.

Don't let anyone say no good came of this. Hopoate eventually loaned his image to a campaign for prostate cancer testing. (Slogan: “It won't hurt a bit - honest.”)

Anyway, all this is by way of observing that, three years after his rugby league career ended in flames, Hopoate has just become the Australian heavyweight boxing champion, proving the truth of the old saying that you can't keep a bad boy down.

Clearly the gloves were always going to be a convenient restraining factor for a man of his proclivities, but it's a serious achievement nonetheless and we applaud him for it, on the ground that it's always good to see someone turn his hand to something new.

We woz robbed - and now for the remedy

Our commiserations to Robbie Keane, whose penthouse suite in Merseyside has been burgled. That puts him on a list of recent victims that also includes Steven Gerrard, Dirk Kuyt, Jerzy Dudek, José Manuel Reina, Daniel Agger and Peter Crouch.

Now, we don't pretend to be anyone's answer to Hercule Poirot here, but do you detect a pattern emerging? Some thin thread connecting these seemingly random acts of criminal activity? That's right. All of these people either are, or were at the time of the offence, Liverpool players.

What's more, most of them were in Europe when the break-in occurred, playing in Champions League matches - although Keane, for his part, was on international duty with Ireland. Either way, the intruder had due and advertised cause to suspect that the chance of the homeowner returning to find someone unplugging his plasma screen was greatly diminished.

The club maintain that they have put extra security in place for their players. But clearly, in the face of this raging crime spree, the only sensible way forward is to cease publishing the fixture list. Advance notice of matches simply gives the criminal fraternity an opportunity to mark dates in their diaries and exposes our footballers and their jewellery to unacceptable levels of risk. We say: prevent crime - keep football secret.