What can we do about spitting? In the age of swine flu, this may be the most momentous challenge that the game of football faces. Indeed, the future of the sport as a permitted public spectacle may rest on it.

A spokesman from the Health Protection Agency went on the record this week to denounce spitting on the pitch as “unhygienic and unhealthy” and something that “footballers shouldn’t do” on the basis that it “could increase the risk of passing on infections”.

True, we lack, as yet, an exact figure for the number of professional footballers infected with swine flu as a consequence of another player’s spitting. If, indeed, there have been any. But you know how quickly these things can take off — and how soon people panic and start banning things. This is no time for complacency, phlegm-wise.

Inevitably, the cry has already gone up. “Why don’t they just stop doing it?” But footballers have always spat. They can’t help it. It’s what they do. You take the spitting out of Wayne Rooney, you lose the player. That’s just a fact.

And the notion that spitting is something that, back in more decorous times, footballers were above, is arrant, golden-age revisionism. The earliest record we have of spitting in a footballing context occurs in a report from 1844 of a match between Nether Poppleton and Skirpenbeck.

According to the author, “The match was but four minutes elapsed when Arthur Thornthwaite, ambitiously deployed for Skirpenbeck in an holding role, did produce most forcibly from within the cavity of his own chest an expectorate the very equal, as to its dimensions, of a small squirrel. Thus unburdened, Thornthwaite was observed to peer down into the grass and declare, ‘Tha’s better off aht than in, lad, so help us God.’ ” So it was, and so it remains.

It’s not like footballers haven’t taken steps to combat spitting in the past. They’ve tried wearing nasal strips, they’ve tried rubbing patches of Vicks vapour rub on to their shirts. And both looked silly, and neither worked — or not from the point of view of stemming spit.

Indeed, in the case of Vicks, the result was an additional loosening of phlegm and related internal materials, leading to an increase in the number of mucus-based evacuations. (See the Carling Opta stats across the 2003-2005 period.) It’s about coping, then — accepting that spitting is “part and parcel” and working with it, rather than trying to dam it.

The obvious individual solutions (a handkerchief, a ball of Kleenex, a personal Tupperware tub with a lid on) are clearly impractical. There are no pockets in football kits and to start introducing them now would be to risk years of advance in the creation of aerodynamic fabrics, potentially sending the speed of the game back to the dark ages (1978-1989, approximately).

Better by far to provide swing or pedal-bins at convenient places around the pitch. For sterilisation purposes, these could be walled-in to create a kind of “gobbing booth” — perhaps on the model of the temporary lavatories that builders put up in people’s front gardens. (You would need to install several of these around the ground, obviously, to prevent queueing.) Alternatively, the game could institute a “hawk-break” — a one or two-minute pause in play, signalled by the referee, perhaps three or four times a half, in which players can leave the playing area and dispose of any unwanted build-ups in a suitably hygienic, epidemic-aware manner.

Television, which has long been angling for the opportunity to screen additional commercials during live games, would love this, and the sponsorship rights would not, one imagines, be hard to sell. (“The Hawk-break — with Fisherman’s Friend.”) Unfortunately, the disadvantage of such a system is that it supposes a uniformity in the respiratory systems of footballers, which anecdotal evidence suggests is not the case. Contrast the players who experience the need to gob infrequently, perhaps only once or twice per half (I’m thinking of the likes of Morten Gamst Pedersen here, or, a few years ago, Trevor Sinclair) with your constant, box-to-box gobbers, or “90-minute men” (Robbie Fowler or, today, Ashley Cole).

Still, it’s better than nothing and the important thing, surely, is to act, and act quickly, before Peter Crouch gobs and the entire game catches cold.

King of Stamford Bridge gives Rachel chance to be queen of X Factor

To be honest, this column hasn’t especially been rooting for Rachel on The X Factor. (It was Tracey from Essex for whom we were preparing to declare in print, at the appropriate time, with nods of respect to Danyl and Lucie.) But that was before our sister paper The Sun came burning through with what is, by very many country miles, our favourite X Factor exclusive of this season — namely, the news that Rachel from The X Factor’s boyfriend’s great uncle is the late Peter Osgood.

No word of a lie. Rachel is dating (or, at any rate, has dated, and possibly more than once) the great nephew of the maverick Seventies goalscoring legend and fabled “King of Stamford Bridge”.

That’ll do for us, vote-wise, and for thousands of others, we don’t doubt, with Rachel now set to surf a groundswell of support among Chelsea supporters of a certain age in the southwest London area. And how great to think that, in the event that Rachel capitalises on last week’s recovery in “swing week” and goes all the way, former team-mates of the King would be called upon to step forward in tribute. You know the kind of thing: “ ‘Ossie would have been made up,’ confirmed a delighted Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris yesterday. ‘He always loved a sing-song.’ ”

And maybe, farther down the line, we might one day see a themed “Chelsea night” for the show, with the likes of Eddie McCreadie, John Dempsey, and other surviving members of the 1970 FA Cup-winning squad on hand to coach the hopefuls through the Cockney classics (Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner, On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep) for which they were famous. (There was a whole album where Blue is the Colour came from, you know. People tend to forget that.) Go on, then, Rachel. All the way to the final, girl. To adapt the great terrace song: “Born is the girlfriend of the great nephew of the King of Stamford Bridge.”

Support gained from Ferguson was not exactly what it seemed

Sir Alex Ferguson earned warm praise this week (and a couple of jocular “Hell Freezes Over”-style headlines) for coming out in support of the referee who sent off Gary Neville in Manchester United’s Carling Cup tie at Barnsley.

As support goes, though . . . well, examine the words for yourself. “I think Gary has followed through and he has caught the boy, not high but just above the ankle,” Ferguson said. “In the present climate the referee was probably correct.” Note the qualification, “not high, but just above the ankle”. (Most television viewers would probably have said the point of impact was closer to the knee of “the boy” than to his ankle. But let’s split the difference and call it halfway.) Note also the use of “probably correct” (leaving room for debate) and, still more brilliantly, the phrase “in the present climate”, inferring the existence of an earlier, more habitable climate, now sadly passed, in which recklessly taking another player’s shin bone off for no obvious reason wouldn’t even have merited a raised eyebrow, let alone a raised card.

Classic stuff, then, from the man who is fast emerging as the master of the apology with nothing remotely apologetic in it. Hell didn’t freeze over, in fact. It didn’t even get noticeably cooler.