An uplifting tale, this one : Fat Frankie Lampard has signed a new contract for Chelsea because of the way the club rallied around him when his dear old mum passed away. “When you sit down and weigh everything up,” said Frankie, “you realise that people feel strongly for you and show you so much at a difficult time in my life.”

How true, how very true that is. Human contact and loyalty - the important things in life. And it makes it perfectly clear that it wasn’t the money after all. Frankie may have been offered a humungous contract which will pull him in £34m, with him earning almost as much in one week as our prime minister earns in a year - but these base, material considerations did not remotely impinge upon Lampard’s mind. Go on, reader, wipe those tears away, have a cup of tea.

It is easy to see why Lampard is so singularly unlikeable, why neutrals such as myself suffered a slipped disc jumping for joy when he was quite unjustly sent off against West Ham United last season. His new manager, Luiz Felipe Scolari, summed it up when he said that Frankie was “a symbol of Chelsea”. Yes, that would be about right, Phil. The odd thing is, though, I think Scolari meant it in a good way.

And even more than that, you might argue that Lampard is a symbol of the Premier League itself; its extraordinary, almost surreal, self-regard, its vanities and its hubris. Its limitless greed, its assumption that we are all in thrall to its brilliance. We armchair Premier League viewers remember Frankie when he played for England - the lethargy, the witlessness, the shots from 20 yards out dispatched somewhere towards the T-shirt sellers 500 yards from the ground, the refusal to take the remotest responsibility when England had lost to the Turks and Caicos Islands, or whoever. The notion that embedded itself in our minds: actually, he’s not that good, is he? If we were being kind we might argue that it is not Lampard’s fault - or Ashley Cole’s - but the inevitable consequence of the culture in which he is immersed.

Lampard’s quoted reasons for staying at Chelsea brought to mind the comments of his occasional England colleague, Shaun Wright-Phillips, when he went there a couple of years ago. Having told the Manchester City faithful that he would remain a true blue forever, a week or so later Wright-Phillips became a Chelsea player - again, not for the money, but in order, he said, to improve his prospects of playing for England. How would that plan go, then, Shaun? Still, the money will be a consolation in both cases, one supposes.

Most of us will still watch from time to time, I suppose - not in the “stadia”, of course (heaven forbid) but from the comfort of our sofas. But you do detect the glimmerings of a disaffection with the league, with the financially-imposed inevitability of who wins and who loses - the antithesis of competitive sport. The most interesting match on day one was the relegation six-pointer between Hull City and Fulham; looking in from outside, that is the only game that really piqued the interest.

Last week, when asked to choose who would finish in the top six and who would go down, pure wishful thinking made me include Fulham along with Stoke and Hull - not out of any inveterate dislike of Fulham, you understand (although, obviously, I hate them, soft west London arriviste ok-yah monkeys that they are), but because hope springs eternal in the human breast and one simply cannot, in all good conscience, predict unrelieved boredom for people for the next nine months; top four same as ever, bottom three consisting of the teams that came up last year.

Competition is at its keenest in mid-table of course: will Blackburn finish higher than Manchester City by a point or two? Will Spurs, Pompey or Aston Villa finish fifth? Will Stoke manage to secure even fewer points than the hapless Derby gained? Watch this space!

The credit crunch may ensure that this season, the disaffection is reflected on the terraces even more than last year, although I don’t suppose that the administrators will care two hoots, as the bulk of the money now comes from TV and merchandise. An empty terrace for the home game against Wigan will not unduly trouble the bank balance of any Premier League team – except maybe Hull and Stoke, who will, in nine months’ time, sink back into the comforting embrace of the Championship where things are still agreeably, finely, poised.

The cost of taking the kids to a Premier League game now, in most cases, easily exceeds that which you might spend flying them to Spain for a week or so in the sun; the rewards, you might argue, do not. And then you hear the disingenuous rubbish from Lampard and compare it to the good-natured, unalloyed joy of a truly successful British swimmer (rather than an overremunerated also-ran), Rebecca Adlington, and you wonder what it is you are supporting, what it is to which you affix your loyalty - when no such loyalty is ever returned, unless buttressed by huge sums of cash.

China sets new thuggery record

ANOTHER gold medal for Britain, one less remarked upon than others, was won by a chap called John Ray in the exciting new Olympic sport of synchronised oppression. Mr Ray is ITN’s Beijing correspondent and he was assaulted by Chinese security goons and arrested by the police for doing his job, which on this occasion involved reporting from a “Free Tibet” rally near Beijing's main TV studios. Note: he was not actually protesting himself, simply reporting on a protest that was taking place. Seven other people were arrested, mostly foreign nationals.

Some grizzled old Chinese Communist Party thug said, when asked about the protest, that the west should “look the other way”. These things happen, he added - the world has “dark and evil” things in it, as well as good things, he explained. No kidding. China’s intention, in staging the games, was to present to the world a clean new image - it was this notion that worried the many campaigning groups who have sought to draw attention to the country’s continued appalling human rights record, lack of respect for freedom of speech, detention of political opponents and the bullying and brutality towards Tibet and other dissident provinces. They shouldn’t have worried, though - with almost every day that passes, the foul regime in Beijing betrays itself with acts that are immediately redolent of totalitarianism and a disrespect for the individual. Fireworks that were not fireworks but computer-generated graphics, for example - a deliberate deception that may have been harmless, but was a deception nonetheless.

Then there’s the case of little Yang Peiyi, aged seven, who sang at the opening ceremony so beautifully, but was not allowed to be seen because the government considered her “too ugly”, and so the more cosmetically agreeable Lin Miako mimed in her place. What a repulsive state it is.

And it all somehow undermines the joy we extract from the brilliant Rebecca Adlington’s two unexpected gold medals and smashing of the world record - an astonishing achievement from a palpably likeable and unaffected young woman. The hug and kiss she received from her teammate Kylie Palmer wasa truly affecting moment; but somewhere beyond the handsome Olympic pool, somewhere beyond the edge of our eyesight, the Chinese government was going about its business as usual.

Accent on idiocy

A MATE of mine, an Arsenal fan, rang in midweek in high excitement, during his side’s game again FC Twente. I wasn’t watching the match- I’d just done the washing up and I was sitting watching the plates dry on the draining board - but I caught the reason for his excitement later, on YouTube . It’s that genius with the expensive teeth, the FC Twente manager Steve McClaren, doing an interview with a Dutch journalist and speaking in the most ludicrous “Dutch” accent ever heard since Austin Powers’ Goldmember. McClaren even deliberately mangles his grammar so that he sounds like a Dutch person trying to speak English. A spokesman confirmed that he hadn’t been joking, either. Remember, the FA made this man the manager of our national team.