THE COCA-COLA Championship is a division of 22 teams of virtually indistinguishable competence — plus Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday. United, under the guidance of that loveable little monkey Neil Warnock, are better than everybody else by a good few yards, yesterday’s defeat notwithstanding. Wednesday are worse than everybody else by about the same distance, yesterday’s victory notwithstanding.

So 2005-06 will be a fine year to support the steel city’s avowedly proletarian outfit, full of delicious gloating and schadenfreude — and promotion in early March, probably on the same day that the Owls are dispatched back to the abyss to face the likes of Scunthorpe and Hartlepool.

Wednesday supporters can cling to the fact that they are “sleeping giants”, albeit giants who have somewhat overdone it with the pills. They will tell themselves this on the coach to Bournemouth next season, where their fans will outnumber the home support by about three to one but their team will still get stuffed. I hope it gives them some sort of solace; certainly it gives the rest of us a good laugh.

There is no better feeling than to see the supposedly mighty smacked around a bit: football commentators suggest that this is the “romance” of football, but really, if we’re being honest, it’s just that noble human characteristic, spite.

The Championship is full of clubs suffering from delusions of grandeur — along with the Owls, we might cite Wolves, Leeds United, Hull City and even, when they’ve had too much Brains Bitter to drink and got a bit above their station, Cardiff City.

“But we’re a big club,” they whine as they slump 2-0 at home to Crewe and the debts pile up and the chairman does a runner. They can be a little obnoxious, these supporters who believe that they have been wrongly imprisoned among the children of a lesser god.

Spend a few moments in the company of a Nottingham Forest supporter and it is rather like being granted an audience by a minor royal who has just been removed from the civil list and may shortly be forced, for the first time in her life, to do an honest day’s work. You cannot quite believe the presumption and the snobbery and the misplaced sense of injustice. Forest’s supporters are the most deluded of all, constantly reminding you of Cloughie’s achievements in much the same way that the ludicrous Princess Michael of Kent, when asked to justify her existence, might direct you to her grand lineage. It’s all a question of breeding, you see. Well, not any more, it isn’t.

At the same time, we should concede that it is rather impressive that those epic underachievers — to which we might add the names of Newcastle United, Bristol City, Bristol Rovers, Sunderland and even Spurs — continue to draw vast crowds for the most demeaning of fixtures despite decade upon decade of ineffectual centre- forwards, idiotic managers and incompetent chairmen. They have been badly let down: the love for their club has been cruelly unrequited. And yet still they turn up, convinced that what they are witnessing is a blip or an anomaly.

Forest still contrive to draw a magnificent 25,000 souls as they flail around at the wrong end of League One with their insouciant, overpaid and — in some cases — overweight squad.

Next season might well bring a nice local derby with Boston — only 45 minutes on the train. You sure it’s a blip, boys? What will it take to convince you that it’s not a blip at all, but the way things are likely to be from here on? As to who will accompany the Blades up to the Premiership, ready to kick the likes of Chelsea and Arsenal off the park for a glorious 10 months, your guess is as good as mine. I cannot remember a time when the division was so heroically, indefatigably, almost universally mediocre — and it would not surprise me too much if every team from second place to 23rd finished on about 50 points, if such a thing is statistically possible. One good run of, say, six or seven matches without defeat could secure

an automatic promotion place — and it is as likely to be Coventry City as Reading. Having seen them both in action, I can tell you that there really is not very much to choose between them.

Last weekend, when my team, Millwall, played Cardiff in a typically lumpen and dispiriting goalless draw, we were the two in-form teams of the division, but still both languishing in the bottom third of the table.

Meanwhile, come April, Crewe, one suspects, will relinquish their laudable but increasingly tenuous grip on Championship status and poor, homeless Brighton may well join them. I sincerely hope I am wrong: I really want Wolves, Leeds and Crystal Palace to go down, for reasons of hatred, bile and spite.

At least, with such an equable distribution of talent, or the lack of it, the Championship is an interesting place to be. This is one reason why the crowds have held up so well, why more people turn out to watch the likes of Burnley playing Luton, on average, than wish to watch the flouncing muppets of Serie A. The standard of football being played may not be very high — but it is at least competitive, which is sort of the point. The Blades and the Owls excepted, of course.

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