People have been grumbling about the grade of entertainment offered by “David & Goliath” (to give the heavyweight title bout between David Haye and Nikolay Valuev its official billing). But, let’s face it, as a roaring, out-of-your-seat, fists-flying tear-up, the original bout wasn’t much to write home about either.

When the outsized Philistine rumbled with the plucky (in more senses than one) harpist from Israel, there was precious little in it for the boxing purists. At least Haye versus Valuev went the full, 12-round distance. The biblical version was all over in the thwap of a slingshot, by all accounts, and David’s fans, many of whom would have spent a small fortune flying out to the Valley of Elah for the occasion, must have returned home with mixed feelings about the expense and the effort, delighted as they were with the outcome.

Remember that these were the days before big-screen replays in super slo-mo, meaning that very few people present in the arena will have seen exactly what happened, with regards to the trajectory of the stone and its exact point of impact. And the experience probably felt a bit flat for the audience watching at home on pay per view, too, who didn’t have (as we did) Jim Watt seated at ringside to score the bout wrongly for them all night long.

“It happened thousands of years ago, it’s happened again now,” Watt shouted, as Valuev sighed miserably, all the way down to the toes of his extra large boots, and as Haye was declared the victor, contrary to every confident indication from Watt to that point.

Yet by repeatedly insisting on the David and Goliath parallel, we run the severe risk of devaluing what Haye achieved out there in Nuremberg.

For example, would the original David have been awarded the fight if it had gone to the judges? Or would they have seen his use of an extraneous rock as a failure to box and docked him points accordingly?

Haye, by contrast, defeated his opponent without any recourse whatsoever to stones, or, indeed, any other outsourced materials. He used only his hands, one of which he seems to have broken by bringing it a little too sharply into a collision with Valuev’s mighty chin during the second round.

Yes, his tactics involved him running away from Valuev a lot of the time. But that, too, is boxing, and it lifts the new world champion on to a different level from his forebear.

For another thing, exactly how big was the original, so-called Goliath? There are some textual disputes surrounding the exact wording of the Hebrew, but, according to the version in Samuel, in the Old Testament, the mouthy pagan pitched up for the weigh-in measuring “four cubits and a span”, which would put him at 6ft 7in — fully 5in shorter than Valuev. And I bet the original’s back wasn’t as terrifyingly hairy, either.

In other words, Haye didn’t just slay Goliath. He slayed Goliath’s much bigger, and much hairier, brother. It’s why there is more than just hot air behind the Londoner’s claims to be, cubit for cubit and span for span, the best fighter out there right now.

One other reason why we were so much better off watching the rematch: the original David removed Goliath’s head with a sword at the end of the fight, a practice now outlawed, along with slingshots, by almost all of boxing’s confusingly multifarious regulatory bodies and commissions.

And quite right, too. If seeing somebody get his head torn off is your idea of fun, then off you go to the cage fighting. Or, just occasionally, the rugby. Not the boxing, though, which has a highly developed sense of decorum about these things. (They don’t wear black ties on that Sky Sports studio panel on fight nights for nothing, you know.) Over on Sky One, Wayne Rooney’s Street Striker — in which the Manchester United and England forward puts his name and his touchingly shy presence to an X Factor-style quest to find an overlooked champion ball-juggler — is back for a second series.

Who could forget series one, which led to that life-changing victory for Michelle McManus? Or was it David Sneddon? Or am I getting confused here?

Anyway, the new crop of hopefuls must once again demonstrate proficiency in a range of football-related skills that don’t necessarily lend themselves to meaningful application on the pitch in a conventional 11-a-side context, but that are fun to watch anyway.

The programme’s message is that it’s all very well being able to pass and score goals and stuff, but you’re nobody on the street until you can trap a ball dropped 18 stories from a tower block and then dribble it around the back end of a drug dealer’s BMW before deftly flicking it over your head into a waste-skip. It’s a fair point. If Michael Owen is wondering what he has to do to impress Fabio Capello, Wayne Rooney’s Street Striker is his answer.