Respect going out from the sports desk to...

...U's boss Geraint Williams, who was named Championship (i.e. Division Two) manager of the month this week. A staggering achievement given the start of the season, when Colchester lost 4 in a row and looked like contenders for the coveted "Worst Team In Any Division, Ever" award. This is a little known award which is judged by the guy who used to be in Eastenders - not Nick Berry, but the bloke who was in it during the 1990s and was a similar hearthrob for the televisually challenged - and then went on to a truly bizarre BBC series called Crime Traveller. What the BBC did not tell the fans about that series was that the time-travel technology was actually real, and this guy (I've just looked up his name - Michael French) - is actually a bona fide "time agent", originally from several centuries into our future. French has - in his timeline - already presented the award, we think at some point between being in Crime Traveller and returning to make the latest series of Holby City, but of course since there are no historical records (yet) of the Worst Team In Any Division, EVER (WTIADE) being awarded, we can deduce that the award lies sometime in our future... in other words, there is a team, in a future season, who will perform even worse than Sunderland did in 2005/06.

Anyway, French is known to enjoy winding up badly-performing football managers by inviting them out for a drink to discuss a "celebrity appearance" at the club for "fundraising purposes." At some point during the conversation, the possibility - merely the possibility - of a WTIADE award is mentioned. It's a matter of meta-historical fact that French has been responsible for an average of one and a half English or Scottish league 'sudden resignations' every year for the last decade or so. Managers simply cut and run rather than face the humiliation of being the Worst Manager Of All Time (WMOAT).

The technology does not yet exist to determine when in the future French will strike "for real", although several contenders for Dragon's Den are working on it. In the meantime, managers and club staff - especially those with several recent consecutive defeats under their belt - should be very wary of taking any calls from this man...

- particularly if he offers you a "time bung". But we won't get into that here. So take care - and I do mean, "take care". Love, Hal.