LIAM MACKEY: The changing of the Swiss guard

The news that Frank Lampard has signed a contract to write children’s books seemed the perfect hook for a quip-happy column until I learned that Frankie had beaten us all to pun, as it were, by naming the second in his series — about a young boy with a magic football — Frankie Versus The Rowdy Romans.

What odds the Romans in question turn out to be rich and Russian as well as rowdy, I wonder? In any event, the fact that a famous football personality is up for such an unlikely career change left me wondering if there was anyone else in the game who could surprise us by taking up a very different occupation.

And then it dawned on me that, in Giovanni Trapattoni, we have the perfect candidate to fill the vacant seat in the Vatican.