Suits are rattled as economic reality bites

WATCHING Ingerlund’s footballers blunder about unconvincingly for much of their match last Saturday, one wondered whether their minds were elsewhere – on their bank accounts and investments, for example.

As Tony Cascarino cheerfully related in his weekend ‘Times’ column, his phone had been burning hot all week with footballers suddenly panicking about the status of their stashed-away loot, much of which we assume to be in questionable private banks and greedy equity-based ventures.

The thought of that collective fretting certainly cheered me up, anyway: for once, we poor working stiffs in the UK are the lucky ones, wholly protected by the Government’s 50K compo scheme, whilst the night-sweating rich have visions of their millions vanishing at the click of a trader’s keystroke. I was also impressed that our heroes had sufficient intelligence to know how serious it all was: you’d half-expect some players to assume that a CreditCrunch was a new chocolate bar.