‘Is this a dagger which I see before me?’

CHRISTMAS will come early for the supporters of AC Milan this evening when the club’s new loan signing, a certain David Beckham, is officially unveiled before the game against Udinese in the San Siro.

Although he won’t make his debut until January at the earliest, we can expect all the pyrotechnics which accompany Beckham’s every public move tonight but, also perhaps, the prospect of a few, more sensitive tifosi bursting into tears when he’s produced out of the sack. “But we asked Santa for Messi,” the poor mites will wail.

One man who can barely contain himself is Milan striker Marco Borelli. Images of Becks stripped to his bare essentials currently adorn Armani billboards all over Italy and, like a little kid homing in on the package beneath the tree, it seems Borelli just can’t wait to, as it were, tear the wrapping off.

“I must admit I have a dressing room curiosity over Beckham,” he has, perhaps unwisely, admitted. “I want to see if he is as equipped as he is in the Armani underwear adverts.”

If Borelli only subscribed to The Sun, he’d already know the answer. The tabloid tracked down someone described as “a fellow LA clubber” who has (ho, ho, ho) “lifted the lid after sharing a loo with the England star”.

From his vantage point at an adjacent urinal, DJ Kyle Sandilands assured the world: “There’s two types of penis. There’s the one that’s the same size all the time and the other one changes in size. Let’s just say he looks like he’s got it going on whether it’s happy or not.”

Thanks for that, Kyle, and now a moment’s silence, please, in memory of the high standards for which this column was once renowned.

Then again, I suppose it’s hardly a great leap to move from talking about Goldenballs to an immediately adjacent organ and, if there’s anything to be said for it at all, it’s that it keeps our minds off what Becks does with his feet.

Which, to be honest, is not a whole lot. But then, the thing he does do, he does brilliantly — and it’s been enough to take him from Manchester and Madrid to a Galaxy far, far away and now back across the Atlantic to Milan. It also sees him currently within one appearance of equalling Bobby Moore’s all-time record for an outfield England player of 108 caps.

And what is the secret of this thing of Becks? In the light of the player’s revelation that he suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder — he has said that at home and in hotels, he has to arrange objects in straight lines or pairs — Après Match star Gary Cooke has an interesting theory about why few can bend it like Beckham.

“This claim that he has OCD is quite interesting,” says Cooke. “I think it’s the reason he could bend the ball and produce free-kicks and crosses that were exactly the same all the time. Obviously, he has that ability, a bit like Jonny Wilkinson, to not just practice the same thing but to replicate it over and over. There was this machine quality to it and I think it’s that part of his personality which is responsible for the unerring consistency with which he could do that. He was better than a Brazilian, better than Zico at free-kicks and probably the best crosser of a ball ever.

“What’s bizarre about it is that people who don’t know about football can be left with the impression that he was some sort of incredible combination of Pele, Zidane and Cruyff — and he wasn’t. He was averagely good apart from being able to do one or two things better than anyone else. The hype far outweighs what he actually was as a footballer.”

Cooke has been giving the world of Becks quite a bit of thought over the last three years or so, and the upshot is a comedy musical, co-authored with his former ‘I, Keano’ stage mate Malachy McKenna, called ‘Macbecks’.

As the title suggests, it’s Shakespeare, but not as we know it, Jim. In this thoroughly modern version, the ancient world of ‘Macbecks’ includes characters inspired by the man himself as well as Posh, Fergie, Wayne and Colleen, the Spice Witches, a rapper called Lmnop, mystic manager Glenn Oddball and the seventh son of an Eriksson.

To hilarious effect on ‘Après Match’, Cooke has previously channelled (deep breath) Eamon Dunphy, John Giles, Alex Ferguson, Joe Kinnear Andy Gray, Pat Dolan, Bono, Ray Wilkins, Brian Clough, Brian Kerr, Graeme Souness and more. For ‘Macbecks’, Cooke’s main character is someone uncannily like Wayne Rooney, although for purposes of theatrical projection he’ll play him with added Scouse oomph, more Aldo than Gerrard, if you like.

And, as a concerned Man Utd fan, Cooke has his serious thoughts on the real-life Rooney too.

“I think Rooney is actually the new Beckham,” he tells me during a break in rehearsals,” in the sense that this utter obsession with him and his performances does not come close to justifying the things people say about him. He’s clearly a talented player but not in the way that the young Ronaldinho was or Messi or even Ronaldo. I think people have a blind spot about him because if Beckham encapsulates all that is modern, Rooney encapsulates all that is old world. I mean, even the brasser he went to was a granny.”

Speaking of which, Cooke also has a cameo as a prostitute in ‘Macbecks’ and is anxious to assure audiences who go to see the show when it opens in the Olympia Theatre in early January: “There is nudity too, yes. I can’t go into it, but there is full-frontal nudity...”

What are you waiting for? And when you join the queue at the box office, be sure to say hello to Marco Borriello.