After China comes the real crisis

Even for those of us who only watch it on the telly, the Olympic Games is a lot like a good holiday. Everything is fresh and charming and after a fortnight of it you're vowing that when you get back home you'll approach life differently. You will, you assure yourself, be more relaxed, find interesting and different things to do, get out and about, and not sink back into the same, dreary old rut. From now on it will be rowing, cycling and running. You will actively seek out the badminton results, pay a visit to a gymnastics tournament and never, ever call table tennis ping-pong again.

You have one last long leisurely breakfast with Hazel Irvine and wave goodbye in a positive frame of mind, vowing to keep in touch with the new friends you have made, with plucky Tasha, bubbly Becca, inspirational Dr Tim and those amazing swearing sailors Percy and Bart.

But when you get back to Blighty you stick the piece of paper you wrote their names on in the back of your address book with the ones from Athens and forget all about them. And the next day it is raining and you arrive back at work to find that nothing has changed: the Gareth Barry departure hasn't been sorted out, Dimitar Berbatov is still pending, nobody has done anything about the Michael Owen contract, or got to grips with the Lampard-Gerrard business.

By midday your good mood has evaporated. In the afternoon you start thumping the desk and yelling: "How many more times are they going to clear the air at Anfield? Isn't it about time they identified the source of the noxious fumes and plugged it? Hicks, Gillett, Parry, Benítez, frankly, if somebody hammered corks into the lot of them, I'd recommend them for a peerage".

By teatime your spirit is broken. In the evening you put all thoughts of BMX racing and kayak slalom to one side and are listening instead to the Carling Cup on 5 Live, wondering all the while why the pundits are suddenly so obsessed with "body language".

"I'm looking at his body language, Alan, and it isn't good," they say, or "Important now at 0-1 that the captain gets his body language right". It's as if the players are signalling their innermost thoughts to Graham Taylor using the art of mime, "And looking at Wayne Rooney, Mike, I'd say he's very much in a stuck-in-an-invisible-box-type situation. Now, people might wonder what I mean by that. Well, I'm speaking mentally. In his mind Rooney is trapped by walls that he cannot see and unless he can find a transparent ladder and literally climb out of it, I believe his problems in front of goal are going to continue."

Then 606 comes on and you discover that, while you have been away in Olympicland, Fabio Capello has been unmasked as a fraud and a charlatan by the British press. This has become so familiar an ending to every episode of The England Manager Story that you half-expect that as he is led away by the FA blazers he will turn, shake his fist and snarl "And I'd have gotten away with it too if it hadn't been for those meddlesome hacks".

The process plays out the same way every time. The manager arrives. He is hailed as a genius, a man whose record speaks for itself, in capital letters with lots of exclamation marks. Yet in less than 12 months he has gone from an iron man who pulls the strings with mastery to a feeble loser who stands on the sidelines waving forlornly like a drunk with a black eye and vomit on his front trying to hail a cab at 3am. The England job has been called a poisoned chalice but it is far more extraordinary than that. It is a reverse alchemist's stone transforming pure coaching gold into the leaden and dull.

Everything the England manager has done before counts for nothing because this, the England job, is the only test that matters. It's as if Bryan Clay had completed all 10 decathlon events only to be told that to win gold he must now scale up the Empire State Building and have a fistfight with King Kong.

Capello is clearly doomed, but there will be no quick coup de grace. Instead he will sink slowly into the slime amid wearisomely familiar talk of a world-class squad and getting the best out of Gerrard, and what role should be given to Rooney (all in all, I think I'd try to get him an apprenticeship as a plasterer).

And as the steady barrage of spats, raps, blasts and back-me-or-sack-me calls resounds around your ears, you realise that Olympicland is now a distant dream. You are stuck on a treadmill once again. You are ensnared like the pathetic claimants in Bleak House, condemned to endure the grinding, insidious tedium of sport's answer to Jarndyce and Jarndyce - professional football - for ever and ever. Your only release will be death or insanity. Still, it's better than working for a living, I suppose.