Keeping fit, the Alex Ferguson way

Adaptable according to your personal timetable, requiring a commitment of only six hours per day and involving almost nothing in the way of complicated and expensive extraneous equipment, this really is the managerially approved fitness programme that’s suitable for every elite list official. Yes — even you, Alan Wiley.

Sign up now and be fit in time for the Christmas fixture pile-up. That’s Sir Alex Ferguson’s guarantee to you.

Exercise one: waste skip bench press Lie under a waste skip. Bench-press it. Repeat 400 times per daily session. Then run up a hill. An excellent all-round cardiovascular workout.

Good also for generally gunning-up the biceps and increasing upper-body strength. Just one month of this and you’ll be ripped to the max and saying: “Try getting in my face now, Darren Fletcher.”

Exercise two: waste skip leg-press Get under that waste skip again, and lift it again, but this time using the soles of your feet. For a warm-down, push the waste skip up a hill. Fabulous for lats and glutes and handy for keeping up with all rapidly developing game situations, even including Arsenal. Also yields the kind of body-shape that says: “Listen, Bellamy, we can continue this conversation in the tunnel later, if you fancy it, you little streak.” Penalty! Why? Because you say so! Result.

Exercise three: waste skip toss Toss a waste skip across the road. Then toss it back again. Aim for 20 reps, minimum, working up to 75 reps by the end of the first week. Then run up the hill carrying the waste skip. Really works those core muscles and expands the chest.

Indeed, within a fortnight, your head should start looking like a pea atop a string-bag of logs. Which is great because then there’s no arguing, is there? Period.

Exercise four: the car pull Attach rope to front end of your Ford Mondeo. Attach other end of rope to your waist. Set off for a 5.30pm kick-off in televised game at Blackburn. Good for thigh muscles, increased lung capacity and becoming a thoroughly hard bastard. Sir Alex says: “Remember, the pain is obligatory, the suffering optional.”

The Sir Alex Ferguson celery, petrol and steroid smoothie Diet is important, so get match day off to a powerful start with this one-stop breakfast of pur?ed vegetable matter and crushed performance enhancers, carefully blended with a spritz of unleaded fuel and a pinch of dishwasher salt. It’s blood-spinning, but in a drink. Not strictly legal, but they can’t touch you for it. You’re the ref! (Warning: Not to be used if pregnant. Develops the strongly discernible six-pack effect that managers love, though not necessarily on the stomach. Consult your doctor, if in doubt or if muscles start breaking out on your forehead or feet.)

At last, the perfect defender of the Newcastle faith
Kevin Keegan famously balked at being asked to sign a player for Newcastle United on the evidence of YouTube footage alone, but we wonder whether he would have been quite so fussy if the player in question had been Elizabeth Lambert.

Now spoken of in tones of awe as “possibly the dirtiest player ever in women’s soccer”, the New Mexico University central defender is the topic of a hugely compelling online montage of “continental-style” felonies in a match against Brigham Young University, including late and shin-endangering sliding tackles, a superbly angled, off-the-ball fist to the back, a cunning blast of the ball into a prone opponent’s face and the poleaxing of a forward by means of what we are trying to avoid calling a yank on the ponytail. (For me the girl goes to ground a bit easily. But what do I know? I haven’t got a ponytail.) Lambert, who is serving an indefinite suspension, has claimed that “emotions got the best of me”. But Emily Pitek, who used to play for Alabama, has vigorously defended Lambert’s approach, explaining that “you need to really show that you’re not some dainty little priss-pot and just go hammer somebody”. Quite right.

And surely it’s only a matter of time before someone comes in with an offer. True, women from American college soccer don’t have a history of adapting well to the quicker pace and general hurly-burly of the English leagues. But here’s one who would surely reverse the trend. Over to you, Chris Hughton.

Will Jimmy White turn yellow, be in the pink, or simply left feeling blue in the jungle?
Our best wishes accompany Jimmy White into the jungle this weekend as he begins his quest to bring home the coveted “King of the Jungle” crown on I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!, the televised endurance major so promisingly landed by Phil Tufnell in 2003, but on which sport has badly struggled to impose itself in the intervening period.

Is White the man to survive three weeks in an itchy sleeping bag and thereby end the years of hurt? Precious few analysts seem to think so, citing the fact that the man is a snooker player (not the most bracingly physical or outward-bound of sports), combined with the sheer, forehead-slapping unlikelihood of a close friend of Ronnie Wood, of the Rolling Stones, winning a camping competition.

Let’s be more positive, though. In many ways, White’s background indicates that the maverick potter could have plenty about him when the Bush Tucker Trials kick in. For starters, The Whirlwind’s long years of hanging around in snooker clubs should mean that the prospect of being incarcerated in a claustrophobic, blacked-out space populated by indeterminate, furry creatures holds scant terror.

Also, like anyone who has risen to the top in a cue-based sport, White has done an awful lot of sitting down in his time, which is very much a part of the required suite of skills for I’m a Celebrity, too. (It’s one of the reasons that Tufnell was able to deliver so emphatically.) Plus, the snooker player’s fabled ability to think two or even three insects ahead could prove invaluable when Ant and Dec rack up the edible bugs.

Moreover, what is the spiritually uplifting message of this show, and countless others like it, if not that anything can be achieved as long as you want it badly enough? Go on, then, the Whirlwind. In off the kangaroo’s privates, my son.