Is there anyone who lives within the area served by this newspaper who doesn't know that last weekend Wycombe Wanderers saw off the Premier Division's Leicester City?

I listened to the match on radio, which is my favourite medium for drama, but for following a football match, however good the commentary, it can be a frustrating experience.

I wanted to see McCarthy's ball go into the net. I wanted to make my own mind up about that handball; and the ridiculous penalising of Steve Brown, who was many people's man of the match, for removing his shirt; and the banishment to the recesses of the tunnel, (for protesting against the officials), of Lawrie Sanchez who has helped himself to the FA silverware before against the odds.

Having recovered from a 2-0 deficit in the previous round to beat the team for which he once won the FA Cup, he found a way to top that achievement by getting his players to act out a scenario torn from the pages of Wizard or Hotspur.

And the winning goal was scored by a Roy! Roy of the Wanderers, with an internet into net, whose surname on the radio came across as S and O.

S for Superman? O for Once upon a time?

I shall be in the queue for tickets to urge the Blues on in their epic struggle against Liverpool at Villa Park. Only eight years in the league and up there with the best. Just what would they be like if all their regular strikers weren't injured?

Several recent incidents have highlighted the absurdity of allowing results to be dependent on the ability of referees to see what the millions of viewers are able to see clearly on their television screens.

There is an irony in the fact that professional footballers, who may be paid thousands of pounds a week, are to some extent impotent in the face of the well-intentioned but often inept decisions of amateur referees.

In almost every other sphere of life if someone acquires a benefit through cheating, then there is the potential to remedy it.

However, in the massively lucrative arena of sport, when there is clearly the technical ability to detect and overrule the demonstrably offside goal or the last defender's handball, we rely on the variable eyesight of three men, who earn their living doing something completely different.

In such a high pressure game, where chance decisions regularly play a not inconsiderable part in the outcome, no wonder that only the likes of Gary Lineker, who was never booked, can resist the temptation to play the odds. So shirts are tugged routinely, forwards dive and defenders use their hands.

When appalling and inconsistent decisions affect the outcome of a match, then the game itself does not benefit from allowing that decision to stand.

As Lawrie Sanchez pointed out poor refereeing decisions can cost a club a million, when millions are not thick on the ground.

Let's hope that variable refereeing plays no part at Villa Park! And that if a talented player celebrates a goal by revealing a T-shirt bearing his ill son's name, he doesn't get sent off by a man in black.