IF I say we're at the turn of the year, you'll think I've gone mad.

But before you put it down to the heat, I should reassure you that I'm talking about the return of the football season. Not that it's ever been away. It's been a long, hot Beckham summer. While I'm at it, can someone please tell me what the appeal of that silly man is? He earns millions of pounds a year, dresses, talks and shops like a big girl and can't afford a pair of jeans without a rip in them.

In the age of our sanity - that is when I was a boy - the football season used to end the first Saturday in May with the Cup Final at Wembley; and it didn't start again until September. Now football, like death and taxes, are inevitable and with us always. I wish the game could be abolished. People looking for cruelty in public life should look further than fox-hunting and turn their attention to this dismal, crude, greedy and sadistic spectacle which masquerades as a sport. I can just about tolerate the spitting and kissing and the endless four letter words, which are only what one would expect from practitioners with an IQ rather less than a ferret's. I can even forget sometimes the ludicrous wages and transfer fees, the bungs, the generalised corruption and the disgusting behaviour of the crowds.

What I cannot come to terms with is the viciousness of the players, these idolised sportsmen. They demonstrate again and again that they are more than ready to ruin their fellow-professionals' careers by their dirty fouls. I don't know any other game where it appears acceptable every week to chop your opponent's legs from under him with a savagery that can and does frequently fracture limbs.

Mind you, my favourite sport - really, if I'm honest, my true religion - cricket is not much better. Cricketers generally are not so brutish and brutal as footballers, but they are no strangers to nastiness. Look at the way Nasser Hussain - not the most charming gentleman in the universe, I'll grant you - has been pilloried and forced out by enemies within the game and among the cricketing press which makes a handsome living out of the game.

Cricket is a gentlemen's game and football is for thugs, hooligans and psychopaths. But cricket can be vicious too. For 50 years I've watched incredulously at the way the best players have been treated by the cricketing administrators. I suppose I've been particularly exposed to this because I'm a life-long Yorkshire supporter. The Yorkshire committee is as lethal in the application of cruel and unusual punishments as the Borgia popes. I remember how they contrived to sack my boyhood heroes such as Brian Close, Willie Watson, Ray Illingworth and Geoffrey Boycott.

I should like to know why nearly all sports - which are meant to be played for enjoyment and as a celebration of high spirits and comradeship - in the end degenerate into sheer cruelty. Even chess. Even croquet. I remember asking a croquet fanatic about the purpose of the game. He said: "To put as much distance between your opponent's balls as possible." Yes, that seems an ample definition of most sports.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.