Beckham hasn't lost his sense of timing

Sideline Cut:  You cannot teach street smarts, and news of David Beckham's flabbergasting transfer to LaLa Land is the final proof that the Essex boy, for all of the cheap derision heaped upon him down the years, was never anybody's fool.

There is an argument to be made that the paying any sportsman up to half a billion dollars, however flamboyant his gifts, is genuinely immoral. Advocates of football, which used to glory in the tag line of "the beautiful game", have watched with ill-ease as distant, self-regarding young professionals have come to dominate the English Premiership, that rose garden of easy money where the winners are practically pre-determined and mere survival - competent mediocrity - is the name of the game. The January sports bulletins have come to resemble nothing so much as stock exchange reports, with breathless accounts of how such-and-such has moved from Manchester City or Portsmouth or Fulham or Newcastle for so many millions.

And in the midst of this, David Beckham, who makes hardened ex-football men smirk and who has been repeatedly castigated by England's press corps as a vain peacock and the chief culprit in the failure of the "golden generation", has trumped them all. In a period when earning power and not medals is how professional football players measure respect, Beckham has made a move as audacious and unexpected as that joyous and nostalgia-tinted shot from the half-way line against Wimbledon all those years ago.

It is easy to imagine Alex Ferguson chuckling heartily at the breakfast table as he reads the heady accounts of Beckham's plans to "take" America. The old-school football man watched Beckham's evolution from the mild and polite London boy to lucrative brand name until he could tolerate no more, but, canny as he is, Ferguson must privately be astonished at how the eager boy he signed as a teenager has metamorphosed into this raging, dollar-commodity, a one-man brand.

Ever since his alliance with Victoria Adams made Beckham a source of seemingly endless fascination for the masses who consume the popular media, he has demonstrated an intuition for self-promotion as valuable as his iconic swerving, right-foot free kicks. From the night he made the careful decision to hit the town wearing sandals and a sarong, Beckham made it clear he did not give a toss for the conventional machismo or conservatism of English football culture.

Beckham used his profile as Manchester United star and England captain to indulge his vanity, the floppy New Romantic fringe giving way to a shaved head, the once lean, pale frame buffed up and tanned and adorned with tattoos.

Somehow Posh and Becks, two almost entirely unremarkable 1980s kids from the Home Counties who should have become no more than fringe celebrities, discovered that making news is as simple as feeding ducks in a pond. They discovered they have a genius for making millions of people want to know more about them.

And that is partly why Beckham has been able to sidestep the pitfalls in his career with a nimbleness rarely seen on the field at Old Trafford, let alone Madrid. Threatened with exile at Manchester United, Beckham turned a potentially adverse position into a personal triumph with his move to Real. And although he flirted with an ignominious decline as Fabio Capello, the decorated Italian coach unfazed by celebrity, left him out in the cold this season, Beckham is now the toast of Tinseltown by signing for the Los Angeles Galaxy.

Beckham's dizzying salary will not have escaped the attention of Lakers' basketball virtuoso Kobe Bryant, arguably the most freakishly gifted sportsman in the world.

Kobe and Becks will be photographed together soon enough, and it is only a matter of time before David and Posh acquire courtside seats alongside Jack Nicholson to cheer on the only sporting franchise that matters in Tinseltown. Beckham may never have made it to Roy Keane's for dinner, but the invitations will come flooding in from the Cruises and other LA powerbrokers for whom this eccentric English couple will represent the hottest date in town.

Comparisons have been made between Beckham's move to America and that of George Best. But poor Best, bright as a button yet cloudy-headed with the combination of drink and a fear of his own fame, was merely running away. Beckham, deliberate and guileless and brimming with clear-headed ambition, will apply himself to Wonderland just as determinedly as he did at the training ground at Cliff and Madrid.

And as he departs for the New World, he leaves behind him an England vexed and perplexed as to what to make of him. From having his effigy burned after his petulant kick at Diego Simeone in the 1998 World Cup, to being lionised after delivering England to the 2002 competition with a lacerating free-kick against Greece, Beckham has had a strange relationship with his countrymen. With Posh, he has been bread and butter for the satirists and impressionists, but Ferguson seemed to regard the former Spice Girl as an actual adversary, as some modern Lady Macbeth.

When Rodney Marsh was once asked if Beckham was as good as Best, he paused for a moment before replying, "He probably is. But George is 53 years old". Besides being one of the great sporting one-liners, Marsh captured the difficulty people have had in assessing Beckham the footballer. In recent years, it appeared that many England football people - including Sven-Goran Eriksson - were so blinded by the power of Beckham's brand image that they could not recognise his limitations as a footballer.

That Beckham was sinfully over-rated has been a common complaint. But ask Alex Ferguson about his contribution to Manchester United's glittering performances in the late 1990s and you will hear a different story. And it cannot be forgotten that Beckham's first six months in Madrid were a blazing triumph, a period framed by the dreamy, perfectionist's goal when he delivered a pin-point, 60-yard cross for Zidane to volley home. It was hardly Beckham's fault that Madrid deteriorated into something akin to a Hollywood film set ravaged by spoilt, fading movie stars and beleaguered directors.

He could have gone back to the top flight in England or to Serie A in Italy, but maybe at 32, Beckham could no longer be certain if clubs wanted him for his football skills or his commercial value.

Flattered by his own looks he may have been, but Beckham knew his place as a footballer: he was a grafter blessed with a single touch of genius, that right-footed dead-ball stroke which, at its most potent, produced passages of play that beseeched even his most damning critics. As he said himself, he regarded simply playing on the same field as Zinedine Zidane as a privilege.

He knew he did not possess the rarefied range of gifts as the Frenchman. But he made his way boldly, armed with good old English pluck, starting out in the fabled Theatre of Dreams and finishing it out now in the gaudy, opulent land of celluloid fantasy where a second act awaits.

He leaves behind the England where he made his name, the England of rain-lashed football stadiums and a country whose 40-year quest for the World Cup now looks quixotic and delusional. And although the masses may feel cheated enough at having invested their emotions and faith in "Goldenballs" to say goodbye and good riddance, they are forgetting that Beckham won't look back at dear old Blighty, the province of his youth, either in anger or otherwise.