PREMIER LEAGUE:In the make-believe world of professional sport, perspective is for wimps

THERE ARE, according to my thesaurus, 104 synonyms for the word "momentous" and by the most conservative calculations, each of them was used at least twice every 15 minutes during last week's rolling TV news bulletins. That's an awful lot of "earth-shakings", "weighties", and "unforgettables" over the course of seven days and yet none of them felt especially misplaced. The events in America were, after all, "epoch-defining" (thanks, Mr Roget).

It would be nice if all elements of our humdrum lives were worthy of such bombast: sitting down to eat a truly seismic sandwich or tackling a pile of washing-up which is nothing short of historic might just add a splash of colour to these grey, damp November days.

We don't, of course, because most of us are able to distinguish between what is trivial and what is truly significant. I say most of us, for in the make-believe world of professional sport perspective is for wimps and if things cannot be said in HUGE CAPITAL LETTERS and followed by at least three exclamation marks, they are not worth saying at all.

A nadir was plumbed in the aftermath of Lewis Hamilton's Formula One victory, when the man who might just be the most significant human being ever to have emerged from Stevenage was asked - quite seriously - to equate his achievement in becoming the first black man to win the Drivers' Championship with Barack Obama's election victory.

Hamilton looked faintly bemused and politely offered his congratulations to his fellow trailblazer from across the Atlantic.

In the self-importance stakes, however, even F1 can merely doff its brightly-coloured peaked cap to the Premier League, an organisation which takes itself so seriously that it is surely only a matter of time before Richard Scudamore insists on being called "Mr President" and managers start inserting clauses into their contracts forbidding eye contact on match-days.

On quiet weeks, they can just about get away with it. When you have nothing significant to talk about, another managerial war of words or Joey Barton's latest act of criminal delinquency assumes a macabre significance and we follow it with all the morbid curiosity of those who slow down to gawp at car crashes.

Other weeks, however, are not so forgiving and while the real world was developing a lump in its throat at developments the other side of the Pond, the Premier League was serving up two stories which, even by its own inflated standards, touched new heights in pomposity.

The first was predictable: Arsène Wenger, a man who has spent more time on his high horse than the Lone Ranger, getting all angsty about a couple of rugged, but hardly outrageous, tackles from Stoke players on his porcelain-limbed Arsenal tyros during their entirely inevitable defeat nine days ago.

Wenger is that rarest of beasts, a manager whose contribution to English football is worthy of superlatives, but on matters such as this he simply looks snobbish and blinkered, a man whose rank refusal to instil some backbone into his side will probably rule out his club from this, and any future, title race. Forget Arsenal's bruised ankles and tweaked shoulders: their biggest problem was a gigantic yellow belly.

The other story, equally predictably, was Alex Ferguson's hissy-fit with Sky over some innocuous comments from two of the station's pundits. The Manchester United manager - the senior statesman of English football, a knight of the realm and an alleged father figure to young coaches - reacted the only way he knows how: swearing loudly and refusing to speak to the broadcaster after last week's Champions League game with Celtic.

For a man so utterly contemptuous of the media - even Sky, a former United shareholder and the Premier League's unofficial cheerleader - Ferguson still gets remarkably agitated by them.

You would have thought that after 22 years in top-flight management, he would realise that a throwaway remark on a TV show watched by approximately four people, all of whom are presumably dying, drunk or both, is not worth worrying about. Instead, he chucks his United-branded toys out of his over-sized pram, thoroughly demeaning both himself and his club in the process.

At least Wenger and Ferguson dredged up some decorum for their sides' league meeting on Saturday. Their generous assessment of each other's qualities was perfectly in keeping with a riotously entertaining match, full of the sort of slick, sumptuous football we've come to expect on these occasions.

It was a wonderful game, but that's all it was. The sky didn't crack, governments didn't quake, historians didn't mop their brows in giddy excitement.

No, for true human drama, revisit the footage of that wrinkled, arthritis-riddled octogenarian, weeping with joy at the words of a man he'd never met, on a day he never thought would come. Now that really is momentous.