PREMIER LEAGUE:Is it right to use Google, Twitter and Facebook to slag off a player who isn't up to scratch, writes ANDREW FIFIELD

SEEING AS I suspect it is now technically illegal to write regularly for a newspaper without once quoting Armando Iannucci, now seems as good a time as any to start.

So, anyway, there’s this great scene in “The Thick of It” when the relentlessly downbeat Peter Mannion MP is informed by his lackeys that the best way of connecting with voters is through a blog that invites feedback.

“Have you ever Googled your own name?” Mannion says with a scowl. “It’s like opening the door to a room where everyone tells you how s**t you are.”

Now, I have no idea whether Bobby Zamora, the Fulham striker, is keen on sharp political satire but, if he is, my guess is this line would have resonated rather forcibly.

Type ‘Bobby Zamora’ into Google and the third-most popular associated term – after the rather tedious “Fulham” and “stats” – is “miss”.

The sixth, incidentally, is ‘”Nicola T”, which can never be good, but I suspect it’s the “miss” thing that rankles most deeply with Bobby, given his one-man campaign against Fulham fans for having the temerity to write mean things about him on the message board located on the club’s official website.

Now, I am not about to heap more opprobrium on Zamora’s sagging shoulders. As it happens, he has my sympathy: towards the end of last season, a column I wrote about Stoke which was mildly critical of manager Tony Pulis led to the kind of postbag which would normally only be the preserve of war criminals and Thierry Henry.

The nicer ones labelled me a cretinous incompetent whose observations on Pulis, “one of the friendliest people you could wish to meet” as one pointed out (this was before last week’s unfortunate naked headbutting incident, of course), were beyond contempt; the nasty ones vowed to track me down to whichever bolt-hole I had crawled into and eviscerate me and all my “bog trotter mates”.

Anyway, the point is that if this is the kind of invective that befalls someone whose celebrity status is sub-zero – although I was once stopped in the street by a man who had mistaken me for the lead singer of Keane – then it is hardly surprising that Zamora, who has had gobfuls of bile spat at him from all directions for much of the last five years, has finally had enough. In the circumstances, his enjoyably furious goal celebration against Sunderland last week were almost restrained.

There are two conclusions to draw from all this. The first is that football supporters need to get a grip, and fast. Nobody is denying the rights of a punter to criticise a footballer – or a journalist, for that matter – but attacks should at least be made with a pretence of perspective.

Yes, there have been better players than Zamora, whose style of play probably falls into that memorable, if nonsensical, category of “defensive striker” coined by Trevor Francis when he was asked to assess the qualities of Ade Akinbiyi. But as someone who spent a significant chunk of his youth watching Marco Gabbiadini, I can assure Fulham supporters that they could have it far worse.

The second is that those wide-eyed types who believed that the advent of new technologies such as message boards, Facebook and Twitter would help fill the yawning divide that separates supporters from players got it horribly, horribly wrong.

On the contrary, it has simply permitted the morally outraged, frothy-mouthed fans who would once simply bellow at their television screens or radios in impotent fury a handy conduit for their poisonous rants.

Fed up with your star striker missing that open goal?

No problem, just set up a Facebook page demanding his immediate castration.

Upset with your long-serving captain handing in a transfer request?

Easy – use his Twitter account to call him a **** 35 times.

It might not be fair but it might make you feel a bit better and, anyway, he earns €45,000- a-week – he can live with it.

Well, possibly, but should he have to?

Should anyone have to?

The point, surely, is that those supporters who allow their tongues or, more likely, their typing fingers, to run away with them are simply taking a gigantic hammer to the wedge that already exists between footballers and the people who help pay their wages.

There was a time disgruntled supporters would come up with a witty ditty to pay homage to their less accomplished players.

And, as it happens, Fulham’s supporters – the real ones who go to the games and everything – already have one (to the tune of That’s Amore): “When you’re sat in Row Z and the ball hits your head, that’s Zamora”.

Surely even Bobby would see the funny side to that.