PREMIER LEAGUE:Chelsea must show backbone by standing firm against Frank Lampard's ludicrous wage demands

SO, ALISTAIR Darling wants to clamp down on oversized, overpriced trundlers which clog up the open spaces in London and pollute the atmosphere by letting off streams of noxious hot air. No wonder Frank Lampard is said to want to leave the country.

It's easy to make jokes - particularly bad ones - at the expense of poor Frank but that really isn't fair. The man just wants to be loved - that and £125,000 (€163,000)-a-week - although in many ways the most put-upon footballer in SW6, denied a new contract by his dastardly employers and facing a summer of bewildering uncertainty, should probably count himself lucky.

If the setting for the very modern morality tale splashed across the pages of last week's papers was Liverpool, and it was Steven Gerrard opening his heart to the nation's media, Merseyside's streets would have been choked with burning effigies.

Fortunately for Lampard, the notion of fiery protest has yet to reach the Surrey stockbroker belt, so Chelsea's fan base was never likely to start incinerating Frank dolls on the King's Road.

I can't quite make up my mind on Lampard. Half of me, the reasonable half, wants to like him. He is a talented footballer - not as good as he thinks he is, but that's hardly unique in the Premier League - and apparently does his fair share of charity work.

He was also unfairly singled out for dog's abuse by those lovable Cockney rogues at West Ham, simply on the basis that he was the son of the first-team coach, an odd attitude for people who make such a song and dance over "faahhmaly".

Then there's the other half, which urges me to throw something at the television whenever he appears on it, which seems to be most of the time.

And I am not alone: England supporters chose to make Lampard their bete noire during the horrific Euro 2008 qualification campaign, not because he was the worst player, but simply because he was the most irritating. Fairly or unfairly, Lampard has come to encapsulate all the most depressing traits of modern top-flight football: the laughably inflated sense of his own importance, the rank refusal to accept responsibility for one's own shortcomings and an apparent total lack of self-awareness.

If you remember, Lampard did give us an early warning by bizarrely abusing American tourists at an airport bar in the wake of the September 11 attacks. At the time, this was put down to the impetuosity of youth, but now it looks like the first manifestation of an underlying and surely incurable idiocy.

Confirmation duly followed at the launch of Frank TV last year, which saw the man in question absorb goggled-eyed tributes from a collection of "football people" in a specially commissioned VT package while guffawing loudly at his own jokes.

Leaving aside the generally reliable rule that you should never trust a man with a television channel named after himself, the most remarkable aspect of an interminable hour-and-a-half was how Lampard appeared utterly oblivious to his own buffoonery. He genuinely believed there was no reason we shouldn't all join in this gratuitous celebration of his unmitigated greatness, or "trifficness", as one of his most fervent admirers, Jamie Redknapp, would put it.

Frank TV is the sort of conceit which would have provoked a mass existential crisis in more philosophical times, but at least it put last week's contract showdown story into context. To a man so obviously removed from the reality of the world he notionally shares with the rest of the human race, expecting sympathy for not being paid £6.5million (€8.5 million) a year when he has, at best, three years of top-level performance remaining probably seems reasonable.

The real irony is that Frank can't be blamed. Instead, the fault lies with all of us: we are the ones who have established Premier League players as the biggest celebrities of our age, buying their dreary autobiographies by the bucket-load, forking out hundreds of euros a year for Sky Sports subscription packages and convincing Lampard's sharp-suited representatives that there is a market for a TV channel based solely around how much chicken and pasta their client eats for dinner.

It's too late to do anything about it now, of course. The monster has been unleashed and all we can do is try to contain the damage. A good start would be for all Lampard's slavish devotees to stop logging on to Frank TV and for Chelsea to show some backbone by standing firm against his ludicrous wage demands.

It wouldn't slay the beast, but it might show Lampard and his ilk that respect is one commodity that cannot be bought.