Ruining the mystique

I've always felt a strangely compelling urge to follow football as closely as possible whenever a match of any remote interest is on. Nowadays, of course, there are myriad ways of finding out whatever you want about a game going on almost anywhere in the world. It wasn't always so.

The days of watching matches unfold on Teletext (or Ceefax, sometimes one half each, always stick with one when a goal is scored for your team) seem a hell of a long time ago. The development of the beloved Gillette Soccer Saturday has rendered it pretty much obsolete, but its spirit lives on in the basic, slow and highly unreliable 'live' scores available on most mobile phones.

Until recently I made as much use as necessary of this rudimentary system, which didn't even have the decency to show scorers on the main score page, and even when you've clicked through fails to distinguish own goal scorers from others, as well as ignoring incidents like red cards. Even Teletext managed, and it must be a while ago because of the individual and event involved, to catalogue a 'Salako stretchered off' during a Zenith Data Systems Cup Final.

I can't help feeling that the old televisual text missed a bit of a trick. The driving force behind this is the BBC Website's brilliant Live Text coverage of matches, often in the company of the vaguely demented Caroline Cheese.

Cheese, who is apparently a real person and of whom I have even managed to track down video footage, brings a lot to what must be an incredibly arduous task.

She'll often, at least in my imagination, be sitting watching several matches at once while simultaneously chronicling both for the usually sky-less public. The live feeds are so beloved that they have extended them to sports like cricket and golf (try betting on the US Open in play with only this as a tool. You won't make money).

I've even sat among the respected members of the press at Wembley and seen several checking their facts by referencing Ms Cheese or one of her colleagues. Now there's a ringing endorsement.

Much like the Guardian's take on the same technique, irreverent humour plays a big part in the unfolding events. It was this that led me to start trawling around on the ultimately disappointing quest to see if Cheese actually existed, or was a made-up 'staffer'. I don't suppose you could make it up.