WHO WILL SUE NEXT?

SO who will sue next? Why not the bloke with the hot dog stand outside Bramall Lane.

Takings have taken a tumble over the past couple of seasons and it's not even the credit crunch that's caused his business to crumble. No, it's that Carlos Tevez who is to blame.

So he gets in touch with moodyclaim.com and they tell him he's got a great case to serve a writ against West Ham over the "Tevez affair".

They calculate that loss of earnings plus the stress of it all - not to mention how his personal esteem has suffered since 2007 - could add up to, say, £250,000. Easily.

OK, it hasn't quite got that silly. Not yet anyway. But the way things have unfolded over the last week, where is this all going to end?

No sooner had West Ham hammered out a mutual agreement with Sheffield United which could reach £20million, seemingly bringing the Tevez saga to end at long last, then the ambulance chasing lawyers went into overdrive.

Apparently Neil Warnock and several United players are set to sue West Ham over money supposedly lost.

Yet one of the players is said to be Phil Jagielka, whose career has been on the up since the Blades went down. A move to a far bigger club like Everton, a fatter contract and England recognition. Maybe West Ham ought to invoice him for helping his career.

Farcically, Fulham are greedily after some wedge over lost merit payments, ignoring the fact that they beat a Liverpool reserve side in the final weeks to stay up. Should West Ham make a claim against Liverpool?

If this "legal anarchy" - as West Ham have put it - is allowed to spiral out of control, then lawyers will be stalking the touchline turning every disputed decision made by a referees or bad tackles into court cases.

Just imagine where we would be if Chelsea now decide to sue Mike Riley for wrongly sending off Frank Lampard at Liverpool then suffering a defeat which most likely cost the Blues the title and led to Phil Scolari losing his job. Yes, he could sue, too.

Disrepute

It's just got to stop. The actual terms of Tevez's status at Upton Park were a technical and naive breach of paperwork by the East London club.

But West Ham have been punished twice now. How many more times? And the notion decided by an 85-year- old judge that Tevez was worth three points is a ludicrous assessment of the outcome of a 38-game season.

The time has come for the Premier League and FA to at last take proper control of this mess, throw out any remaining issues surrounding Tevez and tell all other parties that THEY are bringing the game into disrepute.

That the blame culture must stop now. If football allows ambulance-chasing lawyers run amok the next thing we'll see is clubs being sued for playing rubbish football.

On that basis, Sheffield United would go out of business pretty quickly and make sure our hot dog man goes properly bust.

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