LOCKERROOM: Isn't January a long slow drag of a month? I've heard speeches by Frank Murphy that have gone by faster. I've seen people attend adult literacy classes and then go on to get masters degrees.

All in a January. The only reason they play the world darts at Purfleet in January is because it is the perfect intersection of the most boring sport with the most boring place in the most boring time.

January is sooooo long. I hate it. All the normal things in life take an age to get going again. And so much oul guff gets talked in January. As a month it's all hat and no cattle. Virtually nothing gets resolved.

Journalists are mainly to blame. The year begins with us coming around peddling those dire perennial stand-bys: "One to Watch Out For" and "Because There's Nothing Happening and There's Still an Acre of Space to Fill Here's What I Think Will Happen in the Next 12 Months."

I have often said to the Sports Editor that we should spice the whole business up by running our predictions as to which people from each major sport will die in the next 12 months. Say each correspondent has three guesses each, they could then fill the space with little mock obituaries and at the end publish odds by Paddy Power on the chances of the subject shuffling off his/her mortal clogs. Each journalist starts with €500 to wager. Then periodically during the year we catch up on our competitors and find out how they are doing.

"He will be missed. His untimely death devastated a sport and stilled a generation, but it was very good news for our own man at the races who had picked the jockey to become an ex-jockey at a generous 25 to 1. Imagine the whoops in this office when our boy heard that a certain somebody would be riding a little stiff from now on."

Then we move onto a more tedious phase of the New Year festivities. The annual Festival of Soccer Statistics. This is dangerous territory. You can wander into an apparently harmless conversation and it will turn out to be the Little Shop of Horrors.

- See your crowd lost again today.

- Ah yeah, another day another hammering.

- They're going down, you know that.

Now it's time to edge away. He has a stat and he's going to use it. There are women and children in the vicinity but he's going to blow your brains out with his stat anyway. You should flee. Instead, you say.

- Ah, I think they'll be okay.

And he says.

- Oh yeah? One little statistic. No team with four blue-eyed players in their defence and a manager who drinks Remy Martin who have had 27 points on the 1st of January have ever stayed up.

You shrug.

- Sure, you never know.

- I know. It's all there. I'll give you another one. No team with the letter w in their ground's post code and the letter w in the surname of their goalkeeper and a right full back who takes a runny boiled egg for breakfast, no team with those three things have ever gone down if they have been in the bottom three in January. And who are your nearest rivals? Who fits the bill there? Eh?

Two options now. Wander away shaking your head. Start making up your own incontrovertible statistics.

In the pantheon of New Year bores there should be no creature more deadly than the soccer stat man, but there is: The Man Who Wants to Know Which County Man You Are. When I stand in bus queues I'm always the one that the drunk picks on to loudly panhandle. When I stand anywhere else I am open prey for The Man Who Wants To Know What County Man You Are.

You'll be standing there discussing something intellectual like Rachel from Friends and The Man'll punch you playfully in the chest and ask you straight out, as if it were a logical progression to the discussion.

- Anyway, what county man are you?

People begin backing away. He's wearing something that attracts these people. There's some code those GAA bores have, they can pick each other out.

- Dublin.

- Aw. I had ye down as a Cavan man.

- Why so?

- Heard you ate your dinner out of a drawer in case someone calls.

- Nope. There's a different reason for that.

- Dublin? Ay? Dirtbirds. Nothin' ever came out of Dublin only dirtbirds and jackeens.

- Hmmm (wittily).

- What clubman are ye?

- It is with heavy heart that I must disclose to you my involvement with . . .

- Do ye know Killer McBride?

- Not really.

- And ya say you're in the same club? Great oul pal of mine. Do you know what the Killer always says to me? I wasn't a great player, he says, but I stopped great players from playing. Isn't that a good one now? That's one for the bewk.

- I believe he's dead this five years.

- Is he? Lord save us, is he? Very sorry to hear that. I suppose if I played for a shower like that I'd die young too! Only slaggin' ya.

And then there's the quality of conversations thrown up by January sports stories. Poor. If Kerry people are animals, what sort of animals are they? Squirrels Because they can store so many nuts down there. Bats maybe, because although everybody heard that the county captain had been sent off last year nobody actually saw it. Something amphibian maybe? Speaking of which, what was Marty Morrissey doing with them in South Africa.

And Liam Higgins, what's eating him? Crafty Dublin journalists indeed! And brave young GAA players disporting themselves in a swimming pool across

the world trying to tart up the image of

the GAA. (Those players should be bloody well hung - oh, I believe they were.)

There's the tedious business of the transfer window. There's those RTÉ sports awards. Occasionally there's the Super Bowl which is boring for everyone except those hacks sent to cover it. As a rule we are never sent when the event is held in an interesting city. Roll on Atlanta.

There are conversations as to why the European Golf Tour starts in Asia. Will Eddie Irvine go to Eddie Jordan? The move seemed ill-starred from the very beginning when an Irish sports journalist put a bet on for a large sum of money that driver and car would expire within the next year. The journalist, whose ticket came in at 30 to 1, is believed to be in the area.

And then there is that black eternity in which all you hear is rugby speculation. How will the boys do? Are we weak in the back line? Those forwards! This could be their year.

Roighty! Forgive me Purfleet.