IN the week that the Labour opposition revealed itself to be ConLib-lite, there are many who feel victims of sport’s annual summer betrayal.

Cricket, athletics, cycling, tennis, the Lions pawing their collective feet in Australia, etc can all go hang as those of a certain 11-a-side persuasion gripe and grimace, grumble and moan, stumble from back pages to web pages scouring desperately for news.

They are football fans, and not just fans, but blinkered, blimpish zealots who see no other sport but their own.

Take these two examples. One of the web regulars of The Press urgently implored the sports-desk as to why a certain York City story had not been updated on the internet.

The imprecation was, by implication, an urgent plea for all things Minstermen to be ferried to the greedy ether out there even before anything actually happens.

Then, with my own club Liverpool, a transfer speculation story was dismissed as something that had featured before, so a webwitterer wondered why entice the news-hunters to the web or the sports pages with something of reported spurious certainty?

So damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

The exclusive see-all football, speak all-football, hear-all football exponent is a curious breed. More than an avid aficionado, he and she are not satisfied unless all sports are banished to footnotes, either virtual, or viral, or far from vital tucked away on the sports pages.

Now I love football. It’s my principal sporting passion, which to my surprise has not even been slightly eroded by the elephantine excess of European and English top-tier empires.

I’ll readily confess to daily checks on what might be happening on foot-world as well as sometimes being somewhat tetchy if a domestic season is not followed almost immediately by a major tournament such as the World Cup or European Championships.

But when that happens, it is a rare and welcome break from all that far from heavenly hype about a ball weighing between 14 and 16 ounces being ballooned above or caressed along some patch of green pitch.

There are times when it’s not only refreshing but restorative to escape from the all-encompassing, all-ensnaring nature of football.

And those benefits of renewal and revival can actually be served by any of the aforementioned other sports.

Today, while the Lions step up their campaign to face the green and gold hordes in the first Test, England were meeting Australia in the ICC Trophy, which prefaces the main summer showdown of a home Ashes series.

No-one can fail to be enlivened by such an encounter, enthralled by that ancient rivalry, excited at the prospect of dishing out a beating to those down under denizens.

And thank goodness for Lord David of Gower for elegantly and eloquently stoking up the Ashes fire with his “culture, what culture?”

jibe at Australia and his railing at their crowd’s “animal” tendencies.

Just what the spin doctor ordered.

In cycling, even in the wake of Sir Bradley Wiggins’ injury and illness demise from the Giro d’Italia and his defence of the upcoming Tour de France, we have a Sky team dominating – yet again – the Critérium du Dauphiné.

Chris Froome is in the lead, Richie Port is second and the Tour de France beckons with these two in the vanguard of favourites to sport that yellow jersey at the end of its 3,360-kilometre journey in Paris next month.

As for athletics, the Diamond League has started and Brits who starred in the Olympics last summer, and perhaps more significantly those who missed out in London through injury or poor form, will be sharpening their preparations for the world championships in Moscow later this year.

And any sport that generates the return of the world’s fastest man Usain Bolt, even if he did lose his season’s first outing by fractions to American Justin Gatlin, has got to be more than eminently watchable.

It’s ironic too, how, in athletics, cycling, even cricket, we have proven world-beaters, global tabletoppers, yet in football – damn I’ve written that word again in June – international success is confined to a balmy summer’s day 47 years ago. Footy, schmuty.