THIS is one of those confessional pieces to which occasionally columnists have to own up.

When the England squad was announced for the recent revival of the auld enemy clash against Scotland, the selection of Southampton’s Rickie Lambert did not sit well with yours truly.

While nothing against the Saints marksman, the call-up of the then 31-year-old international novice appeared purposeless. Was Lambert going to be the answer to England’s still to be secured advance to next summer’s World Cup in Brazil?

If England do qualify surely there are better candidates for a raid on Rio than the likeable Scouser, who had trawled the nether reaches of domestic football since being rejected by Liverpool as a teenager and subsequently starring in Southampton’s ascent to the top.

While doubts were diluted by his fulminating first-touch impact of a goal that proved to be the winner over the Scots in a spiky friendly at Wembley, they still remained as to the perceived wisdom of his selection.

There was also a nagging sense that here was another England cap doled out for this week’s flavour as if playing for the country is no more an enticement or enchantment than getting a new contract, a new car, a new agent, a new boot endorsement.

However, all that disappeared not only due to Lambert’s hearteningly honest interview to ITV immediately after the five-goal clash, but also due to the opening weekend of the Premier League.

Less than 76 hours after the Wembley spat, there it was again, ramped-up hyper-ego, hyper-inflated, hyper-marketed product – bigger, better, enveloped in an Everest of definition and clarity. There was even a new gadget-geek kid on the block with BT’s bid to cloud the monopoly of Sky Sports.

So we had the myth-making of Moyes – Man U’s new boss now being nationally feted after his annointment in a private audience with his beknighted predecessor before the end of last season.

And as if that wasn’t enough to provoke a puke in a bag, we had that other myth-taker, Mourinho.

His return to Chelsea drew a London-dominated media scrum to Stamford Bridge only too eager to apply Messianic value to his second time around posting.

Jeez, he is only a football manager – he has not found a cancer-curing drug, he has not solved the world’s economic nightmare, his expensive loafers have not stamped out poverty. He has not discovered the reason why a Marathon bar became a Snickers.

Yet the man who you fear would lick himself down to the bone if he was coated in chocolate, was accorded a response normally afforded to saints, popes and a host of heavenly seraphim, a response almost similarly given to the Premier League’s return.

Thank mercy then for Lambert, who christened the Saints’ opener at West Brom with the only goal of the game, albeit a penalty.

That capped a quite breathtaking five days in the life of Lambert, who, amid all the technical ballyhoo and fawning flim-flam, reminded us that the soul of the game had not all together been pimped to the folding stuff.

Lambert was like you and me – a football fan now playing at the summit. Someone who relished his time in the limelight because he spent more than a decade as the equivalent of a football mushroom, kept in the dark on a diet of....you know what I mean.

In Lambert you could still smile at the dream of yourself being finally spotted, hauled from the crowd, signed on emergency forms and thrown into the action that very same afternoon to answer a team’s crisis and either poaching a late winner, snaffling a hat-trick, or rattling in a thunderbolt free-kick.

‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’ sang American group Steely Dan – Rickie don’t ever lose that wide-eyed appreciation of doing what millions of us on the terraces, in the stands, who knows, even among the vol-au-vent vanguard, would give our right leg, okay left leg, to replicate.

before we all drown in rheumy-eyed romanticism, here’s a craven tale from the top.

According to a survey by the Unite union, no fewer than 14 Premier League and Championship clubs currently pay employees like mascots, ball-boy overseers, and physio interns, less than the national minimum wage of £6.19 an hour.

Yet in those same clubs almost all the senior players will be amassing tens of thousands, some even hundreds of thousands, of pounds a week. Shame on you.