The end of the (Premier) football season was only slightly exciting for West Ham fans.  After seven of eight months lodged at number ten in the table there was a slight mathematical chance of slipping to eleventh on the last day – but only if Spurs beat Liverpool, which wasn’t going to happen was it?

As it is I think we can be quite happy with the result.  The important thing was that we ended up above Spurs, despite all their talk about breaking into the top four at the start of the season.  All the excitement was at the extremities.  I watched the Portsmouth/Fulham game live on Setanta which was a real nail-biter even for a neutral.  I don’t think I could have watched if I was a Fulham supporter.   I’m not sure Fulham really deserved to stay up, only winning eight games all season, but you have to give them credit for the late burst they had.  It looked like they were just teasing the supporters who had been resigned to going down for months but in the end they pulled it off.

There is something about football that makes grown men sentimental, so for me the moment of the season was Benjani Mwaruwari very ostentatiously not celebrating the goal he scored against his old team, Portsmouth.  There was an echo of that in Solano’s non-celebration against Villa yesterday, but Benjani did it better.

Now we just have the FA Cup final and the Champions League final and its a long summer with no footie except for Euro 2008 which will be good but there will not be the emotional involvement needed for us to really enjoy it properly.

What we can get out of it is that we can get a good look at the players being linked to our teams in the various rumours and watch as their notional values visibly go up or down.  These big tournaments are becoming a bit of a shop window now.  In fact I think that Premier league managers and especially owners look at the TV coverage as nothing more than their own shopping channel.

I like to imagine Abramovich watching the Euro championship, World Cup, African Cup of Nations or Copa Americas on a special TV set.  Where the rest of us have a red button in the corner with a label that says  ‘press the red button for more’ he has a red button and a label that says ‘Add to shopping cart’ and ‘press green to check out’.