Brian Viner: Downes shows you can learn a new skill but not a personality

I struggle to overcome the nagging idea that there is something innately suspicious about a man who doesn't like sport

First things first. Or rather, overdue things first. The winner of this column's Christmas quiz was Luke Hodgson, who by now should have received his prize of a year's supply of Spitfire Ale, courtesy of the brewer, Shepherd Neame. Those who correctly answered all the questions were invited to supply a slogan consistent with Spitfire's "Bottle of Britain" marketing campaign. There were a number of variations on the same theme, but Luke won with "Never in the field of human pleasure was one beer enjoyed by so many and brewed by so few".

He is, incidentally, a final-year medical student at St Thomas' Hospital in London, which explains the use of the word "cirrhotic" in the e-mail he sent me acknowledging his win. Luke now has 365 bottles of beer to get through, which brings me, in just about as elegant a segue as I can manage, to Maximilian Devereaux.

He was the reclusive professional chess player with a name Barbara Cartland might have invented who, in last Wednesday's Faking It programme on Channel 4, had four weeks in which to metamorphose into a football manager. He had to learn to swear and drink beer copiously, neither of which came naturally to him. He had last played football at the age of six, had never watched a match, and did not especially enjoy the society of other men, so Wally Downes, the Brentford manager charged with coaching him in the finer points of coaching, had a nigh-on impossible task to get Max to convince a panel of three - the referee Dermot Gallagher, the former Celtic manager John Barnes and the radio presenter Victoria Derbyshire - that he was the real deal.

In the event, not one of the panel was fooled. They watched Max and three other coaches during an amateur tournament, and realised at once that his body-language was all wrong, that his arms hung awkwardly by his sides instead of pummelling the air in annoyance in the manner of Gordon Strachan, or folding and unfolding in frustration in the manner of Harry Redknapp. The other dead giveaway was that he was too articulate by half.

My colleague Chris Maume dissected the programme in these pages on Saturday so I won't dwell on it any longer, except to say that Channel 4 might consider easing the boot on to the other foot. I think that Max should now take four weeks to teach Wally Downes to play top-level chess, with the objective of fooling a panel of grand masters. He would have to learn not to swear, to favour glasses of milk over pints of bitter, and to work out strategies for breaking down the opposition with a pincer movement involving queen's bishop and king's knight, rather than Stevie Bishop and Micky Knight.

I don't suppose that in four weeks you can make a convincing chess player of a Wally any more than you can make a football enthusiast of a Max. It is something upon which Downes might have reflected, as he rather brutally put his eager but hapless pupil through his paces.

Indeed, it is something upon which we might all reflect, those of us who believe that non-sports lovers are fundamentally disadvantaged in life, because the chances are that we are just as impoverished for not sharing enthusiasms of theirs.

The man who can identify every railway locomotive built since the war might think me unutterably sad and anoracky for knowing nothing about trains but being able to name all the Everton players who contested the 1977 League Cup final. And he might be right. Life is all about horses for courses, and in its way there is as much nobility in a novices' hurdle at Kelso as there is in the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

That said, I still struggle to overcome the nagging idea that there is something innately suspicious about a man who doesn't like sport (as sexist as it sounds, women are excluded from the equation). Especially ball sports.

My wife rightly points out to me that I have male friends who would not know a googly from a yorker - or who think that when you discuss Bernhard Langer's proficiency with the sand wedge you must be referring to the afternoon-tea chef at the Savoy - but there's no doubt that I have condescendingly put them in a compartment of their own. I don't have one circle of friends but several, interlocking like a Venn diagram. There are those I can talk to about Paul Sturrock taking over at Southampton, and those I can't.

Speaking of which, Sturrock's predecessor, Strachan, says that in his break from football he wants to go skiing for the first time in his life. Yet as Max Devereaux found, you can learn a new skill but not a new personality. I look forward to reports of a pugnaciously ginger little Scotsman standing at the foot of a slope in Courchevel, bitterly complaining that he was blatantly obstructed by the woman in the purple salopettes.

b.viner@independent.co.uk