One of the joys of having this column is that my lovely co-editor knows nothing and cares less when it comes to sport.

So not only do I have a column, I have freedom! Because we all know that having one’s name at the top of a magazine column automatically makes one a genius whose opinions count.

My opinion is that there’s a lot wrong with a lot of sports, and I have the solutions for all of them, to make them more appealing to spectators, and in many cases, more rewarding for competitors.

Let’s start with swimming. Now, it’s pretty hard to deny that watching eight splashes moving up and down a pool is kind of, well, shit. First thing to do would be remove the lane ropes, and make it more of a contact sport, that way arrogant little prigs like Kieren Perkins would actually have to act half-way masculine.

Next thing would be to have a gantry above the pool, moving randomly and dropping half-bricks into the water. No more focussing on the straight line at the bottom of the pool, oh no. They’d have to keep one eye on the gantry, and be ready to take evasive action by pushing into someone else’s lane or, preferably, by using each other as shields.

Soccer, or football if you will, suffers from only two real problems: there are too many players on the field for it to flow properly, and it’s mainly played by whining nancy-boys who burst into tears whenever another nancy-boy bumps into them. The simple solution to both problems is this: the referee is armed with a Glock 9mm. Whenever a player is lying on the ground pissing and moaning about the horrific injury he’s just received (which will of course disappear the moment he’s awarded the penalty) he gets put out of his, and our, misery with the application of a fully-jacketed hollow-point to the back of the skull.

Rugby League just needs land-mines scattered at random around the pitch, so hopefully one day an entire scrum (a wonderful thing in Union, but utterly pointless in League) will step on one.

As for Union (the game played in heaven) tackles could only be applied to the ears, rolling mauls must be performed to the Macarena, and George Gregan should Shut The Fuck Up.

Basketball would benefit from monofilament razor-wire being strung at a height of exactly six foot two above the playing surface, that way vaguely normal human beings could play it, but there’d still be the chance of seeing basket-ballers decapitated, which I would love to see only slightly less than Ian Thorpe and Lleyton Hewitt choking to death. On each other. On fire.

Tennis has two problems as I see it. The players are all wankers, and the spectators are all wankers. They need those pits like they had in Gladiator, where a tiger springs up out of the ground to gnaw on the players, and they need a gantry similar to the one at the swimming, but with a flame-thrower on it, randomly igniting spectators.

Squash would be a lot more fun if the court gradually filled with water, and the water was full of electric eels. In fact, we could probably use the electric eels in the swimming, too.

Golf presents some difficulties, because there are a lot of good arguments that it’s not actually a sport. When you consider that Phil Mickelson’s man-boobs would get him automatic entry into a Sumo tournament, the arguments start to make a bit of sense. We can fix that by making the players run, and carry their own bags, and repair their own divots, and disqualify any winner who claims that Jesus helped him. As if Jesus is even slightly interested in golf. He’s a snooker fan.

Speaking of snooker, it’s an easy fix – just introduce pub rules, but make sure that it’s a different pub every game, and, of course, the players aren’t told until there’s a contentious decision to be made.

Where do I start with cricket? Sheesh. We’ve gone from Tests that ran until there was a result (sometimes ten days), to the 50-over version, now we’ve got something called twenty-20. Why not just keep reducing the overs until there are none, and we can all just sit in the sun drinking beer and working on our skin cancers and fatal dehydration.

Now the sport that really needs the most fixes is obviously AFL, so here’s my shopping list of improvements.

People who go to the game don’t want to get in before the first quarter, they want to queue up outside and deal with a dreadful ticketing system. Once in the ground, the crowd really want to see more ads, be bombarded with ear-splitting jingles and inappropriate music. They also really really want to pay exorbitant prices for disgusting food and mid-strength beer. Of particular interest to working families is the ability to pay five dollars for a small bottle of water they could’ve got for a buck twenty at the supermarket.

The rules have to change, along with their week-by-week interpretation by the umpires, on a regular basis. A scatter-gun, knee-jerk approach would be best. Accusations of tanking will only be accepted from the AFL itself, and only in the context of a pre-season competition that only it cares about. Coaches and players must be fined huge amounts of cash for commenting on the umpiring.

When an important anniversary, such as the 150th, comes along, it’s very important that the man in charge isn’t there, it’s far more important that he go on a junket to the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Speaking of overseas, it’s obvious that the game needs to be promoted to the rest of the world, so exhibition matches absolutely must not be played where there’s an expat population larger than a couple of hundred, and the game must not be televised anywhere.

Above all, we the fans demand to be treated with utter contempt.

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