(Jair Butler is a member of both Melbourne Victory and Melbourne Heart FCs - and a BPL Citizen Journalist.)

This week's societal adventure took my partner and I to what turned out to be a rather droll restaurant a few streets away. You know the one - the perky table staff with vasoline smiles and callused texting fingers, the wine expert with the Anglo-Euro-Sudamerican accent, the older couple in the corner looking completely uncomfortable eating at the ungodly hour of 7pm.

As we ordered, and she left me at the table to answer an impromptu telephone call, I couldn't help but fiddle with the straw in my post-mix Coke. We've all done that. Admittedly, for me, it's most likely when bereft of interest in my surrounds, and is accompanied by a severe rap on the knuckles during the drive home. In dunking the ice-cubes, chinking the glass, and watching the bubbles rise, my thoughts came to rest where they often do - football.

Season seven of the A-League approaches with an unusual degree of tabloid interest. And with obvious cause, for it's not every day that an Australian footballing demigod chooses here over there. The ‘Kewell factor', as a sub-editor bereft of his Roget's will surely dub it, will be a curiosity in itself this summer, and one that, as a dual-citizen of both the blue and red halves of Melbourne, I hope has the same galvanising effect on the football community that last year's derby fixtures so wonderfully proved.

Where will he play? What number will he wear? Where will he live? What was his wife wearing? - there's fodder enough for ‘soccer' reporters and paparazzi alike. But without a skerrick of gloating in the fact that The Harry Show will run fortnightly at AAMI Park, the real victory of this transfer window fell north of the border.

After 11 years in Europe, including eight at my beloved Ewood Park, Brett Emerton seized the opportunity to fly Steve Kean's ever-besieged coop and land himself in his hometown. There will undoubtedly be the initial flash photography, and likely the flash marketing as is FC's wont, but no fashion police. No nightclub surveillance. No shrieking teenage girls. And therein lies the purity that we of football love and respect.

Akin to Judd and Civoniceva, Emerton's basal quality has always been endurance. I have long attempted to convince my passing-interest colleagues that Emerton is the epitome of an Australian sporting hero, and the closest we have to the Internazionale legend Javier Zanetti, The Tractor. He is the man to whom we wish the loose ball falls in the 89th minute of a World Cup Qualifier in the Perspiration Lands, for we know that one more marauding run and turned defence is likely. The man that, in years past, we recall taking wildly unnecessary shots from 30-yards, but then having the gall to himself win the ball back, and to do it again. The man that, at 20, cracked the Feyenoord first-team and refused to yield for the regular full-back.

The man that no Telegraph reporter knows.

It's with nought but hope that Messrs NRL and ARU realise what sits atop the Sydney Football Stadium table this October, and can take a sip before the football bubbles are burst by the gloam of newsroom indignation, and gradually give way to their half-empty glass of brown we know so well.