CONFUSING week.

The communication lines to the Big Man Upstairs have been crackly. Spent seven days praying for an astrophysicist's brain and woke up yesterday with athlete's foot.

My confusion has not been helped by the stooshie over Alan Pardew's head butt. What a hoopla, and that was just the attempt to throw a rope round his neck. My views on Mr Pardew applying his napper to David Meyler, of Hull City, are clouded by my experience on the football pitch and the consequent damage to synapses that this entailed.

Frankly, head butts were not only expected in amateur football of the 1970s, they were mandatory. The Premier League in England has this quaint ceremony of everyone shaking everyone's hand before hostilities begin. In the auld days, a bout of mutual butting before the whistle would have made the ref's job so much easier.

Indeed, the St Ninians Thistle team of Stirling and of recorded history who played with all the might of their previous convictions would have considered it rude not to have stuck the head on at least one opponent. It was sort of the primal Caledonian equivalent of Maoris rubbing noses.

Now, I am not making light of Pardew's offence. Indeed, two observations immediately came to mind: firstly, why was he not nicked and; secondly, if he was a Celtic or Rangers manager the government would have called a summit meeting to address the uncivil disorder.

His punishment was to be banned for seven games and to be fined a hundred squillion pounds, which is about a week's wages. It is the suspension that intrigues me. It involves Pardew being banned from grounds for the first three of the seven matches, and being banished to the stand for the subsequent four.

Therefore, Pardew will be absent from Craven Cottage when Newcastle go to Fulham today and from St James' Park when Crystal Palace and Everton visit.

Leaving aside the reality that there are people who would pay good money not to see these games, there is much to ponder on how the ban will be enforced. The seat in the stands will, of course, be covered by more cameras than a hastily convened press conference after the discovery that Elvis is alive and living in Dalmarnock with a sexually confused Cabinet minister.

There will be the obligatory shots of Pardew with his hand over his mouth talking into a telephone. The messages to John Carver, his assistant, will run along the lines of: "Narrow it up in midfield, stay tight on the wide men, press in the final third and stick the nut on that annoying little nugget when he comes over for a shy."

It is what Pardew does when he cannot enter the ground that intrigues me. There is the theory that he will be watching the game on the telly in the nearest pub but that is bound to end badly when he confronts a regular with the challenge: "Are you looking at my boys?"

It is not to expected that he will partake of the culture of Newcastle in a bid to tame his wild spirit. First, all the culture in Newcastle is to be found on a discarded kebab and, second, Pardew once stuck the head on Rodin's The Thinker, believing it was the worst piece of statuesque defending he had ever seen. Pardew has never managed Gary Caldwell.

The best use of his talents may be to employ him in a touring production of Boys From The Black And White Stuff. This re-working of Alan Bleasdale's classic will feature a bunch of footballers in a northern town who realise that life is without hope and that their traditional game is being supplanted by the realities of the modern world and the dictates of a southern plutocracy.

The Yosser Hughes role will be played by Tosser Pardew. He will stick the nut on all members of the cast, most of the audience and several of the dwarves auditioning for the panto season. Injuries will be slight because Pardew, most lamentably, is not a purveyor of the Glasgow Kiss, more the Glasgow Smooch. His nut is soft-centred.

The authorities warned Pardew about his future conduct. There would have been no future conduct of any sort if he had tried it on a St Ninians player.