It arrived in one of those daily “your highlights” list of links sent to me by Twitter with the aid of their spyware. Tweets on topics I have shown an interest in the past. Like English football or foreign affairs.

Do they send those messages to everyone? Or just to people who aren’t tweeting enough?

Anyway, it came from a Twitter account named “Football Fours” (at) “Football_Fours … and the text went like this:

“This is brilliant! Yakubu literally doing nothing for 2:20 minutes for Coventry today.” With this link.

And it appears to be a Coventry City player named Yakubu Aiyegbeni, recently added to a struggling club, doing a lot of nothing for more than two minutes late in a 3-1 home loss to Swindon Town.

The video became a hot topic on the web, and I had a look at it yesterday, and replayed it for the other person in the room, and we decided: “Yeah, that is amazing, and a little odd; does he think no one will notice?”

The only problem?

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This is a familial train wreck waiting to happen.

LaVar Ball is the father of UCLA freshman guard Lonzo Ball, a likely lottery pick in the next NBA draft.

LaVar Ball tends to say colorful things pertaining to his three sons and, in particular, Lonzo, the eldest.

Up to this point a year ago, anything LaVar said about Lonzo fell into the “Lonzo’s just a high-school-kid” category. And most kids let their parents say what they want.

Through high school, anyway.

But Lonzo now is most of the way through his freshman season at UCLA, perhaps only months from an enormous NBA contract — and sometime soon the child may feel empowered to tell the parent: “It’s my career, not yours.”

Especially in the wake of two recent high-profile LaVar pronouncements — declaring his son to be a better basketball player, right now,  than Stephen Curry … and telling a radio show he wants his son to play for the Los Angeles Lakers.

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The upside to getting an English-language-based TV package, here in the south of France, is that it allows me to look at about 50 sports channels broadcast in a language I more fully comprehend.

The downside is, when sports events are live in the U.S., it is some time after midnight in France. When, in theory, I ought to be sleeping.

So, I woke at 3:30 a.m. and checked online …

And saw UCLA was leading by 10 late at Arizona …

Which led me to finding the game on ESPN and seeing the Bruins close out the victory …

And learned that unbeaten Gonzaga was up next, against conference rival BYU …

Which ended with a shock BYU victory, 77-71.

Which leads me back to a point made previously: Many sports fans (including this one) believe their viewing a game somehow makes a difference in the outcome.

Because Gonzaga is now 0-2 in games I have seen from start to finish.

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It isn’t true I oppose every baseball rule change. Just nearly all of them.

Baseball’s rules should be treated with great reverence. Change them not at all unless some compelling need arises.

Making the intentional walk “automatic” is not a change that really needed to be made. It’s not like fans, players and owners were agitating for it.

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The financial ramifications of failure in England’s Premier League are the most dramatic in sports.

The difference between income inside the league … versus income outside it for the three clubs who will be relegated in May … appears to be something north of 400 million pounds. Maybe around half a billion.

Per club, per season. Mostly driven by a 5.1-billion-pounds TV deal for the world’s most-watched sports league.

Fear of demotion to the second division, and the financial Armageddon attached to it, led to defending champion Leicester City announcing today it had fired coach Claudio Ranieri — who was named Fifa’s club manager of the year only last month for leading City to the 2016 Premier League championship, one of the most astonishing upsets in sports history.

In most sports, in most countries, that sort of triumph would assure a coach of at least one full season of further employment, and probably two.

For Claudio Ranieri, it was good for two-thirds of a season.

And as harsh as that treatment seems, it is difficult to criticize Premier League owners for changing coaches when that half-a-billion threat of relegation becomes palpable.

As it now is, at Leicester.

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Even before his first full day as Lakers president of basketball operations ended, Magic Johnson pulled off a trade that will help the Lakers in what figures to be a long climb back to respectability.

Journeyman guard Lou Williams to the Houston Rockets for journeyman forward Corey Brewer and a Rockets first-round draft pick.

Some might say: “Lou Williams was the Lakers’ leading scorer!” But that matters little, if at all.

Four reasons why this was a fine first trade by Magic:

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Jerry Buss died on February 18, 2013.

Two months later, the team he owned, the Los Angeles Lakers, completed a 45-37 regular season and qualified for the NBA playoffs for the 31st time in the 33 seasons played since Buss bought a controlling interest in the club, ahead of the 1979-80 season.

Buss left his 66 percent interest in the team to his six children, to be divided equally. The trouble is, he got at least one key role wrong, that of executive vice-president of basketball operations.

That job went to son Jim, who had never really impressed, and the Lakers imploded.

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DeMarcus Cousins was traded by the Sacramento Kings to the New Orleans Pelicans today in what seemed like a lopsided deal.

The Pelicans got perhaps the league’s most prominent big man (and currently the league’s No. 4 scorer, at 27.8 ppg) in exchange for a whole lot of not much — rookie wing Buddy Hield, who is already 23; what’s left of Tyreke Evans and someone named Langston Galloway, plus the Pelicans gave up their two picks in the June draft.

They also got Omri Casspi from the Kings.

What can we make of this seemingly unequal deal?

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Remember when Jimmer Fredette was required viewing? I once watched him play in the wee hours of an Abu Dhabi morning … because I just wanted to see his act.

It was March of 2011, during the NCAA playoffs. That was the season in which he led the NCAA in scoring at 28.9 points per game, more than four points better than any other collegiate player, and helped get BYU to the final Sweet 16 for the first time since 1981.

And then?

Jimmer went 10th in the NBA draft, to Sacramento, but he never really showed he could play in the world’s top league. The Kings gave him two-plus seasons to become a significant contributor, but he never got there because he struggled to score, and scoring is about 99 percent of his game.

By the end of the 2015-16 NBA season, when he had played for five teams in four seasons, his options looked limited to D-League stuff. In August he revealed he was joining the Shanghai Sharks of the Chinese Basketball Association.

And today, he scored 73 points for Shanghai in a double-overtime road loss in the Chinese league, where Jimmer is one of the leading scorers (38 ppg) and, also, the star he never has been in the NBA.

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Kyrie Irving, formerly of Duke University, currently LeBron James’s wing man in Cleveland, recently did a podcast with two Cavaliers teammates in which he repeatedly declared that the Earth is flat.

Flat. As in … sail long enough and your boat will go off the edge of the world. Flat as in “not round”. Flat as in “13th-century science”.

Irving recapitulated the “world is flat” thing on Friday when asked about it by ESPN reporter Arash Markazi.

Kyrie Irving, 21st century point guard and apparent Flat Earth Society adherent.

Until … today. When Irving suggested the whole of it was a sort of joke. A sort of experiment to see if people would, you know, react to his notions of the solar system, and take him seriously.

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