So Chris Blackburn has gone on the transfer list. Nothing too dramatic in that, but further investigation reveals a possible dark secret behind his estrangement with the club; a motive which threatens to pull apart the entire sport.

It seems what has really got his goat is that he insists on playing at centre back, despite establishing himself as a key part of a promotion push as a defensive midfielder last season. Perhaps his desire to play in a position in which, frankly, he didn’t cover himself with glory last season, rather than one in which he excels, has a more deep-rooted explanation. Could it be that Blackburn is in the grip of the footballer’s greatest enemy; superstition? Is he simply insisting on playing in a position which has the same initials as he does?

It’s an intriguing thought. Does his brother Larry insist on playing left back? Would he suddenly be happy to play as a defensive midfielder if he discovered there’d been an administrative mix-up at his baptism and his real name is Dougal Maguire? Will Andy Morrell have a pop at Dean Saunders for not playing him as an attacking midfielder?

Every player has some sort of ritual which they’ve convinced themselves makes them a better player somehow. Whether it’s walking out of the tunnel in eighth place in the team, not shaving until they’ve scored their first left-footed goal of the season or urinating copiously on a corner flag at two in the morning before a cup tie, they all have their foibles.

And of course, they work, don’t they? Some cosmic force keeps an eye on such weirdness and rewards each player or coach with enhanced good fortune and performances.

So why isn’t the game dominated by surprise results? Well, that’s all part of the beauty of it. The lack of shocks helps us to prove scientifically that the theory holds water. As every player and manager on either side carries out the same sort of rituals before every match, that means that all the superstition cancels itself out, and the results are fair.

And therein lies the scandal. As the cosmic balance is maintained by the fact that all footballers are as superstitious as each other, what would happen if one of the players refused to carry out his superstitious rituals? What if, before what looks like an easy home Welsh Cup tie against 1000-1 outsiders AFC Abermorddu, Jamie Tolley decides not to drive eighteen times round the Mold Road roundabout in the wrong direction? The resultant imbalance in superstition between the two sides would mean that we’d inevitably lose 4-1, representing a marvellous gambling opportunity for some shadowy Mister Big in Malaysia. As match-fixing scandals rip across Europe, could this undetectable way to corrupt a result, invented in Wrexham, will become the chosen method of the football underworld?