VOTING on the greatest sportsmen of all time is great fun albeit all rather meaningless.

You can compare the quality and achievements of sportsmen who compete in the same day and age but it's impossible to compare those from different eras.

I mean Dwain Chambers has sprinted 100m faster than Linford Christie and there are unknown Kenyans now who can run 10,000m far quicker than Emil Zatopek but it doesn't mean they are better runners.

Which brings me on to this week's FIFA world player awards.

While the votes of 150 current national football coaches on the best present day footballer have a high degree of credibility, comparing players of different eras is just plain fantasy.

Zinedine Zidane was picked by more than a third of those 150 present day coaches to deservedly win the best player on the globe award for the second successive year ahead of Luis Figo, Ronaldo, Batistuta, Shevchenko and David Beckham in sixth with five votes.

No arguments there just as there could be none with the selection of Steve Redgrave as BBC Sports Personality of the Year.

But then FIFA entered the realms of wonderland by asking the world to vote on the best player of all time.

All good clean fun and interesting enough but it's more the domain of the Red Lion tap room at drinking up time than the offices of the world game's highest authority.

Obviously it should have gone to Georgie Kinkladze anyway, although for some reason the majority of people came up with Maradona and Pele instead (maybe they had trouble spelling the Georgian genius' name).

Maradona won the head to head by a landslide apparently because the vote was by internet which is mainly used by young people, many of whom are too young to remember Pele.

Trapped by their own voting mechanism and desperate to give Pele something, FIFA had their own in-house vote which the Brazilian duly won convincingly leaving Alfredo Di Stefano, Ferenc Puskas, Johan Cruyff, George Best, Marco Van Basten, Stanley Matthews, Phil Neville and Kinky with nothing.

Well, everyone's entitled to their own opinion and no doubt if you ask a hundred different people you'll get a hundred different answers and some heated discussion.

That is also the case if you are talking about a one-two-three of Wanderers' all-time greats which I found myself theorising over after hearing the news that John McGinlay had agreed to turn out for local side Tempest United on Saturday.

The Beast of Burnden is probably second in the list of Wanderers legends behind Nat Lofthouse and ahead of Frank Worthington.

There will be older fans who would no doubt slide McGinlay well down the list to make way for 1950s heroes like Ray Parry, Dougie Holden, Dennis Stevens, Eddie Hopkinson, Tommy Banks, Roy Hartle, John Higgins but it's my bet that if there was a poll of Wanderers fans today my selection would form the top three.

If I am correct (and remember I made Kinkladze the greatest player in the world ever) that means the second greatest legend in the history of Bolton Wanderers will be paying his £2 subs to play for a local side as a favour to a mate.

How many legends would do that? Pele is tops - but not for the younger generation of the polls Not fit? - don't kid me! I WAS interested to read there were concerns about the match fitness of Westhoughton Lions' under-8s rugby league team last weekend because they hadn't had a game for four weeks.

Surely even with the advent of computers things can't have changed that much since my day when playing out from dawn till dusk meant match fitness was never a problem. Iron man Shaun pushes sport to the limit! STAGGERING story of the week was of Horwich's Shaun Babar - a triathlete with a difference.

He is preparing for the world's toughest competition which will require him to swim 24 miles, cycle 1,120 miles and round it all off with a 262-mile run.

Of course it's held in the Mexican heat and the 27-year-old, who runs a marathon every day, fancies winning it which will mean completing the course in eight days with a maximum 90 minutes sleep every night.

One guy who's done it told him he had to have a year's complete rest after it when he succumbed to every infection and bug going.

Shaun says his mates call him a nutter and a psychopath. That's a bit unfair...he just sounds like a nutter to me. Red with envy? CHAIRMAN Mohamed Al Fayed responded to Fulham's FA Cup draw against Alex Ferguson's men with the revelation that he wants his club to become the Manchester United of the South.

So that's 24 kits a season and thousands of Fulham fans travelling from all over the North then.