Beckham sniffs at eyebrow protection

After the Mohican haircut, the tattoo of inaccurate Hindi, the searching portraiture while fake blood dripped down his head, David Beckham now gives us the half-shaved eyebrow. There really seems no limit to the superstar soppiness, but then it is certainly not his fault that every adolescent initiative is seized upon so hungrily.

The latest development, however, is not without a touch of irony. It reminds us that the eyebrow has purposes beyond mere vanity. One of them is to keep the sweat out of your eye.

Judging by his lame performance against the Dutch the other day, Beckham might have gone the whole hog without risking impaired vision.

After scoring from a beautifully struck free-kick against Fulham on Sunday, Beckham was naturally adorning most of the back pages again yesterday morning. It did not matter that United struggled desperately at times to subdue the most promising of Premiership new boys, a fact which had nothing to do with the length of anyone's eyebrows. It was about the absence of Roy Keane, a man who definitely needs all the sweat protection nature has given him.