The small eastern European country of Moldova can rejoice, for a genius or demi-god has been born there.
Masal Bugduv is his name: a 16-year-old footballer of precocious talent. Reports on various websites in the last few months have suggested it is only a matter of time before he leaves the poor local league behind and takes his rightful place at one of the giant, money-orientated sides in western Europe.
Arsene Wenger, the man regarded as the greatest cultivator of exceptional youth players currently working, is apparently ready to pay £5million to buy the youngster - and transplant him, more-or-less immediately, into his first-choice team at Arsenal.
So bright is Bugduv's future that he made his senior debut for the Moldova national side towards the end of 2008. This is an extraordinary feat, even taking into account the relative paucity of talent available to fill out that particular side.
Perhaps the greatest footballer ever to emerge from eastern Europe is the incomparable Gheorghe Hagi - a perfect storm of questionable temperament, 360-degree vision, grace, timing, and killer instinct. Whispers on various websites assert that Bugduv, the man-child who plays for Olimpia Balti, might one day reach such improbable heights.
Wonderful footballers are like a knife jammed fast into the ribs. In an instant they have struck, faster than a snake, and left you on the floor, trying to scrape up your breath and your blood. One touch to control the ball, one touch to murder you. Masal Bugduv, it would seem, shares the calm, devastating knack of the assassin who needs no tutoring.
Except there is one problem: Bugduv does not exist. There is no panacea cure the ills of local football supporters, no Moldovan Hagi to carry a mediocre national team on his back for the next 15 years. He is an invention, a fake - one that fooled journalists the world over, one that had eager fans salivating as they waited for news of his latest exploits.
Bugduv is a practical joke, designed to lure journalists into the trap of discussing the merits of a player who, by definition, they will have never seen in the flesh. In these latter days of pressing deadlines, facts go unchecked (our hero reached number 30 in the list of most promising footballers in the world in an English paper earlier this week - the article which precipated the revelation of his non-existence) and misinformation is proliferated.
There are myriad lessons to be learned from the sleight of mind caused by Masal Bugduv, of which I shall have more to say later - not least the bovine-like lack of questioning with which your author accepts the outpourings of the media, and the damage caused to a particular world-view when one example of an untruth freezes the mechanism of the whole system.
