I have a new sporting hero, Hajar Abdelkader.
In January, the 21-year-old Egyptian launched her career as a professional tennis player at a tournament in Kenya.
She got herself a wild-card entry and in the first round took on the world number 1,026, the German Lorena Schaedel.
The encounter did not last long. Schaedel won 6-0, 6-0 in less than half an hour, Abdelkader winning just three points.
Footage of her thumping went viral. She haplessly thwacked serves into the net, missing routine returns, barely able to hit the ball. She was putting in the kind of performance that would have had her struggling at her local tennis club – never mind on the professional circuit.
Pretty quickly, Tennis Kenya admitted they had made a mistake in inviting her to play. They had, they confessed, been conned.
So Abdelkader joins the exclusive list of the inept and incompetent who, despite their inadequacy, have sufficient chutzpah to fulfil the fantasy we all share of playing sport at the top level.
This is not the kind of cheeky infiltration conducted by prankster Karl Power, who managed to get himself photographed alongside the Manchester United team ahead of a Champions League game, walked out at Headingley in full regalia to bat in an Ashes match and stood on the winners’ podium with Michael Schumacher at the British Grand Prix.
This is a proper con job, giving the perpetrator the chance to perform alongside the professionals.
Remember what happened in the Premier League in 1996. The Southampton manager Graeme Souness took a call from someone he believed to be George Weah, the Liberian superstar footballer. Would Souness be interested in taking a look at his young cousin, Weah wondered, a lad called Ali Dia?
Clearly in the days before Google, Souness was impressed. So impressed that, without any due diligence, he signed Dia on a trial contract and sent him on as a substitute in a league match against Leeds.
The lad could hardly kick the ball. A red-faced Souness admitted he had been royally swindled.
Dia had done it before, at five different French sides, managing to get himself nine games before being exposed. He even went on from Southampton to play a couple of non-league matches at Gateshead and Spennymoor United.
It recalls the Roy of the Rovers comic strip ‘The Kid from Argentina’ (1979-81). Manton County spent £335,000 on an unknown player called Jorge Porbillas instead of an Argentine superstar with the same name. The difference is that, unlike Dia, Jorge could play football.
Even Dia would doff his cap to the master of the sporting con job, Carlos Henrique Raposo. An athletic young man with the ambition to become a professional, the Brazilian had one problem: he had no footballing skill whatsoever.
Not that that stopped him. Oozing audacity, in the 1990s he talked his way into several professional sides. He even gave himself a nickname to demonstrate his renown: Kaiser.
Kaiser was no shrinking violet. Charming and gregarious, always generous in the players’ bar, he was loved by colleagues. He knew, though, that once he played, he would be shown up. So he constantly feigned injury. Poor Kaiser was a slave to a muscle tweak.
Eventually, at Bangu in Rio de Janeiro, one of his many clubs, the chairman was so infuriated by his constant no-shows, he told him he would not be paid if he didn’t play. Not that that deflected Raposo: he had a plan.
During the warm-up ahead of the match he could not avoid, he instigated a fight with the opposition and got himself sent off before kick-off.
To reach the peak of sporting con-trickery, Abdelkader has a long way to go.
