Tom Humphries/LockerRoom: I'm worried about Damien Duff. I couldn't be more worried in fact, not if he called a press conference and, wearing aviator glasses and a Liberace-style jump-suit, announced the Reverend Moon was performing a special ceremony the upshot of which would be Duffer pledging his troth to the singing lesbians of Tatu and also changing his name to Rasputin.

I'm worried. I say to people that Tatu may have their attractions but they are wrong for Damien Duff and people just wink lasciviously and say "Yeah, but c'mon, singing lesbians? He'll be set for life. " No. I am mixed up on that point. In fact I say Chelsea are wrong for Damien Duff and people just wink lasciviously and say "Yeah, but c'mon, 70 grand a week? He'll be set for life."

So what? How many duvets and pillows can a Duffer buy? A man can only sleep in one hammock at a time. What price does society put on the serenity of a creature who likes to nap for 18 hours a day? Can we live with the consequences if Duffer is abducted and brought to one of those cities which doesn't sleep. Where in London could there be fulfilment for a lad who finds being up and about curiously unsatisfying. The bombardment of stimulating experiences London offers could send Duffer into a spiralling depression.

And if it did how could we tell? He's called Duffer for God's sake. Apart from Tommo, which I have tried myself a few times, there is no nickname with less glamour built into it. Duffer has an odd fashioned solidity about it. I cannot bear the thought of David Mellor sucking the hoof of some tabloid trollop while wearing a Chelsea jersey with the name Duff on the back. I don't like the idea of Chelsea's legion of Tory fans rising up onto their hindlegs and applauding Mr Duffer's most excellent shimmies. Duff-ah! Duff-ah! Duff-ah! Suppose they make him an MBE while he's sleeping?

Chelsea are too cosmopolitan, too dysfunctional. This is the club that once put Peter Osgood on the transfer list for "lack of effort". And Osgood was up and about most of the day.

Chelsea always have been wrong. Just wrong. Like a bad idea. They won the league once - by mistake. Accruing the usual amount of points for what passes as a great season at Chelsea (fourth , fifth or sixth place) they discovered no other team had bothered to gain more points and they were in fact champions. That still stands as the lowest points total for any championship winning team.

Apart from traumatising a generation by beating Leeds in the 1970 FA Cup final they have always had other faults. The term nouveau riche has been applied to them more, and longer, than it has to any other football club. (I speak as a fan of Leeds, nouveau broke.) More money than sense or taste. More cabinet members than full trophy cabinets. Ken Bates! And this irritating habit of always collecting decent players like baubles for a Christmas tree.

Chelsea are to buying stars what Leeds are to selling them. Once, back in the early '70s, they bought Bill Garner from Southend for £100,000, which was quite sensational in itself but at the time Bill became the sixth striker Chelsea had added to their books for a six-figure sum. They went down a couple of years later. Tragically.

Back in March 1974, they had the quintessential Chelsea moment when after a four-hour board meeting they put an end to the long feud between the Osgood and manager Dave Sexton. The board announced Osgood was staying and Sexton was sacked. The following day, perhaps after consulting a learned friend, they announced that no, it was in fact the other way around.

And that tradition of flakiness has remained with them. Good managers just leave. Good managers just get sacked. Money keeps pouring in from somewhere. Only at Chelsea could a Russian spiv bring such a strange air of solidity to the place.

Should there not be an investigation as to why they aren't insolvent? Is it only Leeds who are subject to the following economic voodoo: full houses, recent fine Champions League run, series of players sold for more than they were bought for all adding up to need to sell more players which leads to worse poverty. (Sorry, I'm digressing.)

And I'm no bigot and neither, I'm sure, is Duffer but Chelsea are full of dangerous Johnny Foreigner types. It's the equivalent of falling in with a bad crowd at the UN. Italians with their Latino temperaments and tans which Duffer will never manage, French people kissing each other's cheeks and now these sinister Russians with lots of money. Is that the sort of circus Duffer needs to be appearing in? Will he have to carry a leather handbag, will his hairstyle be adequate or will he have to get his roots darkened just to make it seems he's had the rest bleached. This is a chap who appears in car insurance ads for goodness sake. Captioned, Damien Duff, Irish International Footballer. As if he'd never heard of the hood ornaments, Phil Babb and Mark Kennedy.

I know for a fact these new customs are the sort of things that will give Duffer the shakes and require him to lie down for longer than usual. In Saipan last year he went into a catatonic trance until the football started. That's the great unwritten story. Duffer was virtually in cryogenic suspension because people wouldn't stop talking loudly around him.

And the last time I saw him offered further proof of his delicate sensibility. It was in the Country Club Hotel in Portmarnock on the day before our last international. It was raining and windy and the skies were dark because Duffer was carrying an injury. As I stood in the lobby I was distracted by a wet, dishevelled figure with a towel around his waist attempting to get in the emergency exit on the level below me. Duffer! At last he gained entry and came stomping up the stairs obviously anxious not to fall asleep in the lobby. Being too damn nosey for my own good I whirled around as he passed and said wittily, "Duffer?" He looked at me and glanced around quickly as if I might be part of the conspiracy. "They put me in the sea," he said reproachfully and nodded back to a smiling gaggle of Irish backroom people.

Slumber has been his life's work. His circadian rhythm is to sleep for 18 hours a day yet the bitter irony is that the intrusion that is football is what he is celebrated for. Chelsea and all its tacky glam could ruin him. With his alliterative name and supernatural talents for sleeping and dribbling, with his comic-strip style shuffle some of us think of him as having sprung from the pages of a Marvel comic. At Chelsea they will celebrate him for all the wrong things. It could be a dark era.

Duffer doesn't belong there. It's like making Miley from Glenroe go Hollywood. That £17 million gimmick was his way of putting the "Do Not Disturb" sign on the door. He's not the sort of young fella to run away with the circus.

The enduring image we have of him is living in his little house up that mountain just outside Blackburn. All his friends are "loved up" so he spends the days sleeping and every second week or so his Mam comes over and tidies the place up. That should be his life. And on Saturday afternoons an unassuming hero in baggy shorts.

There's a nice honour in living out that life and at the end he's not going to have to sell a kidney to get money, is he? He is the Rumpelstiltskin of football, the only kid who can have a sleepover by himself. He doesn't need to be in a city that never sleeps. It could kill him. Duffer has come from the dressing-room of Brian Kerr where his golden tousled head would be ruffled and they'd tell him they loved him and to just go and do what he does. He has grown up as a feature of Blackburn teams, surviving innumerable managers who have let him be.

He should speak again to Graeme Souness who 33 years ago this summer made news as a 17-year-old who just walked out on Tottenham saying: "I am not happy down there, and nothing will make me go back."

Sometimes you can be happier getting by on £25,000 a week than worrying about how to spend £70,000 a week. Of course, I told Tatu where to get off as well so maybe that's just me.