Indulged superstars at the top of the game blissfully unaware of life's harsh reality

THERE'S SOMETHING peculiar about Gillette's latest advertising campaign. You must have seen it by now: unsuspecting menfolk - all boasting the kind of marble-sculpted physiques and casually tousled hair that just scream real life - are preparing to scrape America's leading brand of razor over their fizzogs when they are blasted with sporting equipment by, in turn, Tiger Woods, Roger Federer and Thierry Henry.

It's all rather confusing. The message is that we all know, deep down, we should be releasing the man inside and getting the best we can get with Gillette's latest trimming machine - we just need a little push in the right direction.

In reality, that becomes rather blurred by the trauma of seeing three of modern sport's true superheroes taking sadistic glee in belting hard objects at stubbly-chinned Schmucks, leaving them whimpering on the floor in a puddle of their own blood and teeth. Federer has a particularly crazed glint in his eye when he crunches a forehand into some hapless Joe's jaw-bone, suggesting a role in the torture-porn industry beckons once he finally hangs up his flannels.

I'm no marketing man - and as the picture above suggests, I'm not a great one for shaving, either - but these are not the kind of images which suggest much blue-sky thinking at Gillette HQ, unless casting their elite stars as weirdo stalkers intent on actual bodily harm is part of some hidden master plan.

And there is another, more intractable, problem for Gillette. Spookily, as if the multinational was being punished by the corporate gods, its hiring of Woods, Federer and Henry just happened to coincide with their descent into sporting mortality.

Within weeks of their first commercial outing, Woods finally succumbed to his dicky knee, leaving his hopes of overhauling Jack Nicklaus's record of 18 Majors looking as dicey as Ian Poulter's plus-fours; Federer has been bludgeoned into submission by Spanish superstar Rafael Nadal and now doesn't seem to be able to tell one end of a tennis racket from another; and Henry, already in decline when he left Arsenal for Barcelona, looks only slightly less ill at ease in Catalonia than General Franco.

There is a lesson to be learned here, and not just for the suits across the Atlantic. Watching Woods, Federer and Henry in their ad - preserved in smug self-assurance, blissfully unaware of their impending falls - serves as a pointed reminder that greatness is fleeting. Every Achilles has his heel, every Death Star its unprotected exhaust vent: the only unknowns are what triggers the implosion, and how long it takes.

If this all sounds rather obvious, bear in mind that for the denizens of Planet Premier League, it could be a genuine revelation. The top flight's more cosseted poppets are encouraged by everyone - their own supporters, agents and the more hysterical sections of the media - to buy into the notion of their own fabulousness.

It is why Frank Lampard can look Chelsea's barmy pay-masters in the eye and demand the sort of weekly wage which would allow him to bathe daily in mermaid spit, or Cristiano Ronaldo can flutter his ultra-conditioned eyelashes at Real Madrid like some cheap Portuguese prostitute and still expect Manchester United to clasp him to the family bosom.

Both have patently lost touch with whatever reality remains in the World's Greatest League and it has required fate to intervene and provide some much-needed perspective.

The first cold shower was provided by a sodden Wembley crowd last Wednesday, which jeered yet another laughably limp performance from Lampard when the player was substituted, all wide-eyed and bewildered, towards the end of the evening. In truth, he hadn't been all that much more appalling than any of his team-mates, but his record of annoying excessively anyone with a vested interest in humanity meant that he was picked on mercilessly.

And then we have Ronaldo. The United moppet probably had more justification than most in thinking he might actually be immortal - I mean, really, scoring 42 goals in a season - but not even his luck can last forever.

Now he has been laid low by an ankle injury until October and United's supporters, always mercifully intolerant of the corporate puff and nonsense which accompanies their club, have lost patience. One fanzine recently labelled their player of the year a "conniving little shit" for courting Real - quite tame by most standards, but pretty scathing for one of Old Trafford's own - and there will be no hero's reception when he finally returns, unless United prove completely emasculated in his absence.

The moral of the story, as Woods, Federer and Henry can well affirm, is that the athlete who scales the greatest heights also has furthest to fall. And no amount of PowerGlide blades or battery-operated micro-pulses can change that.