Within a week, it appears, the North-West could lose another of its football league clubs.

Bury FC could join Barrow, Southport, Workington, Nelson, Darwen, New Brighton and the rest in saying goodbye to the professional game.

Worse, Bury FC could go out of business altogether.

The Shakers have lurched from crisis to crisis over the years.

The North Manchester belt struggles to support the three clubs it has.

Oldham have been more successful, Rochdale, in recent years, have been one of the best run clubs in the lower divisions.

Something had to give.

Bury have a fine stadium and enjoyed a couple of unlikely years in division one, but their off the field affairs have always been open to question.

If Bury are saved - and they are probably the most threatened football club since Maidstone went out of business, then plenty of other clubs could take their place in the dock.

Halifax, Southend, the perennially troubled Carlisle Utd, Swansea City and a host of other clubs have been making alarming noises in recent months.

The number of benevolent millionaires prepared to snap up ailing clubs must be finite - it can only be so long before a small, or even big, club goes to the wall.

That won't necessarily be the end of it.

From Australia comes a story of a club which didn't so much die as get murdered by Rupert Murdoch.

After the immensely damaging split in the game of rugby league down under, which stopped the sport in its tracks, a decision was made to 'downsize' the competition.

This involved merging several of the clubs in the game's Sydney heartland.

Most played along, however reluctantly, but one, the South Sydney Rabbitohs, stood alone.

Yes, you read that correctly, the Rabbitohs.

A Rabbitoh, for the uninitiated was a man who stood on the street corners of Sydney's poorer districts in the great depression, offering skinned rabbits for sale.

A working class name for what was the great working class club.

An antipodean West Ham United.

History meant nothing to Murdoch and his cohorts.

They unceremoniously booted Souths out of the competition and, to all intents and purposes, out of existence.

Then, after three court cases, Souths got a break.

The game needed a boost, a way to recapture the interest of the supporters and, Lazarus like, Souths returned from beyond the grave to claim their place in the big league.

It doesn't have to be that dramatic.

Halifax Town's chairman gave it away last week when he pointed out that when the club was towards the top of the conference it got twice the crowds it does as a struggling third division side.

Maybe dropping out of the league isn't such a bad thing after all.

I can't finish this week's column without mentioning Britain's (i.e.

Scotland's) women curlers.

I just couldn't watch that dramatic final shot to clinch the gold medal.

Not because of the unbearable tension and excitement, more because there was some very interesting paint drying on an oh-so fascinating wall.

What I didn't get was the way Dougie Donnelly seemed to be inventing the rules as he went along.

How can you 'move but not remove' a guard at the 'front of the house' until you have turned around three times and touched your toes?

Of course, I'm delighted that Britain has won a Winter gold in a proper sport (i.e.

not ice skating) for the first time in years, but couldn't it have been something a bit more exciting? Bobsleigh, ski-ing, speed skating maybe, but not a game that involved people with brushes.

And why were the curlers so desperate to point out that it is a physically demanding sport? I can imagine that today's TV generation find skating up and down for three hours, and shouting 'haaaaaard' and 'huuuuury' quite demanding, but it's hardly the London Marathon now, is it? Still, at least we won't have to watch it again for the next four years....