Poor Pepe Reina looked like he’d just had his Porsche Cayenne stolen as the ball deflected off a balloon on the pitch and hit the back of the net in the first half of the game at the Stadium of Light.

The ball appeared to be heading straight for Reina before hitting the balloon, which has apparently thrown onto the pitch by a Liverpool fan.

Red Dwarf creator Rob Grant delivered the most amusing remark with his observation on Twitter that Man City have put in a £40m bid for the balloon.

The situation is not straightforward. Everton is keen to press ahead with a rather unloved proposal to build a new stadium in Kirkby, South Merseyside, on which the government will have the final say.

Meanwhile Liverpool – deeply in debt and owned by warring entrepreneurs George Gillet and Tom Hicks – favours building a new 60,000 stadium in Stanley Park, though a date for leaving Anfield seems no closer than it did five years ago.

Bluenose Bradley is keen on the groundshare idea, and the North West Development Agency is thought to pressuring both teams to accept the groundshare proposal, waving the carrot of a healthy injection of cash if the two clubs obey.

Muddying the waters is the fact that Liverpool, via Gillet and Hicks, owes a significant chunk of cash to RBS, which is itself essentially owned by the government.

A set of unlikely circumstances would need to transpire for LFC to fall under any kind of direct government control, but the prospect remains an intriguing and amusing one.

To an outsider it looks like LFC simply considers itself too big to consider sharing a ground with its oldest enemy, or afford it the opportunity to rebuild its squad by redirecting cash from infrastructure to players.

Everton doesn’t appear to have the cash to build its own ground without help, and if the Tesco-backed Kirkby proposal goes west, a shared stadium seems the only way out of the decrepit Goodison.

However, Liverpool is hardly flush at the moment so the Reds may not have much choice if they want to leave the equally decrepit Anfield.

So, the government may end up owning Liverpool; Everton may not be allowed to move to Kirkby; the NWDA won’t give Liverpool any money unless it considers a groundshare; both clubs are currently mired in debt and have crumbling grounds; and a 2018 World Cup bid would currently not involve Liverpool.

A groundshare makes sense on so many levels, but since when has football had anything to do with common sense?

Bradley may profess to be a dyed-in-the-wool Blue, but he shows little understanding of football and football fans in his desire for LFC and EFC to share a ground.

Even so with both clubs struggling for cash, neither may be in a position to turn down financial aid – the only realistic proposition at the moment, assuming sharing ground is out of the question, seems to be for the clubs to tart up Anfield and Goodison.

LFC won’t get the cash it needs for Stanley Park; Destination Kirkby will probably be blocked.

A groundshare may just be the least worst option.

• Image by davegriffiths.

It’s loosely based around Sefton Park Cricket Club, where I play, and the characters therein but it will probably stray further afield from time to time.

The name, Quis est Porcus?, is a daft stab at the latin for ‘What is ham?’ – a notorious question that has reverberated around the club ever since the question was initially asked.

Quite a few of us are journalists at the club, so it seemed sensible to pool our efforts on a collaborative project.

I was hoping for something in the grand tradition of cricket writing: Jim Swanton, John Arlott, Mike Selvey, Simon Hughes, but I suspect the fogeyish whinging of Bob Willis and Ian Botham are probably closer to the truth.

Various people will write on various aspects of cricket and club life, and in the build up to Sefton’s 150-year anniversary it seems fitting to celebrate the club and the often-eccentric stories that emerge from it.

I should point out that the blog has nothing to do with Sefton Park Cricket Club, it’s just where I happen to play most of my cricket and spend most of my time in the summer.

And winter.