It was the £71,000 West Ham fine that had everyone saying things like “crikey” and “that seems ridiculously lenient”, and it’s been reduced still further.

The Hammers, brazen, will now pay for illegally retaining top scorer Diafra Sakho from Senegal’s Africa Cup of Nations squad with £7.50 and a sack of medicine balls that one Fifa official seized from the club’s Chadwell Heath training ground.

Sakho’s winning goal at Bristol City in the 4th round of the FA Cup brought the controversy to a head, with many speculating that West Ham would be booted out of the tournament.

The Irons, Hammers, have nevertheless been granted their place in the 5th round, much to the chagrin of course of Bristol City and of course of fans of the repeated use of ‘of’ in sentences.

Speaking exclusively to Football Burp, Sam Allardyce leapt to his own defence while wiping barbecue sauce from the contours of his mouth, his chin, his nose and somehow even his brow.

He said: “Sorry about that, I’m just a messy eater. I wasn’t trying to be a savoury minstrel or anything like that.

“It’s perfectly simple – Diafra had a rare kind of injury that meant he couldn’t play for Senegal but could play for us.

“West Ham fine, Senegal not fine. Simple as. I can’t go into more detail about the injury as that’s not my area of expertise, but I’m assured it’s an exceptionally uncommon one.

“Anyway those medicine balls have been lying around the place since the ’60s, so they were probably used by the likes of Bobby Moore and Geoff Hurst and are therefore worth a few bob to Fifa if they play their eBay cards right.

“What’s that you say? No, I don’t think the minstrel comment was a racist one. That quite clearly wasn’t my intention at all.

“You’re going to try to spin this into some sort of scandal, aren’t you?”

Stay tuned for further developments on the Sam Allardyce racism scandal.