We go again. Transfer deadline day. Last orders in the football saloon. A biannual event that is ostensibly a final opportunity for football clubs to buy enough new players to see them through until the next time, it has become seared on the public consciousness by the excitable people at Sky Sports.

They have attached such monumental significance to this glorified trolley-dash through the supermarket of international football humanity that it has now eclipsed the FA Cup and Capital One Cup to become English football’s second most prestigious tournament.

It is apparently not uncommon for grown men to call in sick from work on transfer deadline day so they can monitor goings on at The Hawthorns, St James’ Park or Loftus Road. Yes, they are ill, but not in the kind of physically debilitating way that should preclude them from going to work.

Sky’s star pundit, Gary Neville, once observed that barometers for discovering which football clubs in England are the most badly run do not come more accurate than transfer deadline day.

The busiest are invariably the most inefficient, he claimed, pointing out that better organised clubs conduct their business long before the need for a last-minute panic splurge arises.

Quite what his employer made of these comments remains unknown, but one suspects that if it had its way, all 20 Premier League clubs would be forced to embark on a frenzy of reckless spending for no other reason than to boost viewing figures and subscriptions.

You know the drill by now. With transfer deadline day upon us on Monday morning, Sky Sports will have deployed an army of news reporters and cameramen to assorted football stadiums and training grounds around the country.

Their job? To loiter. To cajole. To plead. To peer. To occasionally grovel. To monitor who’s coming and who’s going.

To engage reluctant passers-by in stilted, often unwelcome chit-chat. If the gates and fences outside which they congregate belonged to schools, they would be arrested or, at the very least, ordered to move on.

David Craig. Ian Bolton. Nick Collins. Amy Lewis. Vinny O’Connor. Bryn Law. Just some of the names with which Sky Sports viewers will have become familiar over the years, watching them stoically man their posts outside the Britannia Stadium, Villa Park, Loftus Road, Selhurst Park, White Hart Lane and the Stadium of Light for the thick end of 16 hours.

Maintaining enthusiasm can’t be easy, but apart from their microphones, enthusiasm is often the only weapon. Faking excitement and intrigue after suffering the spirit-crushing humiliation of being blanked by a sullen, young multimillionaire riding shotgun in his agent’s Range Rover can’t be easy, but these transfer-window warriors remain consistently inquisitive and upbeat.

Even in the face of intimidation from local delinquents and ne’er-do-wells, the facade never slips. Perhaps on the back of a comical January assault which resulted in the deadline-day veteran Gary Cotterill stoically continuing a live broadcast to camera despite being covered in silly string, reports suggest that the satellite broadcaster has requested that several Premier League clubs provide designated safe standing areas for their reporters this Monday, to prevent them from having to rub shoulders with the hoi polloi, on the entirely understandable grounds that it is only a matter of time before one of them is seriously hurt by a drunken nutter who takes it upon himself to liven up proceedings.

Whether the clubs who, let’s not forget, don’t want them hanging around the place keeping their eyes peeled for Peter Odemwingie lurking in the shadows, choose to comply or leave them to run the gauntlet remains to be seen.

Of course, every circus needs a ringmaster and when it comes to transfer deadline day, it is the excitable Sky Sports News presenter Jim White who cracks the whip, bringing us home to 11pm in the company of his more understated sidekick, Natalie Sawyer.

“Nobody enjoys it more than me,” says White of deadline day, even if recent revelations regarding astronomical agents’ fees paid by Cardiff City suggest his outlandish claim might be a little spurious.

“There’s a heck of a lot of people involved, not just myself and Natalie,” he added, although your humble columnist may have added the final two words of that particular sentence in a bid to make him sound more gallant.

The straight man to White’s ridiculously hyperactive, breaking newshound, the importance of Sawyer to this double act cannot be overstated.

Without her present to rein in his ludicrous overexcitement upon hearing that Chris Baird might be off to Aston Villa, there’s a very real possibility that once the Sky Sports transfer deadline day clock hits zero, the man might actually explode. Boom!