There's nothing wrong with a good rumour, especially if you've started it yourself and it rips around race paddocks faster than Jonathan Palmer gets through whatever it is helicopters run on. Dodo sperm or something.

The best one yet this year is that World Superbike exile Noriyuki Haga will make a return to BSB in 2012 and has been 'in talks with a Ducati team', so says one alleged insider. So far as I can make out, there is a remote chance the Samurai of Slide could be at Brands over Easter weekend and in competition but you have to question his motivation.

Haga will have to take a massive pay cut to be here - like 75 per cent. He will be forced to move from a country that has a lovely climate to somewhere that just features weather and then there's the food. He is used to Italian cuisine. That, for me, would be the third strike.

You also have to look at whether it is a good move for the series. When Yukio Kagayama returned to BSB it looked like he really couldn't be arsed, so was shipped back to the Land of the Rising Sun fairly sharpish afterwards. Atsushi Watanabe never liked it here and Ryuichi Kiyonari eventually threw in the towel, although for myriad different reasons.

Series director Stuart Higgs would be a brave man to sanction the entry of a rider who would have so much expected of him by the paying public but may not be able to deliver. It's a formula with no traction control. A Haga of ten years ago would have relished that but now, as he passes middle thirties, can he be bothered to re-learn, or indeed unlearn, how to ride a Superbike?

It would be better for Nitro Nori to follow Troy Corser into retirement and be remembered for that R7 slide into Clearways back when all this was fields instead of what could be the most terrible of swansongs. Unless, of course, he really, really needs the money...