BACK in 2007, we had a little bit of fun at Wayne Shaw’s expense. The then Eastleigh goalkeeper had been drafted in by Wimborne Town for their FA Vase clash against Glasshoughton Welfare, a club from just outside Castleford in West Yorkshire.

Back then Shaw was working as an ice cream seller and sitting on the bench for the Spitfires, much like he has been doing for Sutton United of late.

Fast forward 10 years and Shaw has become the butt of everyone’s humour once again, albeit largely through his own doing and his own nativity despite being the ripe old age of 46.

Confession time: I laughed loudly when BBC cameras caught Shaw munching on a pie in the dugout during Sutton’s defeat to Arsenal on Monday night. A quick scroll through Twitter showed I wasn’t alone, but it didn’t take long for the betting penny to drop.

And as Shaw very quickly started to bear the brunt of criticism from the nation’s sports writers and pundits, the backslapping in the SunBets marketing department could probably be heard from Gander Green Lane. It cost them five figures in payouts, but now everyone knows about SunBets.

Integrity sailed over the crossbar and into the car park behind Sutton’s modest home, but Shaw’s crime, knowing said bookie was offering 8-1 on him eating a pie, was hardly match-fixing either.

Bad publicity? No such thing. Unless you’re Wayne Shaw, of course.

If guilt is eating a pie on television then Shaw is bang to rights. Is he also guilty of being blinded by pound signs and the 15 minutes of fame Andy Warhol spoke so warmly about in 1968? Probably. Has he been ill-advised by people looking to use him for their own gain? Definitely.

The good thing for Shaw is molehills that become mountains are eventually trampled down by some other over-the-top story suffixed by the word ‘gate’.

But in the coming days, Shaw has decisions to make.

He could become a cretin, like the Big Brother, Geordie Shore-ites who dominate our TV screens in 2017 and who are famous simply for being obnoxious. He could make a few quid from jumping on the advertising bandwagon.

Some ‘Creative’ somewhere has probably already coined the idea of him ‘saving’ pies in front of a goalmouth, before devouring one with the same kind of gusto he showed on Monday night. He’s allegedly been offered money to pose nude, with only a strategically-placed pair of goalie gloves covering his modesty. Supermarket chain Morrisons, meanwhile, has offered the 23-stone stopper a job as the company’s ‘Chief Pie Eater’.

Morrisons’ Chief Pie Buyer (yes, that is honestly her title) Tessa Callaghan said: “We’re always looking for the best talent to taste our pies and make sure they hit the back of the net.” (Yes, she really did say that).

Shaw could take on all of this and make enough money to stem the apparent tears that flowed after he had been told to resign as Sutton’s goalkeeping coach in the wake of Monday night’s dugout meal.

He could even end up in the Australian jungle, although one assumes the brickbats and exploitive marketing minds will have moved on to someone else by November when that particular show starts again.

Alternatively, Shaw could keep his head down in Totton, where he lives, and wait for all of this overblown nonsense to calm down. He might then have a chance of another job in football, maybe as a slightly older ball boy tasked with fetching integrity from that car park.

It’s been a big season of realisation and hard truths for the FA Cup. The competition is now treated as an inconvenience by the Premier League big boys and a brazen opportunity to make money by slick, marketing-led firms like SunBets.

But while much of tradition has been slowly sacrificed over the past 20 years, using the fat lad for a laugh, sadly, remains a top British pastime.