When I get that feeling...

It's a funny old league, the J-League. Whether it's players labelling their coach "an idiot" in front of the press, referees sending off the wrong bemused player or top teams choking badly at already relegated clubs, there's rarely a dull moment in the Japanese game.

The same could be said of the 2.Bundesliga - a league I know well having watched many a Fortuna Köln game in that division, before die Fortunen died a slow, agonising death. One club that has managed to avoid a similar fate is eastern German side FC Carl Zeiss Jena, and by all accounts the second-from-bottom strugglers are on the verge of signing one Naoya Kikuchi.

It would be safe to say that 2007 wasn't quite Kikuchi's year. The midfielder was enjoying a solid, if unspectacular start to the new J-League season when word came through of an indiscretion that was set to cost the former Japan under-22 international his job.

In a turn of events that left even the most hardened J-League watcher shaking their head in disbelief (or maybe chuckling ever so slightly), Kikuchi was involved in one of the most bizarre sex scandals ever conceived.

It seems that one afternoon the young midfielder was particularly taken with a certain schoolgirl who happened to be passing him by. The two apparently locked eyes, and next thing you know they were getting jiggy with it in the back seat of Kikuchi's car. For some reason, Kikuchi attempted to pay the young lady in question the token sum of 10,000 yen after the deed was done. But his indiscretion was to cost him a lot more than that.

Kikuchi, in his infinite wisdom, inadvertently left his wallet in the front basket of the schoolgirl's bicycle, and left. The schoolgirl, being an upstanding, albeit amorous citizen of the world, dutifully handed the wallet in to local police, claiming that she had found it on the ground. The police took one look inside the wallet and promptly declared her a thief.

Evidently not wanting to take the fall for a crime that she had not committed, the schoolgirl confessed that she had had sex in the back seat of the car with the owner of the wallet. But this wasn't your average case of a star-struck teenage fan. She'd never even heard of Naoya Kikuchi!

The police had certainly heard of Naoya Kikuchi. They charged him with having sex with a minor - the schoolgirl was just 15, and Kikuchi was immediately sacked by his club side Jubilo Iwata. Claiming that his team's image had been tarnished, Jubilo Chairman Hiroshi Ukon even took a pay-cut - and fined several other members of his staff, for allowing Kikuchi to bring the club into disrepute.

The morality of Kikuchi's shenanighans aside - and let's not forget that it takes two to tango, he certainly took quite a fall for a few minutes worth of summertime fun. Ironically had he bothered to drive his femme fatale across prefectural borders to Kanagawa-ken, he wouldn't have even committed a crime! He just so happened to be committing a crime in his native Shizuoka Prefecture.

After being slapped with a year-long domestic ban, it looks like the erstwhile Jubilo star will be resurrecting his career at the Ernst-Abbe-Sportfeld in Jena. I'm sure that the locals will take to him if he can help steer the struggling outfit to safety. But for everyone's sake, let's just hope the Jena training ground isn't located next to a school!