I have just oven roasted Carlos Tevez and it is going to take some time to get over the trauma.

In fact, I would go as far as saying cooking the non self-basting Argentinian keepy-uppy exponent ranks as the single biggest disappointment of a culinary career riddled with remarkable disappointments.

I should point out that when I say I roasted Carlos Tevez I didn’t actually cook the vastly over-paid, over-rated and under-used Manchester City striker.

No, what I actually cooked was a goose. As far as I am aware, this goose had never played in the Premier League but it arguably could have made the bench for a team in the Championship relegation zone, maybe Coventry City.

Senor Tevez is, however, the undoubted footballing equivalent of a goose. Both the forward and the goose promise far more than they ever deliver and both are ridiculously expensive.

It has not been easy for me to write these words of condemnation. Until now, I have been a fierce advocate of the goose and have favoured its darker, stronger meat over the often wishy-washy flesh of the ubiquitous turkey.

A goose, or rather (vegetarians look away now) a dead goose, looks fantastic, all trussed up and ready for the oven. A goose has a weird, elongated shape, all breast and no wings rather than all mouth and no trousers, like Charley Tevez.

Being so large, and distinctive, the bird makes a great centrepiece for the table. A goose evokes the very spirit of feasting. One yearns to rip off a leg and gnaw it with slobbering abandon before tossing the bone to a pack of baying Irish wolf hounds.

And yes, I know, goose fat is wonderful for roasting potatoes, although no better than (far cheaper) duck fat.

And yet ... I can no longer see the point of a goose. There can be few experiences as deflating as spending hours preparing a meal only to come to the conclusion that it has been a total waste of time.

Seeing your football team lose what should have been a comfortable home win comes close, but the sheer vacuity of pricking, basting, draining and carving a goose is in a league of its own.

I picked up our 13lb goose for New Year’s Day, which, in hindsight, was a little OTT for a family of four. Still, geese have got big bones and there would be plenty for left-overs, for goose rissoles and goose quiche.

The price of this prized bird was (please, don’t tell my wife) £79. For the same amount of money, I could have taken the family on a “turkey and tinsel” coach trip to Scarborough, or something similarly exotic.

I know for a fact I could have snapped up two, possibly three, prime sirloin double rib joints from my butcher for £79 (sshhs).

That’s what really hurts. Perhaps my pain is not so much the abomination of the goose as much as the ribs that got away.

I accept that goose is a notoriously expensive meat, although I don’t understand why. And I am not blaming my butcher, who I would trust with my life as well as my cutlets and calves’ liver.

I paid the king’s ransom for the goose in the knowledge that I was buying into something special. I was buying a bird of paradise.

For the sort of money we are talking about, which I won’t mention again because it makes me cry, a food has got to be stupendously good.

And the goose was just, you know, all right.