conspicuously tangential thinking

I have been reading No Hunger In Paradise: The Players. The Journey. The Dream, Michael Calvin's book about the snakes and ladders of making it from a schoolboy to a professional footballer. Fiona told me about the book as Calvin is going to be part of Brian Moore's Wimbledon Bookfest event this year, and - yes - Callum is in the Appendix though I haven't made it as far as as a mention of him in the text.

It contains this extraordinary passage about Nathan Redmond.

His solution to every boy's nightmare, the loss of a front door key when no one would be at home to allow access at the end of a school day, was to make himself a sandwich he didn't like, and place the key between two slices of bread. His reasoning, that he was less likely to misplace a sandwich box, was the produce of conspicuously tangential thinking.

He put his key in a sandwich to avoid losing it! This is the kind of imaginative leap that is being forced out of the modern game by over coaching.

I can scarcely believe I am not having my leg pulled, but it is there - large as life - on page 270.