A sleepless night, not helped at all by the discovery that the entire British Movietone film archive is available to view free online.

British Movietone were/are a newsreel company, competitors to Pathe News whose archive is already online.

Naturally this means that the amount of historical football clips available on the net has pretty much doubled immediately - the pre-WW1 stuff is particularly good, and there is what amounts to near full coverage of the great 46-48 England team, who were poorly served before.

Start with England v Scotland 1930 - with sound, but no commentary.

No trouble naming the great years: 1946 (England’s greatest ever national side), 1953 (Puskas and co.), 1962 (Garrincha and Pele), 1966, 1970 (Pele and co again, this time in glorious technicolor), 1972 (Netzer’s West Germany), 1974 (total football) and 1982 (Brazil once again), 2006 for the Argentines. You’ll have your own candidates in spades.

It’s harder to work out the “worst” years. Worst in what respect? No one could be interested in rehearshing a list of dull, uninspired seasons or the tedious likes of the ‘90 and ‘94 World Cups. Some guidelines are required, and I offer the following:

• Years in which football culture changed for the worse in some tangible way
• Years in which politics and war did football real and lasting damage
• Air disasters
• Individual tragedies

I’m going to leave out stadium disasters, as they turn into rather unpleasant numbers games when put into lists. In 1988 I was shown the Fire Brigade video of the Bradford City disaster, and what’s in it still invades my dreams from time to time.

It’s all very grim.

Here are my nominees:

1. 1883: Blackburn Olympic become the first professional side to win a tournament, beating Old Etonians in the FA Cup Final. They were among the first teams to be specifically coached, by a former international called Jack Hunter who introduced them to the Scottish passing game and took them away for a rest break in Blackpool before the Final.

   The football codes in Great Britain bungled professionalism, in the end. Within thirty years of that Final, both rugby and football had ghettoized themselves along class lines, to their enduring detriment. As for Olympic, their advantage became their undoing. Local rivals Blackburn Rovers received better financial backing, and tempted the best Olympic players away. Their ground is now buried beneath a local school.

2. 1925: the Offside Law changes, allowing only two defending players to come between the last attacker and the goal, instead of three. Right away, it took less thought and skill and guile to score. Within a year, George Camsell of Middlesbrough scored his 59 goals in a season, immediately followed by Dixie Dean’s 60. Both had enormous talent, both benefitted from a period of defensive chaos. Herbert Chapman, writing at the start of the 1930s, complained that the game had lost its quality and subtlety, that the new rule favoured physical strength and the hopeful long punt upfield. He and Charles Buchan pioneered the third back approach - a defensive measure seen as boring at the time. In the long term, the South Americans didn’t, and by 1950 the difference was beginning to tell.
3. 1931: the death of John Thomson, Celtic goalkeeper. Before World War I, the deaths of players in action was far from uncommon, even in soccer as opposed to rugby (although neither on the scale of American Football, some of whose Edwardian tactics were intrinsically lethal). But Thomson was the greatest keeper in Scottish football, a capped international, a trophy winner and a star. Colliding with Sam English, a Rangers forward, Thomson fractured his skull and died later that afternoon. The event was captured in a thankfully blurred press photograph. Thomson’s death came as a shock and a body blow: his home town is still a place of pilgrimage for Celtic fans and Scottish football enthusiasts in general. Coming as it did at the time of Scotland’s greatest economic peril, it can only have deepened an already dark national mood.
4. 1938-9: the Anschluss and the annexation of Czechoslovakia. Austria and Czechoslovakia were the true European powers in football before World War II. The events of the 1934 World Cup, in which a bent referee muscled Italy past the pair of them at the tournament’s climax, rankle still, and some Czechs regard themselves as the tournament’s true winners. Germany was not so football-orientated, and the first thing annexation did was to kill off a vibrant, growing football culture. It wouldn’t grow again in quite the same way. It was also the real end of the Mitropa Cup, a real European club tournament, best imagined as a mix of European and UEFA cups. And it led to personal tragedies. For a long time, the death in 1939 of Austria’s greatest footballer, the “Man of Paper” Matthias Sindelaar, was thought to have been accidental - carbon monoxide poisoning from a blocked stove. It’s now thought to have been suicide. Sindelaar had refused to play along with Nazification, continuing in fellowship with Jewish colleagues in the face of demands that they be ostracized. He couldn’t live under the Nazis: but in preWar Austria, suicide was illegal, and his friends wanted to spare him the posthumous ignominy.
5. 1949: The Superga plane crash wipes out “Il Grande Torino”, the last flowering of Italian football’s first golden age. They still hold an astonishing array of Serie A records, and the team made up the overwhelming bulk of the Italian national team. The only scar on their record is an unfair one: a 4-0 home defeat to an England side whose like we have never seen again. It must have been one of the matches of the century. The accident crippled the Italian team in the World Cup of the following year, and it would be over a decade before Italian football found itself back at the cutting edge of the game.
6. 1958: the Munich Air Disaster. Little more need be said.
7. 1971: the creation of a single state championship in Brazil. Brazil was the last of the great footballing powers to institute a countrywide football league. The sheer size of Brazil, and the relatively undeveloped transport system, had ruled out such a development before, and not enough had changed to make it a success by 1971. Instead of raising standards, it triggered the foundation of many new clubs, spreading the available talent too thinly, damaging the finances of the likes of the famous Santos and bringing a partial end to the production line of outstanding talent that had been Brazilian football since the 1930s. Enough momentum remained to bring forth the 1982 Brazilian side, but nothing remotely comparable since.
8. 1989: Surinam Airways Flight PY764 crash wipes out the “Colourful 11″ from Surinam. The Colourful 11 were an exhibition side made up of Surinamese talent playing in the Dutch leagues. Amongst their number were names such as Ruud Gullit and Bryan Roy. On this occasion, prior commitments held the famous names back in Holland, and it was the second string who perished. Football can distort thinking to the extent that one might almost regard this outcome with relief.
9. 1993: Gabon air crash wipes out the Zambian national side. We are still waiting for the African World Champions. This Zambia team were a very serious candidate to make an impression at the ‘94 World Cup. Because of the crash (and some bent refereeing) they didn’t qualify. Zambia have yet to fully recover, in footballing terms. In human terms, the families of the dead, who lost major breadwinners, have yet to be properly compensated.

Time to do something more cheerful…

Most of you will have read the contributions to Danny Finkelstein’s Ten Greatest Mistakes in British History question in The Times. I found most of them dubious - the Chartists not arming the London masses?

But it led me to think about what the top ten mistakes in British football history might be. In the week of the Munich commemorations, trying to take off through that bloody slush springs to mind. That’s half a club, half an “England” error. Every other club has its moments of regret, if not on the same tragic scale. What might have happened had Spurs been able to keep Gascoigne and Lineker? Or if Manchester City hadn’t sacked Joe Mercer when they did?

Anyone’s list of ten will betray something of their vision of the game as a whole. I want to see British football the best, the smartest, the most skilful in the world. I’d like to see a national programme sustained over twenty years to bring this about. It might not win us the World Cup - blind luck matters too much in football for that. But it might earn us what great achievement earned Brazil in 1982, Holland in 1974 and Argentina in 2006: the honour of being the best in the world in the eyes of the World. Whose ‘82 highlight reel do you prefer?

So that’s what’s behind my ten. Here they are:

1. The imposition at the start of the 20th century of retain-and-transfer and the maximum wage. These measures guaranteed that football would develop into a working class ghetto sport in the UK, owned and run by middle class businessmen. Not only did this prevent football from becoming a truly national game - it had much to do with the long-term ghettoization of rugby at the other end of society. The impact of this system on the life of the likes of Brian Clough and Wilf Mannion and Charlie Mitten is enough alone to render it a moral disgrace. But there were so many others.
2. The 1925 change in the offside rule. Made for commercial reasons, the change led to the rapid adoption of the long-ball game, the emphasis on physique and the end of the classic Scottish passing game. Most observers at the time, including Herbert Chapman, noticed an immediate and lasting drop in standards, a retreat from what they saw as the more subtle, clever Edwardian game. Although this rule change applied worldwide, other countries, notably Brazil, drew different conclusions from it, and 1925 is one potential date for the loss of our leadership in the global game.
3. Allowing the likes of Jimmy Hogan and Fred Pentland to go abroad. All of the most visionary coaches of the early twentieth century went overseas, barring Herbert Chapman and Jimmy Seed. Hogan in particular found his stress on skills coaching and thinking tactics rejected in England, and it wasn’t for nothing that he sat with the Hungarian contingent at Wembley in 1953. He was accused of being a traitor: the traitors were the English blockheads who rejected his methods in the ’10s and ’30s.
4. Failing to enter the 1930 World Cup. We’d have been exposed to South American football twenty years earlier than actually happened. When we eventually played Brazil in 1950, the effect on the thinking of men like Stanley Matthews and Tom Finney was profound, and both reflect at length about it in their excellent autobiographies.
5. Persisting with separate Football Associations for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It’s done for silly, jingoistic nationalistic reasons, and has actively damaged the game in Wales, let alone preventing a UK national side benefitting from UK clubs’ dominance of European club competitions 1965-85. “Auld Enemy”? If Liverpool could pull together Scots and English and Welsh and Irish, if Leeds and Manchester United could, and with such results, and later Rangers and Celtic, then just mourn what such silliness has lost.
6. Failure to learn from 1953. The lesson there - that we were no longer world leaders in football - met with no concerted national response, and has not done so since. All we’ve had is occasional bleating about catching up, or the assertion that an organized side can beat a skilled one, as though a skilled side won’t be organized or won’t be capable of effective organization beyond the reach of journeymen. We should be talking about taking steps now that in twenty years will get us ahead of the world - or just admit that we’re too bone thick to work the long term.
7. Failure to get to grips with fan violence earlier - it should have been nipped in the bud in the 1960s. Quite apart from that ‘85 Everton side being denied a run at the European Cup, which is quite loss enough, it led to the effective exclusion of all but the all-out fan from large parts of some grounds. “Green Street” didn’t used to be part of “fan culture” (ugh) in the good old days that we’re always being told about by mockney fakers on Sky Sports, but it is now. And it led to the abolition of standing areas, of which more anon.
8. The split between the Premiership and the Football League. We can all see where this is going. Including the new and monstrously tasteless idea of playing a round of matches abroad. It has also led to the decay of the FA Cup as a competition.
9. The introduction of league formats in the European Cup. The tournament has lost a great deal of its former glamour, and the UEFA Cup has lost all of its. European nights benefit from scarcity; and “four teams qualifying from the Premiership” is just crass and tasteless.
10. The abolition of all standing areas at English top level grounds. It’s killed the atmosphere. More has been lost than gained.

Other candidates throng. Giving Clough a run at England instead of Revie in ‘74 was more than one step beyond the FA, whose shortlist that year was a shocking joke. Giving it to him in ‘78 wouldn’t have been fair on him; he deserved better than to have to clean up after others, for all that he was willing. By ‘82 it was too late for him, as we can now see, and his appointment then would have been cruelly unfair on Bobby Robson, another man who’d done remarkable things with a small club side. ‘74 was the year, the last chance to sustain the momentum of ‘66 and ‘70 before it was gone for good. Ramsey had been unfortunate, and a confident hand to take over from him would have saved the situation. But who knew? Revie was the obvious candidate…

The treatment of Hoddle by England - as a player, obviously. And, still more so, of Waddle after he went to France and there played the best sustained football by an English midfielder in recent memory.

Gascoigne’s treatment by the various therapists he’s had over the years: the constant misdiagnosis, the grandstanding and advantage-taking by professional men both starstruck and condescending. British football’s bigoted attitude towards mental illness.

Selling Jaap Stam; selling Beckham. Dropping Beckham. Substituting Charlton. Picking Derek Kevan.

Dropping Tommy Lawton.

Trying to take off through slush.

Trying to take off through all that bloody slush.

Norm’s latest poll put me in mind of a list of my own - my ten favourite footballers. Not the ten I think the best. Just the ten closest to my heart, as it were.

I found choosing my ten “favourite” novelists revealing - what a fireside and slippers little Englander I turn out to be, despite the preponderance of Scots in my list. I wonder if the same will be true of my footballers?

1. George Best

A controversial choice, I’m sure. The little-known Manchester man from long ago etc. But G. Best was the first player I was specifically aware of, and what a way to start. Imagine if it was all like this!

2. Steve Coppell

Steve Coppell was the first player who I wanted to be. It wasn’t that I was a winger - only in rugby union; in soccer I played in defence. But I looked up to Coppell, and that was twenty years before I knew the man had a degree under his belt. How pleased I was to hear him praised in his absence by Ron Atkinson when United made it to yet another FA Cup Final. And then he vanished from my pre-internet radar. Forced into retirement at 27. Imagine: had he played until 35, he might have been at the 1990 World Cup. My best memory of him is his running the West Germans into the ground in the 1982 World Cup: you’ll have to settle for the subsequent match against Spain.

3. Trevor Brooking

Trevor Brooking taught me to play football. His football skills strip cartoon in the Daily Mail had me outside in all weathers, using the recommended tennis ball, learning just about everything I still know. That strip should be given to every new born child in the UK along with their compulsory copies of the Beatles’ albums and Our Island Story.

Brooking spent his entire career at West Ham, which was a cozy London club with a reputation for attractive football. Then, as now, it was an academy producing an unbroken run of fantastic players. Were it not for their financial situation, the Hammers would have won even more than they actually have - a title or two at the very least.

4. Duncan Edwards

I’ve seen film of him now, but didn’t have to have done: he shines out of every Manchester United history as the epitome of a proper boy’s hero. Modest, hard-working, from a good honest background and abundantly talented - and the pain of 1958 is still there, even for those of us not born for another decade. Brutal, heartbreaking waste, on all kinds of levels.

5. Stanley Matthews

Matthews, like Sir Tom Finney, is hard to get at now from under all of the patronizing schmaltz the media have piled onto them. I found out about Stanley Matthews from 1950s football annuals I’d bought in junk shops aged eight or nine, and they told me that he was the best player in the world, and a gentleman to boot.

Turned out to be true - read about his work against apartheid sometime.

6. Alfredo di Stefano

Another 1950s football annual suggested to me that, in fact, Alfredo di Stefano was the best player in the world. Here was a real father figure, with his stately carriage and receding hairline. Practice until you can do anything with a ball, he said, and I tried. What good advice, after half a century, for someone to give to our children.

7. Dixie Dean

These players aren’t all my direct contemporaries, are they? But Dean has to be here. I think his was the first proper football biography I ever read, and that sole shaky photograph of his sixtieth league goal haunted me. Now I know that his great feat was aided by a rule change, but it’s still impressive. And he got to be alive in the 1920s, which I once deeply envied in people, and still believe must have been fun in the right places.

8. Bobby Moore

His looks alone gave to this too-young-for-’66 child the impression of having been born too late for a better, cleaner age. The truth about Moore was far more complex than the blonde brilliant ubercaptain I first admired, but in some ways he comes out better as a human being. But I’d have given much to have been able to comprehend this greatest game in the history of this greatest sport when it was fresh:

9. Bert Trautmann

In the early ’80s I met a man who’d been in the same POW camp as Trautmann. His wartime experiences had convinced him that England was the greatest country on God’s earth - he’d never been to Scotland - but his own nation, for all its horror and tribulations visited and received, still produced its good ‘uns, and Bert Trautmann was one of them. When I was young enough to think myself immortal, I imagined myself being heroic enough to attempt to run off a broken neck..

10. Mick Mills

The epitome of the greatest Ipswich side, a team who were prevented only by a truly exceptional Liverpool generation from completely dominating European football. Why it was Mills, and not Wark or Mariner or the two Dutchmen or even the savant Kevin Beattie, I really couldn’t tell you.

He looks older than players do now. But all the players do. Are they really in their twenties?

Hon. mentions to the Charlton brothers, both Manchester United Pearsons, Sandy Turnbull, Charlie Roberts, Billy Meredith, Alan Ball and Martin Peters.

My choice of novelists revealed me to be a fire and slippers little Englander. I can’t say what my footballers show. An obsession with misplaced nostalgia?

Tell me yours. Remember, it’s your ten favourite players; not the ten you rate the best, or the ten most influential. Fictional players allowed, although I think I’ll pass on Roy Race.

A great game - victory for the underdogs, plenty of skill on display, and a crowd riot at the end.

But you won’t find the highlights at 101 Great Goals. They’re here instead:

It was no small peak: the national side made it to the World Cup Finals for the first time since 1958, and took a genuinely competitive squad. Holland aside, it’s hard to identify who, really, were better than Scotland player for player at that time. Rangers were European Cup Winners Cup holders, and Celtic still had the pre-crash Jock Stein at the helm.

This German documentary (in English) ought to be an out and out celebration, then:

Late in the year, Scotland played a friendly at Hampden against the hosts of the forthcoming tournament, West Germany. Netzer and Beckenbauer against Bremner and a young, young Dalglish. You’ll have to watch it if you can’t remember the score:

A hideous shipwreck of year, for me personally, with the sole and comparative comfort being that 2007 is not quite over: the first part of 2008 promises far worse and quickly.

At first sight, the same might be said of sport. The BBC Sports Personality of the Year did its best to put on a brave face. But so little sport is there on the BBC these days that the show had the air of outsiders looking in. And how, exactly, did cousin Lewis fail to win?

It was impossible not to feel for the Scotland national team too, pushed into second by the English rugby boys. But if you agree with me that Scotland have no excuse to regard themselves as giantkillers - France have not always been the better of the two sides and there are practical, copiable reasons why they are now - and think that it was Scotland’s resort to “passion and commitment” that led directly to Italy’s first Hampden goal - and want to know what happened to them in Georgia, exactly - and regard England rugby’s rapid decline as quite disgracefully avoidable - then the real team to feel sorry for is the Great Britain Cycling Team, which performed magnificently in Beijing.

In some respects, 2007 was the best year for English football for some time. The Under 21 national team let noone down, to everyone’s surprise. And that, gentlemen, is how to lose a penalty shoot-out. But the relative success they’ve enjoyed makes me worry about Stuart Pearce becoming the next obviously-not-up-to-it candidate for the big job. Should Pearce come to succeed Fabio Capello in four/eight weeks/months/years (delete as appropriate) he will inspire pride in the dignity with which an obviously fine man will carry himself, in a small number of inspiring victories, and his grace following dismissal. But he will not have had the chance to learn his trade in the lower divisions, if it is there to be learned there in the absence of any English management training or development culture. Pearce won’t refuse his country should the call come. But he deserves considerably better than to be offered it under current conditions.

It was a good year, too, in that the bullshit that has powered the national side for the last two years has been shown up. I won’t go back over the debacle. Simply - enough, enough of players welcoming Capello… it’s in such shocking taste. And so depressing sometimes. Thus, Micah Richards:

I don’t know much about him apart from he is a big name in football and that his managerial record speaks for itself.

I have been told he is a big believer in sports psychology and getting players’ mental preparation right.

Is that important? Well, with what he is bringing to the table, it must be. You don’t win the things he has won without doing something different.

For me, it will be nice to meet him and see what ideas he has got.

Far more diverting were Steve Gibson’s pair of interviews in which he discussed Steve McClaren. First, we had this:

We’re friendly enough now, we shake hands when we meet but he’s never been back since he left and he’s not on my Christmas card list. And we never want to get into that situation again, I don’t want a guy who is always thinking about the next rung on the ladder. If Steve McClaren said to me the grass is green, I would go out and check. He can be charming but he had this streak of ambition that was absolutely bloody ruthless and you can’t go through life always trying to achieve your ambitions at the expense of others. (..)He just saw us as a stepping stone and if you can make enemies at a club like ours, you’re going to be in trouble when things go wrong.

Which was followed by this, apparently in apology!

Despite their accuracy, my comments did not represent my thoughts and assessment of Steve’s five-year period at Middlesbrough.

Utterly unfair, but thoroughly entertaining.

On a more positive note, England is host to the most beautiful sight in the beautiful game: Arsene Wenger’s young Arsenal, playing quite dazzling football in that marvellous new stadium. Is there anyone in the English game really prepared, even now, to understand why there are so few young Englishmen in Wenger’s sides? It’s not just money. I saw this game in a cod-Irish pub in Earls Court in January:

Although what follows was probably the greatest individual performance by a team in 2007, it was certainly the most pointless.

But that, really, is that. The news that Kingsley Amis’s three books on drink are to be republished in one volume by Bloomsbury, introduced by Christopher Hitchens, is of far more moment than anything 2007 or sporting. I’ll be needing that on my park bench.

That, and the news, on a scrap of old newspaper I’m forcing under my shirt for warmth, that David Beckham is England captain once more. If it isn’t real, I’ll just have to dream it.

Of course, it used to be the double. Between Aston Villa before the turn of the century (20th century) and Bill Nicholson’s Spurs, no side won both League and FA Cup in the same season. It’s become a little less remarkable since then.

But English clubs have been competing for the European Cup since 1956, with only the Heysel interval to interrupt. In those fifty-one seasons, only one team have managed a double-plus-European-Cup, Manchester United in the remarkable 1998-9 campaign. Critics of their performance in the 1999 Final forget that United had met, and beaten, every other major team in that year’s tournament - including Bayern Munich.

The surprising thing is that it took so long to happen. It’s a sizeable ask, as they say. But there have been quite a number of teams whose quality has been such as to make short work of League and Cup - as United did in ‘98-9 - leaving them with the mental space to take on the biggest prize of them all.

Manchester United nearly did it at the first time of asking in 1956-7. Injury, and the only team in Europe that was truly more talented, did for them. What follows is really very violent:

Surely, given time, it would have come to that team, but time, of course, was precisely what they didn’t have.

Four years later, Spurs followed their double year with a European Cup Semi-Final against Benfica - losing narrowly to the trophy’s second “great” side, an FA Cup victory, and third place in the First Division, only four points behind shock winners Ipswich and one behind FA Cup rivals Burnley:

These early treble attempts presuppose one thing that no longer applied by 1998-9: retaining the League title. It’s a tall order, as Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal career aptly demonstrates. In 1965, Liverpool were perhaps fortunate to reach the European Cup semi-final, as their quarter-final against Cologne was decided by the toss of a coin. But once there, only sharp practice on the part of Inter kept them from the Final. The same year, Liverpool won the FA Cup; yet, in the League, they were well off the pace, finishing a mediocre seventh:

It was a similar story a year later for Manchester United. The Best-Law-Charlton side at its height reached the European Cup semi-final, to be denied by injury, weather and dogged opponents; a superb cup run was unexpectedly halted in the FA Cup Final by Everton, and the League… faded away long before the season’s end as Liverpool ran away with the title.

Such experiences leave you to reflect on the differences made by a modern squad approach, different from the first-eleven emphasis of the 1950s and 1960s.

The “other” double - League and European Cup - came close for United in 1967-8, but no near-treble, as Spurs despatched them in the FA Cup Third Round. The following year, both Manchester clubs were in the European Cup, but finished 11th (United) and 13th (City) in the League, results that would lead nowadays to the manager’s sacking and financial ruin. United did make it to the European Cup semi-final, where sharp practice etc.:

So we come to 1970 and to Leeds United. Theirs was, in my opinion, the greatest season ever produced by a club of the pre-Heysel era. It was done without money, in a rugby city, at a time when the talent available to the First Division was as deep and widely spread as never before. Six, perhaps eight, clubs were serious title contenders.

A European Cup semi-final:

A notorious FA Cup Final - and replay!

And second in the league.

There’s the sense of history going wrong here, isn’t there, in the year that the Beatles split up.

Two years on, Derby County made a rather shadow-boxed attempt at the feat, finishing in yet more dodgy Italian behaviour in the European Cup semi-final, reaching the FA Cup Quarter Final, and finishing a long way back in seventh in the League.

In the pre-Heysel era, Liverpool would come closer than anyone to bringing home all three trophies. The climax to a memorable season (certainly the first I remember clearly):

Even the ‘85 Liverpool of Ian Rush couldn’t come close. Yet - defeat in the Heysel “final” coupled with defeat to Manchester United in the FA Cup semi-final, plus coming a distant second to Everton’s second great post-war side - it all makes for a great season.

It wasn’t. Traditional values, the good old days, the working class game, uncommercialized football, people? Reflect for a moment that such series as “The Real Football Factories”, to say nothing of all those hooligan autobiographies, postdate these scenes. (Footage includes the dead - you have been warned).

Given the lack of association football in Wodehouse (plenty of cricket, rugger, amateur athletics, tennis, golf and racing of course) it might not seem the obvious thing to come up with a PGW soccer eleven. But you never know when you might need one. Here’s mine, with accompanying comments from the selectors.

GOAL: Sir Roderick Glossop. (It’s said that goalkeepers are mad. I don’t know. But a loony doctor will do for starters. It’s a pity he’s fictional, as there does seem to be a bit of an English goalkeeping drought going on at the moment. Perhaps Paul Robinson should begin to play “in role.”) I’ve left Ickenham off the bench, but he has a track record for standing in for Glossop, and will step up should the need arise.

FULL BACKS: Aunts Agatha Gregson and Dahlia Travers bring a kind of good cop/bad cop to the centre of defence, very much in the Rio Ferdinand/John Terry mould. What they lack in pace they make up for in intelligence, staying one step ahead of the game and letting nothing past them. Travers brings a vocal presence to the team. Beckenbauer won’t be able to accuse THIS side of schoolboyishness. “Crusher” Gregson is supposed to eat broken bottles, so will have little trouble with lightweight modern front players of the Crouch or Owen mould. On the bench, a man rather prone to playing up his injuries, Beach, and a veteran of the early years of the game, Lord Emsworth.

MIDFIELD (We’re playing the pre-Chapman 2-3-5 formation by the way). Plenty of creativity on offer here, but we need a ball-winner: Rupert Baxter is first onto our team sheet each week. The lemon-yellow home strip was his idea.Then guile, Reginald Jeeves, who needs no introduction, and Psmith. Every good team has its socialist, and Psmith is our Roy McFarlane. On the bench, one off the Wenger block, Anatole, and good all-round utility player Mulliner.

ATTACK. We need goals. Who, in the Wodehouse canon, can score? Bingo Little, of course, seven times in the course of the books if I remember correctly, and skipper Bertie Wooster himself. Sir Roderick Spode eventually scores, and I’m sorry if this is a slightly off-colour basis for selection, but part of Ericksson’s appeal with his players was his power over women, so Spode is in - and alongside him his friend Fink-Nottle, but you’ll need to watch his mental state during matches. Freddie Emsworth finds himself on our left wing. On the bench, Angus McAllister, and Freddie Widgeon. Which tells you that the seam of soccer talent in the Wodehouse novels is wafer thin.

So it’s Glossop, Gregson, Travers, Baxter, Psmith, Jeeves, Little, Wooster, Spode, Fink-Nottle, Emsworth. Subs: Emsworth, Beach, Anatole, Mulliner, McAllister, Widgeon. What do you think - is soccer becoming more middle class?

I was going to do an Agatha Christie XI, but a good half of my likely picks get hanged at the end of the books. A similar injury crisis is unsettling the Dorothy L Sayers lineup, so the Wodehouse lads are still on the lookout for opponents. Anyone care to step up?

Not much, at least not necessarily.

The principle change to football kit since 1905 has been in the shape of progressively lighter, less protective, more weather-stable and weather-adaptable boots. These were a Brazilian innovation, taken up by Stanley Matthews after the 1950 World Cup and further developed since then by European companies.

The ball has lost its deadly laces, but is the same weight as ever. Changes in flight reflect changes in shape and profile, and matter chiefly when a Beckham is in the offing.

Here is the best available comparison: modern players performing in old-style kit. It doesn’t hold them back in any noticeable way, although they do have the benefit of multiple takes.

Also, Jerry gets it, and we win in Paris. What more could you want from a film? And is Sly going to be fit to face Croatia, assuming the national qualification problems can be overcome in time?