Whitey Grandad

You haven’t got a f***ing clue what life was like in the fifties and sixties.

Old people who have worked hard all their lives having started out with nothing eventually getting to do the things that youngsters do all the time.

We used to have an American colleague whom we called B J Thomson but I don’t think he had a middle name.

Wildlife programs that insist on giving wild animals human Christian names.

There are similarities between warfare and football. That’s why you really need a midfield general.

Winning the Cup and getting into Europe? At the moment I’d settle for a win anywhere.

Ah Collioure! Patrick O’Brian, the writer of Master and Commander, lived there, as I’m sure you know. Canet Plage was where Charles Trenet lived until he died a few years ago. He wrote the song ‘La Mer’ whilst he was travelling south across the salt lagoons on the train from his native Narbonne. Who knows, we may have even walked passed each other a few times.

We’ve spent many summers taking the caravan down to Argeles or the Costa Brava. I’ve got some equipment installed at the Conseil Général across the road from the giant Auchan. We’ve never gone right up to Andorra but a good friend of mine had a house up the valley at Bouleternère. I love the view up the coast from La Franqui but our favourite view is when you come over the hills going north on the motorway from Spain. if you get the chance I can recommend having lunch in Spain at Sant Martí d'Empúries in the village courtyard square. Wonderful beaches there with Greek and Roman ruins right alongside. Happy days.

Just go for the throat. Get there the fastest with the mostest. Pace and movement and pull them apart. Not try to bore them to sleep.

Travel far and wide. Seeing my family again. Going to the theatre or up to the Albert Hall for the evening. Doing some longer distance country walks. Driving to the Alps and Italy and Austria. Going on a cruise again. Flying to the Canadian Rockies and hiring a car. Going to Australia and driving the bits we haven’t seen yet. Flying to Barcelona and taking the train along the coast to Perpignan and the little yellow train up into the Pyrenees and then back down into Spain. Driving to Iceland. Driving to Norway. Seeing Scotland and Ireland again. Going to St. Mary’s with my grandson before he goes off into the world.

In the military world you don’t assault a fixed position by slowly walking up to it hoping that the defenders will come out to meet you especially if they don’t need to. When a team is a goal or two ahead and down to ten or even nine men then patiently passing the ball about in front of them is not going to achieve much. They are going to sit tight in their defensive formation and watch the clock go down.

He’s not the only one. We have had several goals chalked off for offside, most of them by a matte of millimetres. All they have to do is hang back a couple of feet and we’d have a few more points.

It was a bump of his elbow nota deliberate strike. Soucek hardly touched him.

Absolutely. And why look at a freeze frame to make your decision?

That’s becoming a feature. Barkley’s goal for Villa came from a similar run.

We lost because we let in three goals. For the first two there was a gaping hole where the right back should be.

The last twenty minutes it looked like we were playing for a 3-2 defeat. Where was the urgency?

Football is a sport. The noble game. El rey de los deported. It’s a matter of honour and earning respect, but what would you know about that?

Breaking his leg could be seen as accidental. Breaking his neck is probably a red card.

It’s like a posthumous pardon for a death penalty.

This will be discussed by the FA but won’t be made public.

At 6-0 they could easily have afforded to be magnanimous and would have earned the respect of football fans everywhere. Instead Martial will always be tarnished as a cheat.

Exactly. And that's what's wrong about using VAR for offside.

With the Ings/Villa one it would be understandable if they went with the onfield decision, which was offside, but withdrew the Adams one they not only overruled the onfield officials but actually saw something that nobody else did. Whatever happened to ‘clear and obvious error’?

The problem is setting the date. Sod’s Law dictates that we would have three weeks of glorious sunshine during the break followed by two months of big freeze.