UFO Info Week-End

They now await Goodman’s return from holiday to see how seriously he has taken Graydon’s strictures

They now await Goodman’s return from holiday to see how seriously he has taken Graydon’s strictures. At 35, you’d have thought he would be allowed to choose his own hairstyle, especially after providing an excuse we survivors of the Great Hair Wars would never have dared to venture in school: “I have to wear it long to cover surgical scars that look like the M25, and all the minor roads too. Honest, sir!” Don King, who sports a similar profusion in grey, does so to hide his horns according to Larry Holmes. The look is closely related to Carlos Valderrama’s legendary festoon-fest. But while Goodman’s hair colour is natural, Valderrama’s is only marginally less artificial than the bottle jobs modelled by Abel Xavier at Euro 2000 and Romania’s squad in France 98.

Once, after an international in Chile, the Colombian media stormed a dressing-room to establish the truth. The great playmaker cowered behind colleagues, a jockstrap covering the evidence. Which reminds me of the West Ham striker renowned both for his flapping blond locks and a love of the high life. Those who had showered with him knew him as “Ginger Pubes”.The same player dabbled with the mullet, that 1980s “style” (short on top, tapering off above the ears, with long strands like rats’ tails trailing behind) which came somewhere between the poodle perm and today’s nightclub-bouncer trim as the footballers’ favourite. Unlike the ponytail, which Manu Petit invests with Gallic mystique but on David Seaman evokes nothing so much as a Status Quo roadie, it is impossible to look cool with this fish-inspired construction. Even Frank Worthington, who fused it with a Teddy Boy quiff, couldn’t manage it.Also called the “ape drape” and the “10-90″ (the proportion of hair on top to that at the back), it lives on among isolated sporting tribes such as New Zealand rugby league players, Czech speedway riders and the pantomime grizzlies of the Worldwide Wrestling Federation Not to mention the blood sports set in north Wales As subtle, all of them, as a flying mullet.. Issues were decided and the destination of many millions of pounds determined at the climax of the last football season without any of the controversy we have come to expect when passions rise and jobs are on the line.

To say that referees are improving is as fashionable as proclaiming Howard Wilkinson a great international manager, so are they just getting lucky?

Issues were decided and the destination of many millions of pounds determined at the climax of the last football season without any of the controversy we have come to expect when passions rise and jobs are on the line. To say that referees are improving is as fashionable as proclaiming Howard Wilkinson a great international manager, so are they just getting lucky?
Certainly a referee needs fortune on his side if he is to succeed, even if, like teams, a good referee can make his luck. Before Kim Milton Nielsen came to prominence, Denmark’s leading official was Peter Mikkelsen. He used to receive the tough assignments that Nielsen has been awarded over the last three or four years.