Typically elusive as they are, memories delight in playing tricks on us. So it is that we recall Benito Carbone as being part of the first wave of foreign players to our shores as the Premier League’s new-found riches gave it a cosmopolitan sheen. He was a novelty in that …

Johan Cruyff’s Holland or Jimmy the ‘Whirlwind’ White may bristle at the notion but there is a heroic kind of glory in losing beautifully and without compromise. It is a virtuous trait that even seven lost finals between them cannot diminish because their greater achievement was to illuminate what was …

With the benefit of hindsight we can see now that the 1990s were a schizophrenic decade. So fearful were we of the heavy symbolism and futuristic unknowns of an approaching millennium that we all went a little mad, creating a global paranoia that a computer glitch by the name of …