After our stunning performance against Barcelona you’d think at least the Brexiteers would jump on board with commendations. Oh no, the BBC website was awash with negativity. Several questioning why they should be happy that a foreign team beat Barcelona. Bloody cheek what with John Stones, Raheem Sterling and Gunn on the bench all captained by a Mancunian this mongrel race has a true continental mix. We embrace skilled workers regardless of colour, class, creed, religion or sex but are condemned for it by the leave voters and now we’ve got arch enemy FIFA dishing out its diktat on poppies. Has FIFA never considered why its meetings are held in English? The English-speaking countries of this planet all got together and laid down their lives so that freedom could be attained throughout the world particularly in Europe. OK I can understand the objections from some repressed quarters, the freedom to object being part of the fight but FIFA declaring the wearing of a poppy as political goes beyond freedom and lands safely in the world of narcissism. 

 With the success of ‘Trick or Treat’ it’s not about foreigners really it’s about money and the fact that we have loads and they haven’t. Of course money and encouragement bring success; nobody objected to Team GB winning an unprecedented number of medals with Manchester having the Velodrome and fetching more medals than Australia. Nobody queried the cost of all that, but success in football is treated as a sin guarded by jealousy. 

Middlesbrough next our bogey team. Time to lay that bogey with the newly-promoted Yorkshire outfit’s visit to the Etihad. Foreign? Anywhere outside ‘God’s own county’ is foreign to a Yorkshireman. 

FIFA. They’ll be asking the FA and SFA for some money next cos when you have paid your dues to the corrupt hierarchy like City and PSG had to then players wearing poppies will be all right.