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When James Milner made his Premier League debut for Leeds he was 16 years old. He came on as an 84th-minute substitute for Jason Wilcox, the current Manchester United director of football, to help close out a win over West Ham in which Harry Kewell, Nick Barmby and Mark Viduka scored. Pathé news reports from the time reveal that Westlife were top of the charts and a few days later Michael Jackson would dangle his baby from a Berlin balcony. Fabian Hürzeler, Milner’s current gaffer at Brighton, was a nine-year-old urchin, learning his times tables and being tucked into his race-car bed. More than 20 years later, Milner is 40, still playing in the top flight, and is the living personification of a hard-working, clean-living, low maintenance model professional who has finally eclipsed Gareth Barry to make the all-time Premier League appearance record his own. Frankly, after 23 seasons at six different clubs doing the bare minimum just to stay relevant, the most obvious conclusion to draw is that the universally admired and well-liked “Millie” is apparently not all he’s cracked up to be.
In the film The Thursday Murder Club, Pierce Brosnan’s character is an ardent West Ham fan, which got me thinking. Relegation would be A Long Way Down. Is there No Escape for the Hammers? They may not be The Greatest, but they’ve got the mentality of a Survivor. The Final Score on the weekend didn’t do them any favours but I don’t see it as The World’s End because there are plenty of matches left to play” – Peter Oh (and no other Pierce Brosnan superfans).
I’m sure that Barry Glendenning would be able to look after himself and have a quiet word with your correspondent who took him to task about using the term ‘centred around’ (Friday’s letters). But if he’s otherwise engaged, I’ll weigh in and point out that it’s a perfectly legitimate phrase, and, if Professor Google Ngrams is to be believed, has been on the rise since around 2010. It still only manages to account currently for 0.000037% of all two-word combinations in English, but since the figure for the rival ‘centred on’ is the only slightly more impressive 0.00013, I think honour is satisfied” – Charles Antaki.
Maybe this is just the myopic view of an unmarried bachelor, but on the topic of how to make VAR better (Friday’s letters), officials must be tying themselves in knots working out whether something is both ‘clear’ and ‘obvious’ – maybe if they just concentrated on meeting one of these criteria, they would feel less pressure and take less time” – Nick Livesey.
Lads, it’s Spurs” – Marc Meldrum.
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