In Newcastle at weekends you can hardly move these days for blokes wearing T-shirts emblazoned with their nicknames -”Cidergut”, ”Sumo”, ”Nobby”. It’s as if they need a constant reminder of who they are and the mayhem they are bent on. A visceral need to celebrate and affirm through the medium of screen-printing afflicts footballers, too.

Patrick Kluivert’s move to Newcastle has created a good deal of excited talk, and not just among those with shares in Tyneside nightclubs. Some critics have wondered if the Dutchman is an over-egged pudding. Many more doubting voices might be raised were the brains behind the move not those of Newcastle’s Freddy Shepherd.

Latvia arrive in Portugal as outsiders so rank you can smell them from here. If the odds against them are to be believed they are not so much minnows as krill. They should not be daunted, however. History shows that the European Championship is a tournament in which every banana skin has a chance to realise its full potential.

Last week Sepp Blatter told my colleague Jim White: “Football is the most powerful force in the world.” And according to the Federation Internationale de Football Assoc-iation (Fifa) chief, the most important people in football are the players.

There is a story about a man who repeatedly hits himself on the head with a mallet. When asked why he does it, he says: “Because it feels so good when I stop.”

As surely as night follows day, or Barrichello follows Schumacher, so the collapse of yet another England cricket tour produces a deluge of suggestions on what must be done to improve the team.

In one of the most extraordinary denials in the history of sport, Bayern Munich’s goalkeeper Oliver Kahn recently told the world: ”I am not the pope.”

A woman from Zurich once wrote to George Bernard Shaw: ”You have the greatest brain in the world and I have the most beautiful body, so we ought to produce the most perfect child.” Whenever anyone in football talks of fusing the British and continental style of play, I always recall Shaw’s reply: ”Yes, but what if the child inherits my body and your brains?”

The United States decathlete Dave Johnson was expected to win gold in Barcelona in 1992.