Did I read the other day that Spitting Image is coming back? Not a moment too soon, in my view. And not just for the fun to be had with the current nightmarish bunch of politicians. No, the greatest gift to the puppeteer satirists is the court of the Emperor Roman, which is currently on a kind of working holiday in Portugal.

Jose Mourinho is one cool customer, a man who does things his way. And in Wednesday night’s battle of Europe’s most-wanted young football managers he emerged the decisive winner over Didier Deschamps. If coaches were eligible for the man of the match award, it would have been his for the taking.

Until Frenchman Gérard Houllier walked through the front door of the club he had supported during his days as a student teacher, successive attempts to promote managers from within the family had gradually laid waste the legacy of Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley. The Liverpool dressing room had become a sort of pigsty.

The last time a player with a No 7 on his back so compelled the attention during an FA Cup final, the match came to be known by his name. As a competitive spectacle Saturday’s contest between Manchester United and Millwall was not in the same universe as the Stanley Matthews final of 1953. But it was glorious to watch Cristiano Ronaldo.

For more than 10 years, football fans have stared in horror at Diego Maradona’s face and then turned away in sadness as the apparently inexorable decline of the man sometimes called the greatest footballer of all time played itself out in the world’s media, one hideous chapter after another.

Think of Michael Owen and you think first of speed. Speed of decision, speed of execution. The speed he showed that night in 1998 when he slipped through Argentina’s defence to score the goal that made his name. The sort of speed that bypasses the normal processes of decision and issues from a youthful instinct unhindered by fear, pain or doubt.

Brazil got themselves knocked out of the 2004 Olympics football tournament at the weekend, beaten 1-0 in Chile by a Paraguay team who will go on to join Argentina as South America’s representatives in the finals in Greece this year. There are many voices saying it would all be different if Kakà had been there.

When Linford Christie, Leroy Burrell or Maurice Greene got their massive frames rolling in the sprinting finals at major championships in the 1990s, the very foundations of the stadiums seemed to quiver and shake. Last week in Paris, Kim Collins changed all that.

There was never any doubt in Sven-Goran Eriksson’s mind of what
England lost when Steven Gerrard reported unfit for duty in Japan last season. This week the Liverpool midfielder dominated the first half of England’s friendly with Serbia and Montenegro in a fashion that would surely have inspired a better showing against Brazil’s 10 men.

Clive Woodward has a repertoire of useful mantras, and one of them came out again in the immediate afterglow of Sunday’s triumph in Dublin. “We keep learning and moving on,” he said, finding one way to sum up the five years since he took over as England’s manager.