Mike Gould

@prodnose Yep - so many memories of great games featuring Italy, especially 1982 of course.

Into second half of extra time: B&H 1 Italy 1. Penalties loom. I really want Italy to do it but down to 10 men. World Cups need Italy. When you know, say, France v Italy is the days third game you pour yourself another wine and plump up a cushion.

@lee0969 @jillwebb2005 @nikidoog @Carolyn_on_X @FatOldAnarchist Yep, Hand in Glove. ‘Suffer the children’ is a difficult listen but groundbreaking & brilliant in its own way.

On this day in 1984 No 9 UK Album Chart The Smiths with their debut album “The Smiths” This album was a game changer for me. Another very difficult choice but I’ll choose “Hand In Glove” how about you? #1980s #TheSmiths @jillwebb2005 @nikidoog @Carolyn_on_x @FatOldAnarchist @brunstead @SkaManD14

@lee0969 @jillwebb2005 @nikidoog @Carolyn_on_X Was great job. Older staff introduced me to lots of good stuff & I got into all sorts of chart music I wouldn’t necessarily have listened to. Remember buying everything from Costello to Television to Isley Bros & Allmann Bros.

@gotpenmustwrite @jillwebb2005 @nikidoog @Carolyn_on_X Our Price…..now that’s a blast from the past, got some real bargains from there Mike 👍

On this day in 1982 No 14 UK Album Chart The Human League “Dare” Remember how huge this was at the time, a brilliant album and a very difficult choice. I’ll choose “The Sound Of The Crowd” how about you? #1980s #TheHumanLeague @jillwebb2005 @nikidoog @Carolyn_on_x @FatOldAnarchist @brunstead @SkaManD14

@midopido21 Idea of England as one of top favourites for W Cup wildly misplaced. Yes, good qualifying but we always qualify well but our recent record against top teams not great. A French team which doesn’t even start with Doue or Camavinga is frighteningly talented.

This is their second team man

@Lowkey0nline @Harryslaststand If true (& no reason to doubt it) will it be registered as a war crime? Will Israel itself carry out an investigation? Will our own govt formally condemn it & act or skirt around the edges with hand-wringing gestures.

Israel has just killed Lebanese journalist Fatima Ftouni. I am honoured to have known her. Just at the beginning of the month she reported on Israel killing seven members of her own family live on air.

Robert Mueller died last night. He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving. He had integrity. And tonight the President of the United States said good! I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good. I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word. Good. This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather. That is what is happening. That is what has happened. The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming. America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner. And the church said nothing. Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary. Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him. Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart. JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn. These men are something more painful than monsters. They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again. Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing. Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less. That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him. And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it. When Trump is gone, they will still be here. Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous. That morning is coming. Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say. He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true. He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad. The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it. That is all it needed to be. A man died. His family is broken open with grief. That is all it needed to be. Instead the President said good. And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸 Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

Have to say that @umirf1 analysis is best we’ve seen on BBC for a while - far better than some of the ex-pros who seem to have difficulty articulating basic observations & prefer to make jokes or recycle opinions. Danny Murphy, Pat Nevin honourable exceptions.

@NeilLWise1 @batcountry1980 I always thought it signified a sort of sneer (taking aim) at comfy MOR - and some of the crap that had gone before, even down to the semi- ironic ‘Elvis’. ‘Alison’ is a beautiful song though it does have some pointedly bitter lines!

Hey Raoul @batcountry1980 we were listening to my Spotify feed and EC's Alison came on. As he was singing the chorus my wife asked why he called the album "My aim is true" when it was on the Alison chorus. Any clues?

@tara_crewe @dhv938d @LissaKEvans Sounds fantastic. I remember it being very beautiful from my only previous visit back in the early 80s.

@gotpenmustwrite @dhv938d @LissaKEvans I’m from Kilsheelan; I think you can walk the Blueway from Clonmel to Kilsheelan now. It’s beautiful. Take your children to Annestown/Stradbally/Boat Strand/Ardmore, some gorgeous beaches just over the border in Waterford.

The thing about Irishness: it's insidious. There was I, living in England, confident in my Welshness - didn't look where I was going, and suddenly I was producing Father Ted and marrying an Irishman. On #StPatricksDay. Be careful out there.

@dhv938d @LissaKEvans Will be there in a few weeks so our (grown up) kids can check out their roots, if that’s not too corny. Happy St Patrick’s to you too!☘️

@gotpenmustwrite @LissaKEvans I'm from and live in Clonmel. A big Happy St. Patrick's day from here ☘️

@ChopsyBristol Methinks this tweeter doth protest too much.

When we did English Lit GCSE we didn’t have to memorise quotes. Whoever was responsible for making this a thing well, a plague on both your houses

@davidsmith1932 Yep, it’s all relative. Last year we were genuinely being sucked into relegation scrap. So it’s nice to be near the top again. But team still need serious strengthening, given the squads available to Arsenal, Liverpool, City & Chelsea.

Contary to what some are saying, a majority of the Utd support myself included, are feeling 'giddy' about being clear in 3rd, after the 'suffering ' of the past 18 months, nobody is pretending that Utd are ready to challenge, but winning 7 from 9 who isn't happy.

@cric_blog It does seem to support the developing view of lack of professionalism & unbending adherence to ‘vibes’. A bit of this also came across in way Anderson’s exit was handled.

The Liam Livingstone interview is quite damning and makes you wonder how many other players have received similar treatment in the McCullum/Key era.

@batcountry1980 Must check it out. Love that song.

There’s a show called Words + Music on the MGM channel. I don’t know who else is on it, but there’s an Elvis Costello episode. He talks about songs, reworks them live. Just watched him doing Veronica as a ballad. Really beautiful and moving. I had tears in my eyes during it.

@JamieJo86909968 @WG_RumblePants Err. It has two. One quite a well-known links- style course - Cooden Beach & the other a parkland one, Highwoods. Very surprised you never saw either especially as you go past Cooden on the main Hastings to Eastbourne train!

@WG_RumblePants Lived in Bexhill for 8 years. Didn’t know it had one!

Thanks to Rob Key for taking the time today to respond to Liam Livingstone’s allegations. Here he is speaking to me from Bexhill Golf Course.

@theclarebuck @MichaelRosenYes @YouTube Interesting- didn’t know that! I saw Paul in ‘83 supporting Dire Straits. He blew me away, especially’Nothing but the same old story’ But will check out Dolores version.

Dolores Keane - The Island RIP Dolores singing the Paul Brady song about Lebanon from 1985 youtu.be/DvcxBT5Bx8Q?si… via @YouTube

Should also add the dedicated and helpful editorial contributions from Caroline, Jo, Sue & Cathy M!