As Laurie Anderson never said: Oh, supermarkets. I do all my food shopping in them, but they don’t half get on my nerves. Take Sainsbury’s for instance. At the moment, they are trying to get planning permission for a 35,000 sq ft store slap bang in the middle of one of the busiest parts of Penwortham, the Lancashire town where I grew up.

There is absolutely no need for a supermarket there. Firstly, it will create traffic chaos in a part of town that is already a traffic nightmare at rush hour. Secondly, it will threaten the many small shops nearby. Thirdly, there’s already a Sainsbury’s about 20 minutes’ walk away.

“The new store will create jobs,” trill a series of Sainsbury’s spokesbastards to the local paper. Yes, perhaps even as many jobs as it destroys.

In response to the argument that the store will create traffic jams so hellish that drivers will only enter the are if armed with a full Thermos flask a week’s supply of Kendal mint cake, Sainsbury’s have pledged to widen a nearby road. Because if there’s one thing a traffic bottleneck needs in addition to a new supermarket, it’s extensive roadworks.

But the new store will probably still get built, because they usually do in the end. And people will flock there, and the nearby shops will close, and in a few years’ time someone will write a blog post or a letter to the local paper moaning that there’s no sense of community any more.

Someone like me.

I live in south Manchester. Within 10 minutes’ walk of my house, there are two Co-op stores and a Tesco Express. I’ve got another two big Tesco stores within five minutes’ drive. And I’m less than 20 minutes in the car from an Asda so big that it should have its own postcode. I have more supermarkets on my doorstep than I could possibly need. And it’s me – among others – who is keeping them all in business.

While popping from big Tesco to little Tesco to another big Tesco, I started to notice something. I could buy the same product for different prices in different Tesco outlets. The Tesco Express stores – the ones that have driven local convenience shops towards extinction – are the most expensive, as you’d perhaps expect. But prices differ even from one big Tesco to another.

So a carton of orange juice at Tesco in Didsbury (which is a very well-to-do part of Manchester) costs more than the same carton at Tesco in Gorton (which isn’t).

This is, apparently, part of a strategy called ‘price flexing’, which helps big supermarket chains wear down the local competition. And it taught me this: The price you pay for something need not bear any relation whatsoever to its quality. This is worth bearing in mind the next time someone shouts ‘What a waste of money’ at Fernando Torres.

Last on MOTD: Norwich 0 Chelsea 0
Commentator: Guy Mowbray

Some more thoughts on shopping: I remember, some time around 1994, going into a high-street sports store in central Preston and being able, if I wished, to buy a Notts County away shirt. (It was the tartan one they wore on their way to relegation from what is now the Championship.)

Here’s a sign, perhaps, of how much shopping habits have changed in 18 years since. I could still buy that 1994 Notts County away shirt on the internet today if I wanted to. (It’s on sale here. Look!) But my chances of walking into a high-street sportswear store and finding the current replica kit of a struggling Championship side based nearly 100 miles away are next to zero.

Sure, I can walk in off the street and pick up Brazil shirts and Barcelona shirts and Holland shirts and Manchester United shirts and anything else from Nike’s top-level range. But I’d struggle to find a Norwich City replica shirt in any sports retail store outside Norfolk. That’s Norwich City, who are ninth in the Premier League.

Chelsea are only five places higher. But you can buy their shirts on just about any high street in the country. Given the effect the shirt seems to have had on Torres, it’s a wonder any get sold these days.

“The Torres in red would have put that into the net first time,” said Match of the Day’s Guy Mowbray as the not-at-all-prolific striker took two touches before whizzing a chance wide from 10 yards against a team who hadn’t kept a clean sheet all season.

It does seem as if a Chelsea shirt is to Torres what Kryptonite is to Superman, or ITV to Adrian Chiles. It should be pointed out, though, that the striker is not the only party to suffer following his exit from Anfield. Indeed, Liverpool have since shown themselves to be so reliant on Luis Suarez that the whole club allowed themselves to attract near-universal condemnation just to show their misguided support for him.

Much of the criticism of Torres surrounds the fact that he cost so much. Well, perhaps it’s easier to laugh at his goal record (he’s scored fewer times over the last three months than Everton keeper Tim Howard) than it is to question how Roman Abramovich came to acquire enough money to be able to blow £50m on a striker in the first place.

You see, £50m is an unimaginable amount of money to us. (Well, it is to me. If you feel differently, all I will say is: Can I have a go on your yacht?) It’s a significant sum to Abramovich, but it’s a sum he can afford to lose.

There’s another question to be asked here, especially at a time when Darlington are in danger of going the same way as the local convenience store. What sort of game has English football become whereby clubs can only compete at the top level if run by the sort of person who can afford to blow £50m?

Torres has been a flop at Chelsea, but he was a gamble the owner could afford to take. His signing was never going to drive the club out of business, even if he didn’t score a single goal.

My point is this: If Torres had cost £2m, would he have been seen as a waste of money? In the Premier League, probably not. You see, Jessie J, it really is all about the price tag – even if, to a man of Abramovich’s wealth, Torres is arguably no more a waste of money than buying a carton of orange juice from Tesco Express instead of Lidl.

Gubbometer 2011/12

1. Fulham: 5 (2L: 1, 3L: 2)
2. West Brom: 4 (2L: 4, 3L: 4)
3. Aston Villa: 4 (2L: 4, 3L: 3)
4. Norwich: 4 (2L: 3, 3L: 2)
5. QPR: 4 (2L: 1, 3L: 1)
6. Swansea: 3 (2L: 4, 3L: 4)
7. Sunderland: 3 (2L: 4, 3L: 0)
8: Wolves: 3 (2L: 2, 3L: 4)
9. Stoke: 3 (2L: 1, 3L: 4)
10: Liverpool: 3 (2L: 1, 3L: 3)
11. Wigan: 2 (2L: 6, 3L: 4)
12. Blackburn: 2 (2L: 2, 3L: 3)
13. Tottenham: 2 (2L: 1, 3L: 0)
14. Newcastle: 2 (2L: 0, 3L: 0)
15. Bolton: 1 (2L: 3, 3L: 4)
16. Chelsea: 1 (2L: 0, 3L: 3)
17. Everton: 0 (2L: 5, 3L: 4)
18. Arsenal: 0 (2L: 2, 3L: 1)
19. Manchester United: 0 (2L: 1, 3L: 0)
20. Manchester City: 0 (2L: 0, 3L: 1)

2L = On second last (Sunderland 2 Swansea 0)
3L = On third last (Stoke 1 West Brom 2)

(Teams receive one point every time they are last on MOTD. Teams level are separated by the number of times they are on second last, then by the number of times they are on third last. MOTD2 not included.)

I’ve been thinking about Team Y a lot over the past week, amid the latest batch of blathering about refereeing standards. (Honestly, I’m almost wondering if the Respect campaign was concocted purely to give Sky Sports News something to fill airtime during the Beijing Olympics, to which they didn’t have the rights.)

First Chris Foy sent off Vincent Kompany for one two-footed tackle, then Lee Mason didn’t send off Glen Johnson for another, and suddenly it seemed as if everyone was screaming about inconsistency like a seven-year-old who has just seen his older brother get a bigger slice of cake for dessert.

I have a problem with the moral inconsistency here. It’s easy to complain about a lack of clarity in football’s rules, and an inconsistency in the way they are applied. But the fact is that there are plenty of teams out there who behave just like Team Y did when I saw them – trying to influence and deceive officials to gain an advantage. Yes, the referee that day had an awful game, but that was largely because Team Y made it so difficult for him.

Partly because of this, and partly because the game is so much quicker than it used to be, I’ve come to the conclusion that professional football is rapidly becoming impossible to referee. Officials make mistakes. The only wonder is that they don’t make more, given the speed at which some tackles fly in.

The usual argument at this point is to suggest making use of TV technology to help referees. It could be done, certainly at the top level. Perhaps there could be a video official, on the touchline or in the stand, watching replays on a monitor and alerting the referee via an earpiece if he had made a clear error.

Done that way, the flow of the game wouldn’t be interrupted. My fear is that the TV industry wouldn’t be satisfied with that. It would want to be the centre of attention, with the game stopped for big decisions and everyone watching for a verdict to be displayed on a big screen, cricket or rugby league style. There is, though, an argument for introducing TV technology as unobtrusively as possible. Except, except. . .

I’ve watched Kompany’s tackle on Nani in last Sunday’s Manchester derby several times. In slow motion, I think it looks a fair challenge. At full speed, it looks dangerous. Referee Foy saw it at full speed. And so I can understand why he sent Kompany off, and also why the FA rejected Manchester City’s appeal against the decision.

Johnson’s tackle on Joleon Lescott in Wednesday night’s Carling Cup semi-final between City and Liverpool looks awful from some angles, and not from others. Mason presumably saw it from an angle where it didn’t look like serious foul play. Had his position been different, maybe Johnson would have walked too.

But referees are in an impossible position, often damned even if they’re right. In fact, sometimes it feels as if managers, players and pundits almost moan about officials out of habit, like junior office workers who grumble about their boss because it’s all they have in common to talk about. This week they’ll complain about inconsistency, next week they’ll complain about a lack of common sense. Because, of course, everyone’s idea of common sense is exactly the same, right?

In short: When it comes to the issue of refereeing consistency, I’m with Gary Lineker.

Last on MOTD: Liverpool 0 Stoke 0
Commentator: Guy Mowbray

Lineker was a world-class centre-forward, and his intelligence off the pitch once led him to address the Oxford Union (about the banalities of sports interviews, since you ask). But he proved during last night’s Match of the Day that he’s no Bob Monkhouse.

Years ago, Monkhouse was presenting the National Lottery draw when his autocue failed. Ever the pro, he improvised a routine of topical jokes on the spot. Faced with his own autocue breakdown as he prepared to introduce highlights of West Brom against Norwich, Lineker fell silent for a couple of seconds as his composure went for a wander.

He didn’t quite stray into Ortis Deley territory, but it was reminiscent of the late Bob Greaves’ accident-prone attempts at hosting Granada Goals Extra in 1991 (about which I’ve blogged on here at least twice before, should you desperately need further enlightenment).

“Something’s gone wrong with the autocue at this stage,” Lineker said, “which is not really what you want to happen in the middle of a programme. But let’s go to that game now.”

He then introduced commentator Conor McNamara as ‘Colin Macmagara’. McNamara took it in good spirit on the popular invade-your-own-privacy site Twitter. “People are being very unfair on Gary Lineker,” he tweeted. “It was Colin Macmagara commentating at West Brom, not me.”

It still wasn’t as embarrassing as Lineker’s missed penalty for England against Brazil at Wembley in 1992. And the MOTD host recovered sufficiently to make a cogent defence of referees after yet more tackling-related controversy at Anfield.

In the first half, Stoke defender Jonathan Woodgate ploughed into Liverpool’s Stewart Downing, and didn’t get so much as a yellow card. Woodgate hasn’t always looked up with the pace of the Premier League this season – there was one game at Wolves were he was hauled off to save him getting sent off. And there’s certainly an argument that his tackle at Anfield yesterday was hopelessly mistimed rather than malicious.

The problem is that FIFA’s law on tackling doesn’t touch on intent. Instead, it described using “excessive force” and “endangering the safety of an opponent” to be an offence of serious foul play, worthy of a straight red card. If you make a dangerous tackle, you’ll be sent off regardless of whether you meant it or not.

But here, again, I think, was an example of TV muddying the waters rather than clearing them. At full speed, Woodgate’s tackle looked committed to me. Guy Mowbray, the MOTD commentator, only really picked up on the seriousness of the challenge while watching the slow motion replays which, to my mind, made the challenge look a lot worse. Maybe referee Howard Webb was lenient with Woodgate. Maybe, at full speed, he just didn’t see it as that bad a tackle.

“Referees are human,” Mowbray said. “They will see different incidents differently.” I think he meant to say that they will see similar incidents differently. One for Private Eye’s Commentatorballs, perhaps.

In the MOTD studio afterwards, Alan Hansen stated the obvious: “What you could do on a Saturday is take five or six incidents, get a different referee in there and you’ll get a different outcome.”

Lineker lets a lot of nonsense go from his pundits, but not this time. After reading out FIFA’s law on tackling – which is clear – he made a very sensible point. “How can you clarify that? There’s always going to be inconsistency, isn’t there? You’ve just got to put up with it.”

To prove the point, Hansen and Alan Shearer then watched another slow-motion replay of Woodgate’s challenge on Downing, and came up with different verdicts as to whether it should have been a red card. Pundits, eh? No consistency.

EPILOGUE

Celebrity Stoke City fan and Sean Dyche soundalike Nick Hancock hosted Radio Five Live’s Fighting Talk yesterday morning, with Colin Murray interrupting himself to host the BDO (Both on Double One) World Darts Championship coverage. During the show, Hancock asked his assembled guests to forecast which game would be first on Match of the Day.

Amid the various predictions, Hancock said: “It’s very rare that you leave a Premier League ground and don’t hear the home fans say: ‘Well we’ll be last again tonight. We’re always on last.’ Everybody can’t always be on last. That is not true. Although Stoke are always on last.”

Well, last this week, yes. But Nick: since Stoke were promoted to the Premier League in 2008, they have been last on MOTD 20 times. Over the same period, Fulham have been on last 28 times. Don’t believe me? Check the video evidence.

Gubbometer 2011/12

1. Fulham: 5 (2L: 1, 3L: 2)
2. Aston Villa: 4 (2L: 4, 3L: 3)
2. West Brom: 4 (2L: 4, 3L: 3)
4. QPR: 4 (2L: 1, 3L: 1)
5. Swansea: 3 (2L: 3, 3L: 4)
6. Norwich: 3 (2L: 3, 3L: 2)
7. Sunderland: 3 (2L: 3, 3L: 0)
8: Wolves: 3 (2L: 2, 3L: 4)
9: Liverpool: 3 (2L: 1, 3L: 3)
9. Stoke: 3 (2L: 1, 3L: 3)
11. Wigan: 2 (2L: 6, 3L: 4)
12. Blackburn: 2 (2L: 2, 3L: 3)
13. Tottenham: 2 (2L: 1, 3L: 0)
14. Newcastle: 2 (2L: 0, 3L: 0)
15. Bolton: 1 (2L: 3, 3L: 4)
16. Everton: 0 (2L: 5, 3L: 4)
17. Arsenal: 0 (2L: 2, 3L: 1)
18. Manchester United: 0 (2L: 1, 3L: 0)
19. Chelsea: 0 (2L: 0, 3L: 3)
20. Manchester City: 0 (2L: 0, 3L: 1)

2L = On second last (Aston Villa 1 Everton 1)
3L = On third last (West Brom 1 Norwich 2)

(Teams receive one point every time they are last on MOTD. Teams level are separated by the number of times they are on second last, then by the number of times they are on third last. MOTD2 not included.)

It was a nice way to celebrate the club’s history, but it caused a hell of a lot of confusion. Several kitmen at other League Two clubs seemed to be under the impression that Bury were still playing in white. There were an awful lot of colour clashes.

Towards the end of the season, Port Vale became the umpteenth team to turn up at Gigg Lane with the wrong kit. As they had no alternative strip, Vale had to play in their training tops – which didn’t have numbers on them.

Those used to watching Vale week in, week out could probably have muddled through. The rest of the press box spent the entire 90 minutes in a state of bewilderment.

With half-time approaching, Vale got a penalty. BBC Radio Manchester decided to go live to their reporter at the ground, who described the resulting goal thus: “Port Vale have just taken the lead from the penalty spot. I’ve no idea who’s scored.”

A few years before that, I was assigned to cover a charity match at Macclesfield’s Moss Rose for a local radio station. A side made up of actors from Sky One’s football soap Dream Team played a Coronation Street XI, and the station I was working for thought it would be fun for me to go along and do live updates.

There was only one problem. I’d never seen an episode of Dream Team in my life. And while the Corrie XI were listed on the team-sheet under the real names, the Dream Team players were listed by character names. On at least three occasions, I had to run down to the dug-out after a goal to figure out: a) which player had scored, and b) what their real name was. By the time the score got to about 8-6, I had given up.

“A marvellous afternoon’s entertainment,” I flannelled, hoping that no-one would notice that I didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.

A few years before that, Tony Gubba (the man who is, in many ways, the father of this blog) was assigned to cover a World Cup group stage match between Romania and Tunisia for the BBC. As the teams emerged, he discovered to his great delight that the entire Romania team had dyed their hair bright yellow, making player identification almost impossible.

Such are the pitfalls of live sports broadcasting. I suspect that, even now, Gubba cannot look at a peroxide blond/blonde without a shudder. I believe he ended up giving away his entire collection of Billy Idol LPs.

Last on MOTD: Tottenham 1 West Brom 0
Commentator: John Roder

Gubba stopped appearing on Match of the Day at the end of the 2009/10 season, although he still keeps himself busy with the Football League Show and Dancing On Ice. One show is filled with C-listers sliding around haplessly to the derision of the viewing public, the other is presented by Philip Schofield. (Honestly, I’d be writing gags for Have I Got News For You if only I could crowbar in a few more gratuitous John Prescott references.)

And so, thankfully, he was nowhere near White Hart Lane on Tuesday night to witness Jermain Defoe’s new blond look. A tribute to Romania’s 1998 World Cup squad? A New Year makeover? An accident with a bottle of bleach? Honestly, even I don’t care.

Also absent from White Hart Lane was the bronze cockerel that normally adorns the top of the stand, taken down for safety reasons as high winds battered Britain. Both Gubba and the cockerel missed Defoe scoring a very smartly-taken second-half winner against West Brom, to add to the goal he scored in a 3-1 win at The Hawthorns in November.

Defoe has scored 10 times for Tottenham this season, but has struggled for regular games, with manager Harry Redknapp generally preferring to play Rafael van der Vaart off Emmanuel Adebayor up front.

The new hairstyle – allied to the goalscoring form – should ensure Defoe isn’t ignored. Well, as long as his team-mates don’t all follow suit. But that would surely never happen, eh, Tony?

Gubbometer 2011/12

1. Fulham: 5 (2L: 1, 3L: 2)
2. West Brom: 4 (2L: 4, 3L: 2)
3. Aston Villa: 4 (2L: 3, 3L: 3)
4. QPR: 4 (2L: 1, 3L: 1)
5. Swansea: 3 (2L: 3, 3L: 4)
6. Norwich: 3 (2L: 3, 3L: 1)
7. Sunderland: 3 (2L: 3, 3L: 0)
8: Wolves: 3 (2L: 2, 3L: 4)
9. Wigan: 2 (2L: 6, 3L: 4)
10. Blackburn: 2 (2L: 2, 3L: 3)
11: Liverpool: 2 (2L: 1, 3L: 3)
11. Stoke: 2 (2L: 1, 3L: 3)
13. Tottenham: 2 (2L: 1, 3L: 0)
14. Newcastle: 2 (2L: 0, 3L: 0)
15. Bolton: 1 (2L: 3, 3L: 4)
16. Everton: 0 (2L: 4, 3L: 4)
17. Arsenal: 0 (2L: 2, 3L: 1)
18. Manchester United: 0 (2L: 1, 3L: 0)
19. Chelsea: 0 (2L: 0, 3L: 3)
20. Manchester City: 0 (2L: 0, 3L: 1)

2L = On second last (Wigan 1 Sunderland 4)
3L = On third last (Manchester City 3 Liverpool 0)

(Teams receive one point every time they are last on MOTD. Teams level are separated by the number of times they are on second last, then by the number of times they are on third last. MOTD2 not included.)

It’s probably best I don’t name the call centre, or the town, or even the country. (It was somewhere on Earth. Even there, I think I’ve said too much.) This call centre took orders and dealt with enquiries for a mail order company that sold the most incredible tat you could possibly imagine: Shoe trees, musical mugs, Boyzone annuals. Oh, and the video/DVD of Titanic. This was the autumn of 1998, and everyone in the country was buying that damn movie. (Not all of them just to make sure Leonardo di Caprio drowned, either.)

The company even sold mildly pornographic alphabetti spaghetti, a product I have seen nowhere else before or since. If your imagination is failing you, it was spaghetti spelling out the word ‘boobs’, or in the shape of a penis, that sort of thing. I think we did a chocolate selection box along similar lines. Whenever people rang up to order either, they almost always followed up by saying: “It’s not for me.” But it was.

I don’t know how call centres work now, but 14 years ago, they had a good old go at stripping their employees of any dignity they might have walked in with. I didn’t have a telephone, as such. Instead, I was clamped to a headset and the calls just flowed into my ears.

At least I was spared the humiliation of cold calling. I worked on the enquiry line, and so only had to deal with incoming calls from customers, many of them furious, deranged, or both. I couldn’t always blame them. For reasons best known to senior management, the courier firm we used to deliver goods was owned by our main rivals.

The fact that a lot of parcels seemed to go missing in transit, or turn up at the wrong address, was probably a coincidence. But when you’ve just had your fourth caller of the day telling you that you’ve ruined their Christmas because their shoe tree has gone AWOL, you’re willing to entertain all sorts of conspiracy theories.

There was a lot of pressure to deal with callers quickly. At one end of the office was an LED-lit red dot matrix scoreboard, which tallied up all the calls taken and missed. If we started missing too many calls, the office supervisors would walk round and metaphorically crack the whip.

It was easy to miss calls, particularly as we were dealing with the busy build-up to the festive season. And the admin could hold you up, too. When I’d finished dealing with a customer, I had to do something called ‘wrap up’, which consisted of logging the call on our computer system using a complex system of acronyms. (As a result, the log always looked like a large scale version of the Countdown conundrum.)

While I did this, I could press a ‘wrap up’ button on my key pad, which temporarily stopped calls coming into me. However, my key pad was linked up to a central computer being watched by a supervisor in the middle of the office – so if I took too long to log a call, he or she would find another reason to get grumpy.

Oh, and if you wanted to take your half-an-hour lunch break, your 10-minute afternoon tea-break or even go to the toilet, you had to press another button on the key pad to stop calls. All of those breaks were timed, too. On many an occasion, I had a conversation with a colleague in the tiny canteen near my desk interrupted when a supervisor wandered in to say: “Your break’s supposed to be 10 minutes. You’ve been out for 13.”

In a job where every day was weird, some days were weirder than others. Despite the fact that we were working for an enquiry line that cost 50p a minute to call, we would sometimes get the lonely ringing up just for a chat.

One morning, an elderly chap phoned with a spurious query about a tin of Quality Street that he had ordered but claimed not to remember receiving. I had to leave my desk to check his order number on a computer elsewhere in the office. When I returned, all I could hear was loud groaning on the other end of the phone.

“Hello?” I said. He continued groaning. I tried again. “Hello? Hello?” After a few seconds, the man went quiet. I could hear a television or a radio in the background. I called my supervisor over.

Because the caller had registered his name and address when he started shopping with us, I had his details – including his home phone number – on my screen. The supervisor called the police, and told me to stay on the line in case the elderly chap returned. We feared the worst.

After about 20 minutes, the groaning started again, faintly at first, then getting louder and louder.

“Oh God,” the caller finally bellowed into the phone.

“Are you all right?” I asked. “I thought you were having a heart attack.”

“I wish I had,” he said. “At least I’d have been a goner then. This was far worse.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve got terrible gangrene in my leg. I have these pain attacks, and they’re absolutely unbearable.”

“OK. Well, just to let you know; we were a bit concerned about you, so we’ve called the police out to pop round and check you’re all right.”

I kept him talking until the police arrived a few moments later. My colleagues, sympathetic to the last, were practically rolling on the floor with laughter.

In such miserable working conditions, a sense of gallows humour developed. The customers didn’t always escape. Many of our callers were agents – that is, they bought our tat at a reduced price, sold it on at full value and kept the difference, making themselves a bit of cash. If they had an agent number, they had to give it to us when they called. We typed it into the system and it brought up their name. If they had a particularly funny surname, we would jot down the number, pass it round the desk and challenge each other to type it in and not laugh. Mr Bumpass, Mrs Wanklyn and Mrs Crotch had us all in hysterics, and they never knew.

Some of us were better at dealing with customers than others. One guy, who had been in the navy at some point and was used to telling it as it was, would give callers a mouthful if they started getting stroppy. A few times, he cut them off.

I took more of a softly-softly approach. I’d reassure callers, telling them that they would receive their Titanic DVD and their porno alphabetti spaghetti in plenty of time to enjoy on Christmas Day, even when all evidence suggested it had no chance of getting there.

Navy Guy, sitting opposite me, couldn’t help but smile. “You keep saying everything’s fine, you,” he laughed. “You’re like Captain Smith on the Titanic.”

After a while, he stopped calling me Mike. “Morning, Cap’n Smith,” he said. “How’s life on the Titanic today?”

“Everything’s fine,” I always replied. Somehow, we both made it through to Christmas before quitting. I got some work on a local newspaper. With any luck, he’s now enjoying life on the high seas again.

Captain Smith, as I’m sure you’re all aware, was born in Stoke-on-Trent.

Last on MOTD: Blackburn 1 Stoke 2
Commentator: Guy Mowbray

But when I think of the Titanic’s doomed skipper these days, I think of Steve Kean. Blackburn’s manager has often tackled post-match interviews in the same way that I used to tackle angry callers – looking to stay positive even when the world is caving in. Kean has insisted that the fans calling for his exit do not represent the majority view, that Rovers are playing well and that things will improve. Meanwhile, the iceberg drifts closer.

Kean appears to have been on the verge of the sack almost from the day he took the job, having turned a mid-table Blackburn side into relegation fodder and having lost eight out of 10 home league games this season.

Yet something strange has happened over the last few weeks. While Blackburn fans continue to see Kean as little more than a mouthpiece for the calamitous Venky’s regime, the fact that he has clung on, almost (but not quite) without complaint, has started to win over sections of the press.

The turning point seems to have come when the Lancashire Telegraph published a front-page editorial a fortnight ago telling Kean to leave the club. Kean then turned up at a press conference a few days later with his young son in tow, took all the flak in a decent spirit and began to garner a degree of sympathy. Words such as “dignified” and “determined” began to replace phrases such as “tactically inept” and “odds on to be the first Premier League manager to lose his job this season” in national media articles on Kean.

A unlikely draw at Anfield and an even unlikelier win at Old Trafford helped, but it was still all a little bemusing. It was almost as if the national sports media’s opinion formers thought: “Well, I know we’ve been banging on for months about Kean being a laughing stock, but it’s a bit rich for the local paper to start doing it. Show the guy some respect, for goodness sake.”

Kean could point to a degree of misfortune in yesterday’s home defeat against Stoke. At 0-0, Christopher Samba headed against the bar, then had a goal ruled out – wrongly, in my view – for an apparent foul by Yakubu on Thomas Sorensen.

The problem is that Blackburn have not kept a single clean sheet all season. Peter Crouch scored twice for Stoke, and could have had a hat-trick before David Goodwillie scrambled in a goal for Rovers. Kean’s afternoon was summed up when Morst Gamst Pedersen accidentally slid into him on the touchline and sent him flying. (As Kate Winslet might have put it: “I’m flying, Jack!”) The home fans cheered.

“We’re kicking ourselves because we feel it is a big missed opportunity,” Kean said afterwards. There have been too many of those this season – losing at home to Everton after missing two penalties, chucking away a two-goal lead late on to draw at Norwich, chucking away a one-goal lead even later to lose at Sunderland, going down to an 89th-minute goal against West Brom.

Kean’s heart will go on. But it does look as if the ship has been holed below the water line. The whole sorry tale would make a decent movie, though.

Gubbometer 2011/12

1. Fulham: 5 (2L: 1, 3L: 2)
2. Aston Villa: 4 (2L: 3, 3L: 3)
3. QPR: 4 (2L: 1, 3L: 1)
4. West Brom: 3 (2L: 4, 3L: 2)
5. Swansea: 3 (2L: 3, 3L: 4)
6. Norwich: 3 (2L: 3, 3L: 1)
7: Wolves: 3 (2L: 2, 3L: 4)
8. Sunderland: 3 (2L: 2, 3L: 0)
9. Wigan: 2 (2L: 5, 3L: 4)
10. Blackburn: 2 (2L: 2, 3L: 3)
11. Stoke: 2 (2L: 1, 3L: 3)
12: Liverpool: 2 (2L: 1, 3L: 2)
13. Newcastle: 2 (2L: 0, 3L: 0)
14. Bolton: 1 (2L: 3, 3L: 4)
15. Tottenham: 1 (2L: 1, 3L: 0)
16. Everton: 0 (2L: 4, 3L: 4)
17. Arsenal: 0 (2L: 2, 3L: 1)
18. Manchester United: 0 (2L: 1, 3L: 0)
19. Chelsea: 0 (2L: 0, 3L: 3)
20. Manchester City: 0 (2L: 0, 3L: 0)

2L = On second last (QPR 1 Norwich 2)
3L = On third last (Aston Villa 0 Swansea 2)

(Teams receive one point every time they are last on MOTD. Teams level are separated by the number of times they are on second last, then by the number of times they are on third last. MOTD2 not included.)

It was February 2010. County were hurtling towards relegation from League One, and teetering on the brink of extinction, having spent almost a year in administration. On the pitch, they had lost a club record 12 successive league games. Ablett, taking his first steps into management, was gamely struggling with an impossible job.

His dry sense of humour, though, hadn’t deserted him. After the win at Exeter ended a 17-match run without a league victory, a local radio interviewer asked him for his thoughts.

He said: “Football would be a great game if it wasn’t for Saturdays, wouldn’t it? We could enjoy the week and not worry about the weekend.”

As he spoke about Stockport’s win, Ablett also reflected on the valued support of his family at a time when his working life had been so difficult.

“All this will certainly make me appreciate the good times when they come – if they ever come,” he added.

“I think I’m a fairly well-grounded person. I have a good staff, we have a good set of players, and I have a fantastic family at home who keep me going.”

Sadly, football’s good times did not return for Ablett. By the end of the season, with Stockport’s financial crisis deepening to the extent that they couldn’t even afford to buy a new microwave for the training ground, he admitted that his job at Edgeley Park had become a burden.

When he left at the end of that season, his coaching skills were in demand, and it didn’t take him long to find a new role at Ipswich Town. Soon after his arrival, though, he was taken ill with the blood cancer that would eventually claim his life. He died yesterday, aged only 46.

The tributes to Ablett from within football today speak of his ability as a defender and a coach, but also of his tremendous decency. An amiable footballer, he achieved the rare feat of gaining respect on both sides of Stanley Park, spending a decade at Liverpool and then four years at Everton.

He made his Liverpool debut at a time when the club were still winning league championships on a regular basis, scoring on his home debut in April 1987, slamming a shot past Steve Sutton for the third goal in a 3-0 victory over Nottingham Forest, and looking almost as surprised as delighted.

It would be his only goal for the club, but his contribution to the team over the next four years would be invaluable. When Glenn Hysen, David Burrows and Steve Staunton nudged him down the pecking order at left-back, Ablett switched to the centre of defence and proved a more-than-capable deputy for the increasingly injury-troubled Alan Hansen.

He won league title medals at Anfield in 1988 and 1990, before moving to Everton, where he went on to lift the FA Cup in 1995. Barry Horne, a Goodison team-mate, recalls Ablett making “an unbelievable run” to set up a late goal in the 4-1 semi-final thrashing of Tottenham at Elland Road that year. Horne’s description of Ablett as a versatile player, and as an understated, generous person, will tally with the recollections of anyone who encountered him.

He was a player who bore his career setbacks with dignity, too. After leaving Goodison Park in 1996, he established himself as captain at Birmingham City, only to see his career thrown into the balance in a single moment.

It came during a match at Crystal Palace in February 1999, when Birmingham were challenging for promotion to the Premier League. Ablett snapped his cruciate and medial knee ligaments in what looked an innocuous challenge. It put out of the game for almost a year. At the time, Birmingham manager Trevor Francis had been about to offer him a contract extension, but that plan was scrapped while the club assessed his recovery.

With his contract due to run out at the end of 1999, Ablett went on loan to Wycombe in a bid to prove his fitness. He was made the subject of a feature by ITV’s Football League Extra, and spoke honestly about the difficulties of facing an uncertain future with a young family to support.

“I’d agreed [the contract] with the manager on the Friday before the game, then got the injury and they wanted to hold fire until they discovered the extent of the injury,” he said.

“When they did, they said: ‘We’ll take it one step at a time.’ To be fair, they stood by me in one way by supporting me through the injury, it would have been nice to have the extra five months from Christmas until the end of the season – which the original contract would have given me – to prove I was fit.”

Even as he battled to save his playing career, Ablett could still see the humour in his plight. During his month at Wycombe, he played under the management of Lawrie Sanchez. It was Sanchez, when playing for Wimbledon, who scored the goal that beat Ablett’s Liverpool in the 1988 FA Cup final, one of Wembley’s greatest upsets.

“I remember the back of his head, because I was supposed to be marking him when he scored,” Ablett smiled, ruefully.

After Wycombe, he linked up briefly with former Liverpool team-mate Steve McMahon in the Second Division at Blackpool, and had a stint playing in the United States, before retiring in 2002 and beginning a promising coaching career. He led Everton’s Under-17 side before guiding Liverpool to the Premier Reserve League national title. His departure from the Anfield backroom staff in 2009 was something of a surprise, but Stockport County soon offered him their manager’s job.

Perhaps, if he’d known just how difficult that role would be, he might have waited for a better offer from elsewhere. But he bore a difficult season with dignity, and deserved a chance to rebuild his career elsewhere. That chance, tragically, was denied him.

We didn’t break all contact immediately, which was a mistake, in hindsight. I got a few angry e-mails and text messages, and avoided answering my home phone for a while. I kept visualising her turning up on my doorstep, sly grin, ready to do something awful, although she never did. Things eventually calmed down, as they always do, except when they don’t.

Friends were generally sympathetic, although one or two told me I’d got off lightly. I don’t think I could go through something that intense these days, although I do wonder occasionally if I’ll ever inspire that level of emotion in someone again. I wouldn’t be sorry if I didn’t, to be honest. A boring, stable life has a lot to recommend it.

It’s funny what sticks with you when a relationship ends, though, however brief and unsatisfactory. Years later, when all bitterness has long since evaporated, when the bleep of your mobile phone no longer fills you with dread and you can barely remember their surname, the most random thing can trigger a memory.

With her, it’s Scrabble. Even now, I can’t look at a board without remembering her. She taught me how to win at it. The secret, she told me as she kicked my sorry ass the first time we played, is in knowing your two-letter words.

The mistake most Scrabble players make, she once said, is in thinking that big words are the key to victory. Sure, if you can score 137 with ‘CRAZIEST’ (assuming the Z is on a double-letter score, either the C or R is on a triple-word score and you receive the 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles in your rack), but how likely are you to get that lucky?

No, the best way to accumulate points steadily throughout the game is through two-letter words, because it gives you greater flexibility as to where you place your tiles on the board. According to Hasbro, who hold the rights to the game in North America, you can increase your score by up to 50 points a game by knowing all 101 of the two-letter words allowed under Scrabble tournament rules.

So, for instance, if your opponent had started a game by placing the word ‘ORANGE’ across the middle of the board, and you had the tiles EENPRST in your rack, then you could place the word ‘PRESENT’ on the row above – but with the T on top of the O to make the additional word ‘TO’. Trust me, this would score you a lot of extra points.

By the time the relationship ended, I discovered she had taught me a lot of two-letter words. It turned out she knew a lot of four-letter words, too.

Last on MOTD: Norwich 1 Fulham 1
Commentator: Martin Fisher

I’d be curious to know what she made of Scrabble Trickster, a variation on the traditional game brought out in the UK by Mattel in the summer of 2010. (I’m not curious enough to get back in touch with her, though.)

Thanks to some rather misleading media reports at the time, Scrabble Trickster caused a lot of controversy – because its rules allowed proper nouns and people’s names to be used. Reports claimed that Trickster would effectively replace Scrabble, leading to the story being discussed at great length on Have I Got News For You by Richard Herring and Victoria Coren.

(As I recall, they both tutted amusingly, although Herring was just as befuddled by the fact that the word ‘ZA’ – which, apparently, is short for ‘pizza’ – is allowed in conventional Scrabble, despite being a term hardly anyone uses.)

Conventional Scrabble and the Trickster version are very different beasts, but the value of two-letter words remains key to both. So if you were to assess the worth of Premier League players in Scrabble terms, the most valuable would be Newcastle striker Demba Ba. (Believe it or not, ‘BA’ is acceptable in conventional Scrabble. It is an ancient Egyptian term for the soul.) But throw in the Trickster rules, and Fulham striker Orlando Sa must be worth a fair bit too.

There is unlikely ever to be a Premier League player with a shorter surname than Sa or Ba, unless someone signs Mr T from the A Team. While Ba has enjoyed a prolific season with Newcastle, Sa has taken a little longer to get going with Fulham since arriving from Porto last summer.

The Portuguese striker has started Fulham’s last two games, though, and scored his first goal for the club at Norwich on Saturday. It ensured that the Canaries’ failure to keep a single clean sheet all season continued, but it wasn’t enough for victory. Simeon Jackson equalised in the fourth minute of stoppage time to ensure Fulham continue their record of drawing a lot. They could probably draw a game of Scrabble at the moment.

If that was a disappointment for all you Fulham fans out there, take heart from the fact that you were last on Match of the Day, thus ensuring your club once again moves to the top of the Gubbometer. With no Europa League distractions to worry about in the New Year, you can look forward to playing on Saturdays a lot. The Last on MOTD crown is once again yours for the taking. And let’s face it, that’s far more of an honour than any Scrabble competition.

Gubbometer 2011/12

1. Fulham: 5 (2L: 1, 3L: 2)
2. Aston Villa: 4 (2L: 3, 3L: 2)
3. QPR: 4 (2L: 0, 3L: 1)
4. West Brom: 3 (2L: 4, 3L: 2)
5. Swansea: 3 (2L: 3, 3L: 3)
6: Wolves: 3 (2L: 2, 3L: 4)
7. Norwich: 3 (2L: 2, 3L: 1)
8. Sunderland: 3 (2L: 2, 3L: 0)
9. Wigan: 2 (2L: 5, 3L: 4)
10: Liverpool: 2 (2L: 1, 3L: 2)
11. Newcastle: 2 (2L: 0, 3L: 0)
12. Bolton: 1 (2L: 3, 3L: 4)
13. Blackburn: 1 (2L: 2, 3L: 3)
14. Stoke: 1 (2L: 1, 3L: 3)
15. Tottenham: 1 (2L: 1, 3L: 0)
16. Everton: 0 (2L: 4, 3L: 4)
17. Arsenal: 0 (2L: 2, 3L: 1)
18. Manchester United: 0 (2L: 1, 3L: 0)
19. Chelsea: 0 (2L: 0, 3L: 3)
20. Manchester City: 0 (2L: 0, 3L: 0)

2L = On second last (Bolton 1 Wolves 1)
3L = On third last (Stoke 2 Wigan 2)

(Teams receive one point every time they are last on MOTD. Teams level are separated by the number of times they are on second last, then by the number of times they are on third last. MOTD2 not included.)

(No, seriously, I think I would qualify as a celebrity, on the basis that I once dated a woman who had previously gone out with a bloke who has his own Wikipedia entry.)

For some reason, the viewers keep voting for me to do the bushtucker trials, which Ant and Dec seem to find hilarious. On the six or seventh day, the madcap duo come up with their most gruelling trial yet. I have to choose between eating a kangaroo’s anus (what do they do with the rest of the kangaroo?) and watching a DVD of all of Aston Villa’s goalless draws from the 2011/12 season. Baulking at this impossible choice, I decide to leave the camp. Inevitably, the Andrex puppy goes on to be crowned King of the Jungle.

OK, OK. Before I get a deluge of complaints, I’m not seriously suggesting that watching Aston Villa is as tortuous as eating the unpleasant bits of Australian marsupials. But at the same time, it’s not been much fun this season. Average attendances at Villa Park have dropped by around 3,000. High ticket prices in economically challenging times have undoubtedly been a factor, and there’s a theory too that some Villa fans have stayed away in protest at the appointment as manager of the man who got Birmingham relegated in May.

But there’s also the fact that, for significant chunks of the season, a Villa side that lost Stewart Downing and Ashley Young over the summer, led by a boss who was in charge of the Premier League’s lowest goalscorers last season, have not been great to watch.

Indeed, all the recent hoo-hah over injured striker Darren Bent’s shopping trip to Cambridge on December 18, as his team were playing Liverpool, rather masked the fact that Villa were utterly abysmal that day. If you were feeling particularly cheeky (and I do sometimes, but we won’t go into that), you might ask the question: Are Villa so boring that even their own players find it a trial to watch them?

Bent would say not, and has since apologised for popping to the shops when he really ought to have been watching his team. His manager, Alex McLeish, has dismissed suggestions that Bent has had enough of life at Villa Park and wants a move in January.

Maybe everything will turn out OK for McLeish and Villa in the New Year. It’s just that, right now, they don’t seem to have an awful lot to look forward to. At best, they might enjoy an FA Cup run and a top-half Premier League finish. At worst, if things really fall apart, they might get sucked into the kind of relegation battle that ultimately engulfed McLeish’s last club. Bent’s goals may prove crucial to avoiding that fate.

This season, Villa have scored 19 times in 18 Premier League games. It’s not the worst top-flight tally – and it does include the competition’s 20,000th goal – but it’s not great. There are five teams in the division with fewer league goals to their name this season. As it happens, one of them are Stoke.

Last on MOTD: Stoke 0 Aston Villa 0
Commentator: John Roder

Bent was still injured for last night’s non-event at the Britannia Stadium – Villa’s fourth goalless draw of the season, and a match that has moved them back to the top of the Last on Match of the Day standings. He did, though, make sure he was at the ground, watching on, thus staving off any gags about trips to the Wedgwood factory shop. (I’m not sure if it would be open on Boxing Day, anyway.)

The striker sat and suffered with the rest of the near-28,000 crowd, and a Sky Sports audience who could have been forgiven for looking at their subscription and thinking: “I’m paying how much? For this?”

Good grief, this was dire. The highlight of the first half came when Gabriel Agbonlahor accidentally ran into Mark Clattenburg, It’s A Knockout style, causing the referee to lose his pen. When Ryan Shawcross tried to return it, Clattenburg initially shooed him away, thinking the Stoke defender was approaching him for a moan.

Clattenburg, I can only assume, spent a little too much time over Christmas listening to The Referee’s Alphabet by Half Man Half Biscuit, a wonderfully wry examination of the life of a permanently-harangued official:

Sample line 1: “G is for the gnarled face of someone on £90,000 a week who reckons he should have had a throw-in.”

Sample line 2: “N is for the numbskull who asks me during the Boxing Day game what else I got for Christmas besides my whistle. An afternoon with your wife, mate.”

Sample line 3: “X represents the sarcastic kiss planted on my forehead by a swarthy Portuguese centre-half who I’ve just dismissed.”

Clattenburg and his fellow officials had only one major decision during the game. To the disappointment of all those who like to bang on about bringing TV replay technology into football officiating, they got it right. Marc Wilson’s header hit the underside of the bar and was cleared by Agbonlahor, with the ball neither crossing the line nor being handled by the Villa man. Television was forced to look elsewhere for its controversy on Boxing Day.

Otherwise, this was no fun to watch. If you stuck it out to the end, the least you deserve is a star for your camp and a good meal. Or, failing that, a shopping trip to Cambridge.

Gubbometer 2011/12

1. Aston Villa: 4 (2L: 3, 3L: 2)
2. Fulham: 4 (2L: 1, 3L: 2)
3. QPR: 4 (2L: 0, 3L: 1)
4. West Brom: 3 (2L: 4, 3L: 2)
5. Swansea: 3 (2L: 3, 3L: 3)
6. Sunderland: 3 (2L: 2, 3L: 0)
7: Wolves: 3 (2L: 1, 3L: 4)
8. Wigan: 2 (2L: 5, 3L: 3)
9. Norwich: 2 (2L: 2, 3L: 1)
10: Liverpool: 2 (2L: 1, 3L: 2)
11. Newcastle: 2 (2L: 0, 3L: 0)
12. Bolton: 1 (2L: 2, 3L: 4)
13. Blackburn: 1 (2L: 2, 3L: 3)
14. Stoke: 1 (2L: 1, 3L: 2)
15. Tottenham: 1 (2L: 1, 3L: 0)
16. Everton: 0 (2L: 4, 3L: 4)
17. Arsenal: 0 (2L: 2, 3L: 1)
18. Manchester United: 0 (2L: 1, 3L: 0)
19. Chelsea: 0 (2L: 0, 3L: 3)
20. Manchester City: 0 (2L: 0, 3L: 0)

2L = On second last (Sunderland 1 Everton 1)
3L = On third last (Chelsea 1 Fulham 1)

(Teams receive one point every time they are last on MOTD. Teams level are separated by the number of times they are on second last, then by the number of times they are on third last. MOTD2 not included.)

“Sky are now hyping up the 20,000th Premier League goal,” he tweeted. “Of course, football didn’t exist before 1992. Surely it’ll be the 2,000,000 and something top-flight goal. Come on Sky, pull your finger out and work it out!”

He’s a bright, talented and enthusiastic young journalist is Ian, and generous too; whenever we’re on a shift together at the newspaper we both work for, he always brings in a tonne of biscuits (and the odd piece of fruit too). By working with him, I’d say my food bill has dropped by half over the last couple of years.

However, he does like to speak his mind. A few years ago, he wrote some forthright programme notes about his beloved Wycombe Wanderers when they played at Blackpool. The notes caused such consternation in the away dressing room that manager Lawrie Sanchez ended up blaming Ian for Wycombe’s defeat.

Ian is a man capable of taking umbrage at a remarkably wide range of things. A couple of weeks ago, in the office, I witnessed him fly into a grumble over the fact that he was supposed to give his microwave lasagne nearly 10 minutes to heat up. It really is something to see a man arguing with a piece of ready meal packaging. (Mind you, I spend enough time shouting at my computer, so I’m hardly in a position to mock.)

So it shouldn’t really have come as a surprise to me that Ian – a passionate advocate of lower-league and non-league football – should get into a bit of lather about a football landmark that, if you think about it, is arbitrary. Albrighton’s goal, after all, was really only the 20,000th goal since the top flight changed its name in 1992. It was marking a rebranding exercise – albeit one that has had a significant impact on the make-up of the English professional game.

Anyway, I’d made a couple of references to the landmark goal on Twitter too. And so Ian soon set me a test.

“Here’s a mission, if you choose to accept it,” he tweeted to me. “Find out how many goals have been scored in English top-flight history.”

So I did.

There were two ways I could have tackled this challenge. The first option was to go through every top-flight table for every season from the very first, 1888/89, and to add up all of the league goals scored by each team. But this would have taken me about a day, and I couldn’t be bothered.

(I should point out, though, that I’m not averse to labour-intensive research, despite a traumatic episode on a work experience placement at the Westmorland Gazette 13 years ago. At the time, the Gazette was putting together its annually-published local agricultural directory, and someone needed to proofread it. As a result, I had to spend three days painstakingly going through the previous year’s directory and phoning the hundreds and hundreds of listed numbers to check that they were all still accurate. By the Wednesday, I was ready to cry. A kindly reporter called Gillian Cowburn took pity and pestered her seniors to give me something more fulfilling to do. In fairness, the news editor subsequently gave me a brilliant reference – a far better one than I deserved – so things worked out OK in the end. But, you know, if want me to do that kind of thing now, the least you can do is pay me.)

Luckily, there was a far simpler method of finding out the total number of top-flight league goals scored since 1888 – and it came, funnily enough, courtesy of Sky Sports. The Sky Sports (formerly Rothmans) Football Yearbook has the figures listed in its records section.

And so I can tell you that, between 1888 and 1992, there were 117,060 goals scored in the First Division. Add the 20,011 goals that have been scored in the Premier League, and you have a grand total of 137,071 top-flight goals. And so strictly speaking, Albrighton’s goal wasn’t the 20,000th, but the 137,060th. Nothing to get excited about.

Last on MOTD: Wolves 2 Norwich 2
Reporter: Damian Johnson

I do love a quirky football stat, though. And as the 20,000th Premier League goal began to draw closer on Tuesday night, BBC Sport Online came up with a corker regarding Norwich’s trip to Wolves.

It was this: The last time Norwich won a top-flight match on a Tuesday, Cliff Richard was at No.1 in the charts with Mistletoe and Wine. (A song, by the way, co-written by Keith Strachan, who also composed the theme tune and incidental music for the ITV quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire – a piece of work which, appropriately enough, made him a millionaire.)

I’ve checked the stat out, and it’s true. Norwich’s last top-flight victory on a Tuesday came when they defeated West Ham 2-1 at Carrow Road on December 27, 1988. Admittedly, it’s a fact that is a little misleading. For one thing, this season is only Norwich’s second in the Premier League since 1995. For another, when they were taking on all-comers in the late 80s and early 90s, they played virtually all of their midweek games on Wednesdays.

All the same, Tuesday’s trip to Molineux offered a chance to put that stat right. (Cliff wasn’t in the stand, as far as I’m aware.) It also gave them a fair chance of being last on Match of the Day which, when it goes out on a Wednesday night, always puts the Tuesday games on at the end.

For a while, it looked as if Norwich might claim an historic win – they led early through Andrew Surman’s superb diving header and then, after Sylvan Ebanks-Blake scuffed in an equaliser, regained their advantage through Simeon Jackson.

Alas, Norwich’s hopes of turning the clock back to 1988 were foiled by goal 19,988. Eight minutes from the end, Ronald Zubar scored for Wolves to leave the Premier League 12 goals short of 20,000. (Almost immediately, Yakubu found the net for Blackburn against Bolton at Ewood Park to reduce that gap to 11.) Albrighton’s moment of glory had just moved a step closer.

Fate might have been different had a late Steven Fletcher strike for Wolves not been correctly ruled out for offside. As Match of the Day’s Damian Johnson cutely put it: “Wolves manager Mick McCarthy had the look of a child excitedly opening a present on Christmas morning, only to discover another dodgy jumper from grandma.”

McCarthy’s Wolves remain in relegation trouble. Norwich remain unable to win in the Premier League on a Tuesday. A few miles away from Molineux, Albrighton has joined Brian Deane (1st), Eric Cantona (100th), Mike Newell (1,000th), Andy Townsend (5,000th), Les Ferdinand (10,000th) and Moritz Voltz (15,000th) on the list of landmark Premier League scorers. But some people are never going to be impressed by that. Eh, Ian?

Gubbometer 2011/12

1. Fulham: 4 (2L: 1, 3L: 1)
2. QPR: 4 (2L: 0, 3L: 1)
3. West Brom: 3 (2L: 4, 3L: 2)
4. Swansea: 3 (2L: 3, 3L: 3)
5. Aston Villa: 3 (2L: 3, 3L: 2)
6: Wolves: 3 (2L: 1, 3L: 4)
7. Sunderland: 3 (2L: 1, 3L: 0)
8. Wigan: 2 (2L: 5, 3L: 3)
9. Norwich: 2 (2L: 2, 3L: 1)
10: Liverpool: 2 (2L: 1, 3L: 2)
11. Newcastle: 2 (2L: 0, 3L: 0)
12. Bolton: 1 (2L: 2, 3L: 4)
13. Blackburn: 1 (2L: 2, 3L: 3)
14. Tottenham: 1 (2L: 1, 3L: 0)
15. Everton: 0 (2L: 3, 3L: 4)
16. Arsenal: 0 (2L: 2, 3L: 1)
17. Stoke: 0 (2L: 1, 3L: 2)
18. Manchester United: 0 (2L: 1, 3L: 0)
19. Chelsea: 0 (2L: 0, 3L: 2)
20. Manchester City: 0 (2L: 0, 3L: 0)

2L = On second last (Blackburn 1 Bolton 2)
3L = On third last (Everton 1 Swansea 0)

(Teams receive one point every time they are last on MOTD. Teams level are separated by the number of times they are on second last, then by the number of times they are on third last. MOTD2 not included.)

In the piece, he talked about developing more English players capable of the tiki-taka football that has helped Spain dominate at international and club level. “For us, it’s about trying to get the skill base in place early,” Brooking said. “So by the time they get to 11, they are comfortable and can keep the ball.”

Brooking’s tone was optimistic. I’m not sure I share it. (Sorry, gran.) You see, I’ll only really start to believe that English youth football is on the right lines when keepers start taking their own goal kicks.

Let me explain: A friend of mine spends a bit of time helping out with his young son’s Under-10s side. When I caught up with him a few days ago, he made a whole raft of pertinent and somewhat dispiriting observations about the state of youth football in this country – for instance, that it’s still common for kids to play on full-size pitches in the wind and rain with parents on the touchline bellowing “Get rid of it”, and that too many pro clubs seem to want 6ft-plus athletes to whom they can teach a few rudimentary football skills.

But there was one observation that really struck a chord with me. He noted that, in a lot of junior football, defenders will take goal kicks. The reason? Because the goalkeeper can’t kick the ball. In many cases, the lad in goal has been put there because he is no good with the ball at his feet. He’s there, really, so that he’s out of the way.

It struck a chord because my lack of footballing skill was the main reason I ended up in goal as a youngster. I couldn’t kick a ball for toffee. I still can’t. (I did score a penalty past former Oldham keeper Jon Hallworth at my high school summer fair in 1989, but that was just luck.) When I played for my school, I needed a defender to take my goal kicks. I wasn’t alone.

As it turned out, I wasn’t terribly good at goalkeeping either. So I stopped playing in 1992, when I was 15. It was the year the back pass rule came in. I figured the writing was on the wall.

A junior league goalkeeper unable to kick could just about get by in the late 80s and early 90s. But now? Almost 20 years after keepers were banned from handling back passes? Well, it’s difficult to know whether that’s funny or sad.

You can see it sometimes, even much higher up the football food chain. In July, I watched a pre-season friendly involving a Conference North side. They had a keeper who had, relatively recently, been on the books of a League One club. Midway through the first half, the keeper received a back pass on his weaker left foot. I say weaker: He clearly just used it for standing on. Unable to work it on to his right because he was being closed down, the keeper took a panicky air shot with his left, then scrambled to the loose ball and poked it out for a throw-in. It was hopeless.

Teaching youngsters to play like Barcelona is a laudable aim for Brooking and his team. But perhaps first, it might be a good idea to teach them how to kick a ball properly. And that includes wannabe goalkeepers.

Actually, I’m of the view – as is my friend with the Under-10s side – that kids shouldn’t develop a specialist position so early. You want to be a keeper? Fine, but you should also spend some time playing outfield, to develop your ball skills. Ambitions to be a striker? Might do you good to spend a bit of time in goal. Naturally right-sided? Play at left-back for a while, and practise using your weaker foot. Yes, you might lose a few games, but who cares at that age? I mean, can you tell me who won the Central Lancashire Junior League in 1992? I can’t, and I played in it.

I do despair that it’s still common for the goalkeeping role to be treated so lightly in junior football, that it’s too often seen as somewhere to stick a duffer so they’re out of the way. As long as that keeps happening, we’ll struggle to produce top-class goalkeepers, and our Premier League clubs will have to carry on importing from overseas. If you want an example, cross the border into Wales and look at Swansea’s Michel Vorm.

Last on MOTD: Newcastle 0 Swansea 0
Commentator: John Roder

Vorm has kept eight clean sheets in 16 Premier League games this season, saving two penalties as well. Yet even though his dad was a decent amateur keeper, the Dutchman claimed recently that he hated playing in goal as a kid.

“I enjoyed playing outfield,” he said last month. “Whenever the boys were in the street, kicking the ball about, I would make sure that I was not stood between the posts.”

In Holland, youth players don’t have positions imposed on them as early as in England. And so when Vorm finally succumbed to family tradition and put on a pair of gloves, he was already comfortable with the ball at his feet.

According to Swansea manager Brendan Rodgers, those ball skills were just what he was looking for when seeking a keeper to replace Dorus de Vries, who quit during the summer in order to spend all season on the bench at Wolves.

“We like to start from the back,” Rodgers said, “so our keeper has to be a good footballer too.”

Don’t get me wrong, though. Being a great shot stopper is vital as well. Vorm proved that by denying Demba Ba from six yards at St James’ Park yesterday. It ensured a clean sheet as Swansea earned a third away point of the season.

It was a sombre afternoon, preceded by a beautifully-judged tribute to the much-missed Gary Speed, once of Newcastle and always of Wales. Gwyn Hughes Jones, the Welsh tenor, gave a breath-taking rendition of Bread Of Heaven from the centre circle. There was a minute’s applause as fans held up black and white cards to pick out a giant No. 11, Speed’s shirt number. When the match reached its 11th minute, supporters rose from their seats in tribute.

“The Geordie faithful loved Gary Speed, and they showed it like only they can,” Newcastle manager Alan Pardew said afterwards.

In the circumstances, the match seemed something of an irrelevance. It did, though, demonstrate just how important Swansea’s defending – and the goalkeeper – will be in their attempt to stay in the Premier League. At home, they have the top-flight’s best defensive record, with just two goals against. Away, they have one of the worst, shipping 18 goals.

A clean sheet on their travels, then, was very welcome, as chiselling out away points is going to be key for Vorm and his team. Swansea’s record at the Liberty Stadium this season may be excellent, but no team can expect to stay up on home form alone.

So although Vorm’s ball-playing skills will come in very handy over the next few months, so will his ability to command his penalty area and keep his defenders in check. Oh, and to take his own goal kicks.

Gubbometer 2011/12
1. Fulham: 4 (2L: 1, 3L: 1)
2. QPR: 4 (2L: 0, 3L: 1)
3. West Brom: 3 (2L: 4, 3L: 2)
4. Aston Villa: 3 (2L: 3, 3L: 2)
4. Swansea: 3 (2L: 3, 3L: 2)
6. Sunderland: 3 (2L: 1, 3L: 0)
7. Wigan: 2 (2L: 5, 3L: 3)
8: Wolves: 2 (2L: 1, 3L: 4)
9: Liverpool: 2 (2L: 1, 3L: 2)
10. Newcastle: 2 (2L: 0, 3L: 0)
11. Bolton: 1 (2L: 2, 3L: 3)
12. Norwich: 1 (2L: 2, 3L: 1)
13. Blackburn: 1 (2L: 1, 3L: 3)
14. Tottenham: 1 (2L: 1, 3L: 0)
15. Everton: 0 (2L: 3, 3L: 3)
16. Arsenal: 0 (2L: 2, 3L: 1)
17. Stoke: 0 (2L: 1, 3L: 2)
18. Manchester United: 0 (2L: 1, 3L: 0)
19. Chelsea: 0 (2L: 0, 3L: 2)
20. Manchester City: 0 (2L: 0, 3L: 0)

2L = On second last (Everton 1 Norwich 1)
3L = On third last (Wolves 1 Stoke 2)

(Teams receive one point every time they are last on MOTD. Teams level are separated by the number of times they are on second last, then by the number of times they are on third last. MOTD2 not included.)

His secret to keep, I guess. In fact, the whole thing nearly didn’t come to light at all. The press room at Goodison has a couple of TV monitors on which it’s possible to watch live the interviews being conducted for that night’s Match of the Day. The BBC’s Martin Fisher was rounding up his chat with Lambert, when someone off-screen – presumably either the floor manager or the match director – instructed him to ask about the dug-out incident. It was the first those of us in the written press knew about it.

Lambert’s answer didn’t clear things up. So when the Norwich manager popped up to talk to newspaper reporters, the question was put to him again.

“No, no. It’s OK,” Lambert said. “You don’t need to ask me that. I missed the goal, and that’s what happened.”

“You say we don’t need to ask you, but we do really,” the reporter replied.

Lambert wasn’t giving ground. “Yeah, and I can give you my answer, can’t I? Which I’ve given you.”

“Which is that you don’t want to say where you were.”

“Mmm.”

Lambert, of course, doesn’t have to answer such questions. Given that he has lifted Norwich from third-tier football to ninth place in the Premier League in two-and-a-half years, he would undoubtedly prefer to talk about the progress of his team.

And the whole dug-out thing may well have been nothing. But there’s little more guaranteed to perk up a journalist’s curiosity than a sidestepped question.

Where had Lambert gone? Had he left some important tactical note in the dressing room? Was there an urgent phone call he had to make? Did he need the loo? Any of those would have been understandable reasons for leaving his post. It just seemed curious that, whatever the explanation, he should be so determined to keep such an apparent triviality to himself.

Lambert missed something of a rarity, as Everton don’t score many. There were nine minutes to go when lively substitute Royston Drenthe cut in from the right, ran at Norwich’s defence and struck a low shot that was heading straight to the keeper until Leon Osman diverted it in. It was a deserved equaliser on the balance of play, but it was starting to look as though it wouldn’t come.

Articles about Everton these days invariably fall into one of two categories: Those discussing the club’s lack of money, and those discussing the club’s lack of goals. There is a link between them.

Owner Bill Kenwright seems to have been trying to sell up forever. But then what sort of person wants to buy a football club these days? There’s only one Sheikh Mansour, but there are an awful lot of Glazers.

Kenwright doesn’t have access to the fortunes needed to run a Premier League club; certainly not one with as few lucrative corporate facilities as Everton. As a result, manager David Moyes has to sell players to balance the books. The result is a squad of declining quality.

And it’s a squad without a prolific striker. Everton’s leading scorer this season is Apostolos Vellios, a promising but raw 19-year-old pulled out of Greek football for £250,000 at the start of this year. He has scored three times. Louis Saha is inconsistent and too often injured, Tim Cahill looks a shadow of his former self and hasn’t scored a club goal for 362 days. Denis Stracqualursi has given the Goodison faithful little reason for excitement since his loan move from Argentina.

Creativity has been an issue too. Before today’s game, the statistic doing the rounds was that Everton hadn’t managed a shot on target since November 26. It was one disputed by Moyes, and by the figures in today’s match programme, which cited four shots on target against Stoke a fortnight ago, and one against Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium last Saturday.

But if the ‘no shots’ stat was true, Everton quickly set about putting it right this afternoon. After the game, Moyes counted 15 efforts on target. It’s a figure that sounds about right. Norwich haven’t kept a clean sheet all season – conceding five to Manchester City, three to Blackburn and four at home to MK Dons. They’re always likely to give you a chance because they take a chance.

Standing in Everton’s way, though, was a strong Merseyside connection. Texas-born centre-back Zak Whitbread grew up in Runcorn and used to play for Liverpool, while keeper John Ruddy was chasing a second clean sheet at Goodison – nearly six years after his first.

Ruddy spent five years at Everton but only played for them once. That appearance, against Blackburn in February 2006, was something of a statistical oddity. As far as I’m aware, it’s the only time in Everton’s history that two keepers have made their competitive debut for the club in the same match. Iain Turner started in goal that day, but was sent off after nine minutes. Ruddy came on, and kept a clean sheet in a 1-0 win.

For a long time today, he looked like maintaining his perfect Goodison record. He saved bravely at the feet of Marouane Fellaini early on, then made an important clutch of second half stops to deny Osman, Saha and Drenthe among others.

“John’s done very well,” Moyes said afterwards. “He needed the games. He did great at Motherwell on loan before he left us. But we’ve got Tim Howard, who we regard really highly, and it was going to be a long haul for John to get past him. I thought he made some really good saves for Norwich today.”

Just as impressive for Norwich was Whitbread’s centre-back partner Russell Martin, who dived to head Osman’s goalbound curler round the post in the first half, then flung himself in the way of Saha’s shot in the second after Ruddy punched a cross to the striker’s feet and found himself out of position.

But somewhere amid all those Everton chances, Norwich took the lead with their only shot on target all afternoon. It came in the 28th minute, when Steve Morison hooked on a David Fox free-kick, and Grant Holt turned John Heitinga before beautifully threading a shot through a crowd and in off the far post. It was Holt’s sixth goal in eight games. For the record, Lambert saw that one. “It was a brilliant finish,” he said.

As Everton continued to tot up shots on target without scoring in the second half, Holt had a great chance for another, but headed over Kyle Naughton’s long cross from the right. Everton probably wouldn’t have had the firepower to come back from 2-0 down.

A single goal deficit is another matter. For although Everton have only scored 16 league goals this season, 10 of those have come in the final 15 minutes of matches. So perhaps Osman’s late equaliser, which denied Ruddy his clean sheet, was to be expected. That only makes more baffling the fact that Lambert missed it.