A FEW of us spent a most enjoyable and rewarding hour in the company of three Irish football heroes of yesteryear on Monday morning as Tony Cascarino, Frank Stapleton and Paul McGrath mixed some astute analysis of the Premier League and Trapattoni’s Ireland with a few entertaining detours down memory lane.

QUALIFICATION for the group stages of the Europa League? One million euro. The emotional reward for the players, staff and supporters of Shamrock Rovers? Priceless.

THE best of times and the worst of times — in the League of Ireland it sometimes seems as if you simply can’t have one without the other.

‘MAN UNITED Face West Brom On Opening Day!’.

HE MIGHT have been a stayaway but he hasn’t gone away, you know.

GREETINGS from Skopje, capital of Macedonia or the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to give it its full title.

SO how do you solve a problem like Messi? Happily for the rest of us, that’s one for Alex Ferguson to puzzle out tonight. Banning him is out of the question, I suppose, so that removes one of the manager’s favourite tactics for handling tricky customers.

THE Queen might not have made it to the Aviva Stadium — or even to dear old Dalyer to doff her crown to the Jodi Stand — but Irish football had its own reasons to feel the hand of history on its shoulder this week.

THE POOR old FA Cup has been subjected to more battering in recent years than the Spanish version which Sergio Ramos let fall under the wheels of the Real Madrid bus.

JOHN LENNON had Jose Mourinho bang to rights years ago: “We’re playing those mind games together/Pushing barriers, planting seeds/Playing the mind guerrilla/Chanting the mantra peace on earth/We all been playing mind games forever”.