As my long-suffering comrades in the press box know only too well, your aging correspondent doesn’t need much encouragement to regale all and, yes, even sundry with what I like to imagine are fascinating stories from my life in — yikes! — going on 40 years in the inky trade.

Ireland’s clashes with Wales, involving two evenly matched teams, will be decisive next year, writes Liam Mackey.

There’s been some fanciful talk that, with Manchester United’s 0-2 win away to Zorya — and its confirmation of Henrikh Mkhitaryan’s belated arrival as a significant influence — Jose Mourinho might well have negotiated one of those famous ‘turning points’ so beloved of teams in, to put it at its most charitable, transition.

One defeat doesn’t define Dundalk’s remarkable season even if, with so much at stake, last night’s 2-1 loss to Maccabi Tel Aviv is bound to leave Stephen Kenny and his players with an acute sense of deflation at the end of their European dream.

I have to say that, all those centuries past, it was very far-seeing and considerate of his ancestors to arrange for the new England manager to come among us in 2016 with a ‘gate’ already appended to his surname, thus sparing journalists the effort of having to add the same four letters if – when? - his reign goes, as it were, south.

While I wouldn’t imagine that having to engage with the dreaded meeja features high on any football manager’s list of ‘favourite things to do’, victory must make the task a lot more tolerable.