John Bull has always divided opinion. To our neighbours, he came to symbolise the best of British: A jovial, chubby, but solid and honest character of rural stock. For others (ie pretty much everyone else), this representation came to be viewed in very different terms. Just how different was apparent in a New York Times piece from 1861.

You gotta larf. The only other option is to cry, to look ahead to next summer’s World Cup with a knowing dread and to what will, on all recent form, be another public bout of self-flagellation on the part of the England football team, its supporters and a media that feeds off the national XI like a shoal of sharks.

Seven years ago, Damian Duff sat down for a chat with thi snewspaper and spoke about how you could feel Lansdowne Road’s creaky old bones shaking from the toilets in the dressing-room as the DART thundered through the West Stand.

As a reporter covering a rather more bellicose international contest once famously remarked: I counted them all out and I counted them all back in again.

HUNGARIAN football legend Ferenc Puskas, the inspiration of the “Mighty Magyars” side that dominated world football in the 1950s, has died after a long illness. He was 79.