Surreal swear case puts footballer Terry on the spot

BEING new to football — that is, having gotten into it in my 40s as opposed to my teens — it still remains something of a mystery.

Not the bit where two lots of 11 men get on a pitch every Saturday and run up and down with a ball — that offside rule isn’t nearly as complicated as men like to think — but the other stuff. The culture. What happens not from the knees down, but from the neck up.

Like ‘handbags’. According to John Terry and Anton Ferdinand, calling a fellow player a funking cult (see what I did there, to get around the newspaper no-swearing laws) is just ‘handbags’. You know, like what birds would do. Well, I don’t dispute that John Terry knows lots of ladies, even ladies that aren’t his lady-wife, but that seems a bit extreme. We ladies tend not to batter each other with handbags, verbal or otherwise.