The gaffers who came back from the dead

This very weekend back in 1999, Glenn Hoddle was a dead man walking as manager of England, an ironically appropriate condition for him to find himself in, since it was a newspaper interview in which he had amplified his belief in reincarnation which had put him on the front as well as the back pages and brought him, as an international gaffer, to an authentic point of no return.

Speaking to a reporter a few days earlier, Hoddle had declared: “You and I have been physically given two hands and two legs and a half-decent brain. Some people have been born like that for a reason. The karma is working from another lifetime. I have nothing to hide about that. It is not only people with disabilities. What you sow you have to reap. You have to look at things that happened in your life and ask why. It comes around.”

Taxi for Mr Hoddle!