Heard the one about the 22 Englishmen, six Scotsmen, the Frenchman and the Portuguese?

AS the Premier League season heads towards an exciting climax – arguably the most gripping since Michael Thomas galloped through the heart of the Liverpool defence on May 26, 1989 – it’s worth remembering that, despite its cosmopolitan values, English football remains one of the tightest closed shops in the sporting world.

For all the numbers of international star players who now strut their stuff, in the 63 years of the post-war game only two non-British managers have managed to breach the citadel of Albion by overseeing their teams to win the league championship.

Even that is a relatively recent phenomenon. Arsène Wenger, who was famously parodied as “Arsène Who” in London’s Evening Standard when he arrived from Nagoya Grampus Eight in 1996, became the first non-Brit to lift the title when Arsenal did the Double a year later. He was followed, seven years afterwards, as if we would be allowed to forget it, by the second, José Mourinho. And that’s it.