Best Before

It pains us to point this out yet again, but dear old Jimmy Hill has long since reached and passed his sell-by date. The programme which bears his name, the ‘Sunday Supplement’ screened by Sky is in principle a really good idea – an hour’s lively discussion on football, usually chaired by Brian Woolnough and regularly featuring two other top sports journalists. The only trouble is, it still contains Jim himself and he is increasingly becoming an embarrassment.

Week in, week out, he ritually trots out the old lines – trying, like some faded actor who has been treading the boards for far too long, to deceive the audience into believing that he is uttering them for the very first time. And you can feel the ‘guests’ cringe as he embarks on his theory that the presence of a classic ‘number 9’ is not optional but compulsory, or the idea that referees should be ex-pros, or the impossibility of succeeding without a ‘proper’ left-sided player, or why he made it a personal rule as a manager not to discuss contentious issues straight after a game, or the fact that after about two years players will have heard everything a manager has to say (the irony of this is never lost on him!), or the way too many foreign managers and coaches is stifling the English game, or those halcyon days at Fulham when he knew exactly when to run for Johnny Haines’ inch perfect through ball.

Jimmy Hill has had a wonderful career in football – as a player, a union leader, a manager, a director and a television personality – and there are many, many people who have much to thank him for, especially financially. But now it really is time to retire gracefully, with our thanks