Football

For the serious football fan and Sky Sport subscriber, one of the great pleasures of a Sunday morning is the opportunity to tune in to Jimmy Hill’s Sunday Supplement.

The formula is simple and very effective. Every week, under the skilful chairmanship of Brian Woolnough, two of the country’s top journalists join Jimmy ‘in the kitchen’ to discuss material that’s topical and right on the button - including transfer news, the latest football rumours, England football, the Premiership, managers, players, moves, headlines, highlights, odds, predictions…

Catch the show and the chances are it will quickly become a regular habit - and when that happens, you’ll be surprised how many outstanding football journalists we have these days, how well they know the game and how easily they’ve made the transition to television. You’re likely to be impressed and entertained too by the diversity of characters – among them the urbane Patrick Collins, the pugnacious Steve Curry and the expansively witty Martin Samuel.

There is, of course, a price to pay. Dear old Jim can never resist hauling himself up onto one of his soap boxes. We need ex-professional players to become referees. There are too many foreigners in our game – and that’s why we aren’t producing enough good English players, or managers. We haven’t got a left-sided player to play up front in the England team. Worse still, we haven’t got a ‘number nine’.

That last one is the biggest and most boring box of all and you can feel Jimmy’s guests cringe when he ritually climbs up on it. Apparently, there’s some unwritten law in football that stipulates that you can have any formation you like, but if you want to succeed it must include a ‘number nine’. By which, so far as we can tell, Jim means a traditional centre forward – a big tall geezer who can ‘win things in the air’, ‘hold the ball up’, ‘bring others into play’ and ‘get goals’. A new Alan Shearer perhaps. Or, perish the thought, an English version of Didier Drogba.

Leaving aside the fact that the Laws of the game do not actually insist upon a ‘number nine’ of the type Jim favours, there are other important considerations. Do we have such a player? If we do, who is he – the lanky Peter Crouch, that good old workhorse Emile Heskey, or…? And more important, do we really need such a player to succeed – especially when we have players of the calibre of Michael Owen and Wayne Rooney? It’s worth pointing out that in recent years, Brazil and France seem to have managed OK and at club level so have others, among them Arsenal and Real Madrid.

It might be argued that the ‘number nine’ may already be an endangered species. Unlike Jimmy Hill of course.