As passionate about my own team, much less bothered about other football

The ‘big 6’ is just a Sky creation. From the start they’ve seen the PL like a soap opera with main characters and supporting characters and they still sell it like that.

It has very little to do with performances on the pitch - succeed or fail the narrative is all about those six clubs. Just watch Monday night football when two ‘other 14’ clubs are playing - they’ll still spend the first 50 minutes of the pre-match coverage talking about whatever the current drama surrounding a ‘big 6’ club is.

There’s no point trying to rationalise or change it because it has always been artificial.

Credit in the bank

The PL is harder on average than the group stages of the CL. The knockout stages of the CL are hardest to win overall and the trophy itself is probably more prestigious.

Might as well forget the restrictions on squad sizes now. Newcastle’s owners also own four clubs in Saudi Arabia so that is potentially 100 players they can call on if needed.

Not as much as they deserve

You can never entirely remove subjectivity because it will always feature in things like the degree of force and dangerousness of a challenge.

One thing would be in offside where you could say that only a player that touches the ball can be offside (but this would potentially lead to tactics like people standing right in front of the goalkeeper to block his view).

You could remove subjectivity from handball by simply saying that any contact with the hand or arm was always handball. Again that might have some unintended consequences but at least it would be simple and consistent.

They were both the kind of ‘all-rounder’ midfielders that you don’t see so much these days. Both could tackle and get up and down the pitch, they were both good passers and finishers too. Gerrard was perhaps the better tackler and passer, Lampard got in the opposition box a bit more and had an incredible scoring record for a midfielder.

At PL level they were both the business. Hard to compare them because in the main Lampard had better players around him than Gerrard.

It must be said that neither of them quite convinced at international level and neither of them tested themselves abroad at the peak of their careers. Their international careers were blighted a bit by difficulties in fitting them both (and sometimes also the similar and equally good Paul Scholes) into the same midfield.

It’s poor, to be honest. There used to be a top level black referee, and an Asian too, but there are none now. I suspect it is racist abuse, particularly in the lower levels of the game where they start out, which deters them.