Brass neck

Football’s European club matches, which continue next week, have so far tiptoed around in such predictable outline that only the obsessed have been bothered — leaving the headline writers to continue their lather over recriminations about the serious head injury to Chelsea’s goalkeeper Petr Cech, when he dived to save from an onrushing opponent in a mundane Premiership match at Reading. Keen to wade in with my two-penn’orth here, I was about to telephone an old Manchester acquaintance, long retired to Spain, when a bright young sports reporter from the Times saved me the trouble and the money. Nick Szczepanik called Bert Trautmann, who chuckled down the line at the very suggestion that goalkeepers needed more protection, ‘It would totally spoil the English game,’ he said. ‘Helmets? What would happen when a goalkeeper’s helmet injures a forward who was rushing at him? Protection for goalkeepers would make the game topsy-turvy.’