Before both codes of rugby muscled in briefly with a flurry of Test matches, a month or so ago who’d have imagined the two most compelling contests at the top of soccer’s Premiership this first Saturday of December would be Bolton Wanderers against Arsenal and Wigan Athletic’s neighbourly barney at Liverpool. Olde-tyme top-of-the-table ‘six pointers’. While Bolton’s reclaiming of the heights has been worthily achieved of late, their name has an antique resonance as founders of the League in 1888; Wigan’s dramatic rise would be even more spectacularly heady if they were to beat Liverpool today and then stop in their tracks the strutting leaders, Chelsea, next weekend at Stamford Bridge.
Panegyrics for George Best will continue in lachrymose flood. As they mourn, are those of a certain generation also grieving for the final burial of the 1960s, that hedonistic, both-ends-burning time of peace, love and self-indulgence? Not to mention mini-skirts and maxi-measures.
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