The colour purple

In Competition No. 2955 you were invited to supply a report on a Uefa Euro 2016 match written in the florid style beloved of some sportswriters. There was some inspired awfulness on display this week. How about this, from Mike Morrison: ‘The craven defence unravelled like cartoon knitwear, enabling Dottirdottir, the archetype of stoic strategy, to blithely torpedo the decider through the enmeshed architraves of triumph.’ John O’Byrne, Josh Ekroy and Derek Morgan were on impressively toe-curling form too, and those entries printed below earn their authors £25 each. Adrian Fry earns £30.

Spain’s three-nil defeat of Turkey demonstrated how, in Spanish hands at least, soccer is a language whose finest conjugations come by way of logorrhoeic feet, fully cognizant that the divide between Art and craft exists unpatrolled by linesmen. Morata and Nolito — their names anagrammatic of one another but for the handful of letters that make all the difference — had little choice, arithmetically, but to share out the goals unequally.