It reminded me of a story which has always amused me in connection with my dad – the sort of story which sits in its own era, and wouldn’t ever happen today. It concerned a match that took place in April 1971 between Leeds and West Brom.

You will no doubt remember the game in question, or at least dad’s commentary line which (in a fairly competitive field) remains one of his most-quoted: “and Leeds will go mad! And they’ve every right to go mad!”  (Personally I prefer the “and the Yorkshire spirit really coming to the fore” that followed a few moments later when there was a wrestling match between police and fans going on in the centre circle, but that’s by the by!)

The key moment in the match occurs 5 mins 55 seconds into the YouTube clip, but in short, the match story was this: Leeds had already had a goal disallowed for offside when West Brom’s Ken Brown, intercepting a pass just inside the  Albion half, actually stopped as he crossed the halfway line expecting the whistle, because Colin Sugget was in an offside position and the flag was waved. But as the Leeds players also stopped the ref waved play on, and Brown ran on and passed  to Jeff Astle, who scored to make it 2-0 to Albion. The match finished 2-1.

So much, so well known. But what amused me was what happened next.

In those days, the match commentator also did the post-match interview, charging down from the gantry following a quick piece-to-camera from the commentary position for the match report.

Dad got there ahead of Don Revie, who arrived for the interview absolutely steaming about referee Ray Tinkler, as you might expect. The decision, after all, is generally considered to have cost Leeds the title.

So Revie arrives, absolutely livid… And dad advises him to go back into the dressing room and calm down before going on air, or he might say something he’ll regret!!!!

I asked him about it the other day and he admitted, “I suppose my action was not exactly that of a journalist… But I knew him quite well at the time.”

I bet Dalglish wishes he’d had the same opportunity to take stock!

In a similar way, I sometimes wonder how come Europe remains in such a financial pickle after all this time, when I take the natural assumption that the people in charge know exactly what they’re doing. And then I see decisions made by EU and soon-to-be-in-the-EU governments about a subject that I do know something about, and I realise that actually they make it up as they go along, with little, if any, weight put on experience and the reality of today’s market.

Take, for example, the news that the Serbians have decided that an ISP block is the way to stop online gaming. Have they been watching anything that’s been going on? Do they talk to anyone who has tried it and seen it fail? What magic bullet do they think they’ve got that hasn’t worked for anyone else?

In Belgium, meanwhile, the ground-breaking news is that they have introduced a blacklist. What, like the Italians had, that everyone got round every week? Surely not? But yes – no joke about it. Perhaps all that was happening during the two years that the Belgians were trying to work out how to form a government? Or is there another excuse?

Their list currently includes ten operators, but the man in charge, Peter Naessens (a name which by coincidence sounds remarkably like ‘no sense’) says that “that could rise to 100 by the end of the year”. I’m sure that will prove effective in the face of the 15,000 sites estimated by the EU to be offering gambling services online (or 20,000 by other counts).

It remains a source of bewilderment to me that this sort of measure can continue to be put in place in the face of mounting evidence that bans are an ineffective means of ensuring that people are properly protected. The latest people to add to the pile are the South Africans, whose National Gambling Board says it is powerless to block sites. So much better, then, to licence operators which can then promote their services in a country. It’s surely not that difficult to understand?

Believing in the idea that Capello, as Shearer repeatedly suggested, somehow ‘doesn’t care enough’ (and is therefore able to walk away three months before the start of a major tournament) just betrays a failure to understand that when it comes to it, he’s gone against his will. While he has technically ‘resigned’, to all intents and purposes he’s been pushed out. Or fired, if you want.

The clue to this being the case is in the absence of any expression, in the FA statement, of regret about his departure. Had he genuinely resigned, then without any question the FA would have said that they accepted his resignation ‘with regret’ (or similar). In fact, what they need is for him to go, but for people to believe – a la Shearer – that it was all Fabio’s choice. It wouldn’t serve to have someone who is potentially key to the successful outcome of a campaign which finishes in three months seen to have been kicked out.

That it needs to be painted that way will be deemed better for Capello as well, since it’s nicer to say that you quit than that you were kicked out. But in reality, by failing to consult him on the John Terry decision, the FA had made his position untenable. As became clear from his subsequent television interview, he was totally emasculated – a fact which was lost neither on him, nor the FA. And while they might have been able to point to a clause in his contract which showed that they have the ultimate over-ride for decisions, they would not have wanted to get into a debate about unfair dismissal. The result was that they came to a compromise agreement, and in exchange for whatever payout is now being (or maybe has already been) discussed between lawyers, Capello will have had to say that he has decided to go.

Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing clearly depends on what you thought of him as a manager, but for anyone to suggest that he’s gone because he doesn’t care is just daft. But it’s also profoundly depressing, because it will add to the clamour (viz Wayne Rooney’s tweets) that the next manager has to be English, as if by sharing the side’s nationality, it means that he’ll care more. Apparently, the need for such affiliation by birth makes no difference at a local level – a Scot can care about a city as much as a Scouser or a Mancunian, it would seem – but when it comes to coaching England, apparently only Englishmen need apply.

This sort of thinking makes me weep – and not just because it means that the names mooted to take over (even for the short term) therefore include Stuart Pearce. It’s because, surely, the objective has to be to get the person who is best for the job (which is to deliver an international trophy with the best English players available). If that ends up by coincidence being an Englishman (and in Harry Redknapp, it may well be) then brilliant for us all; but though Pearce may, in the eyes of some, lead the young English crop, there surely can’t be anyone in the country who genuinely believes that, passionate player though he was, he can possibly be thought of in the top rank of managers.

No other sport has this obsession with the idea that the national team’s coach has to be English. No-one’s batted an eyelid that Andy Murray’s hired a Czech; the Great Britain rowing team has a record envied by the world over the last 20 years, under the leadership of a German; English cricket went from bottom of the world rankings to second under a Zimbabwean. Why should football have to have this obsession with nationality, if not because, while tying itself in knots recently about whether an uncomfortable faction within it might be racist, the sport has missed the extent to which it is xenophobic?

ARJEL’s president, Jean-Francois Vilotte, has called for urgent regulatory reform, saying that a 10% decline in Q4 gross win from €31m to €28m is a “cause for concern” because “it could lead to players betting to unregulated sites”. An understatement, or lost in translation? You’d swear the phrases he must have used were ”il est tres evident que” and “deja“.

There are some people out there who like to praise the French legislation for having got it right (with its sports betting right, high taxes,  and maximum return to player) when it was introduced in June 2010. The obvious concern that the new law would result in a growing black market – and that once you lose a customer to that, it is very hard to get him back – was dismissed as false.

Perhaps in the face of these numbers, some of France’s more ardent supporters in the UK might revise their view and start adopting a sensible position that protects everyone?

Gambling Compliance has spotted that the Sunday Zaman, a Turkish national newspaper,  has reported that online bookmakers there are apparently thriving despite government attempts to block access to their sites, with police figures showing that IP blocking has proved to be such a failure that half a million Turks regularly bet online with an operator other than the State monopoly.

Good for Gambling Compliance – although I would quibble with their suggestion that the growing group of countries which have come to this obvious realisation is ‘select’. Far from just including Norway and Italy, the club also counts as members the French, the Australians, the Swedes and – by implication, given the DOJ turnaround just before Christmas – the Americans.

Bearing in mind that the British, the Danes, and the Spaniards were not daft enough to go down this route in the first place, that leaves just Germany and Greece.

Lessons in there for the Euro?

It will not, I gather, apply in all sports: it won’t be a rule for those, like cyclists and rowers, who step off their bikes or out of their boats and onto the podium. It will apply to athletes in the Olympic stadium.

Equally, the visions I had of the finish line on the track looking a little bit like a bowling alley or ice rink, and a little chap running up to the first three finishers and asking what size suited, will not come to pass. In fact, every athlete will be given, in advance, an “off-track” kit, comprising tracksuit and shoes – and it is that which they will be required to wear on the podium. As most medal ceremonies around the track will take place some time (sometimes even days) after the end of a race – and athletes will already have changed in order to go and do media and take a drugs test – we won’t actually see athletes scrambling into their new kit before picking up their medals.

The rules have, I gather, been put in place because it had come to the attention of those responsible for brand protection at the Games that some athletes’ agents were actively encouraging to push the boundaries on behalf of their personal sponsors. This was deemed the only way to stop that.

All in all, more logical than it was first explained to be, although it’s not quite the world of sport that I grew up with… I don’t know about you!

At the Olympic games this summer, athletes will, as things stand, have to change their footwear (if they win) to ensure that they are wearing Adidas kit on the podium. There was, apparently, some discussion originally about the idea that they would actually have to COMPETE in Adidas kit, but that was deemed a step too far. The requirement for them to be “properly” attired as they collect their medals, though, stands – not just in terms of their shirts and caps, but what they have on their feet.

It seems to me that when people talks about safeguarding the integrity of the Olympic Games, the principle that they are seeking to uphold is that what people see is what is actually happening. We don’t want an outstanding performance to be drugs-fuelled; we don’t want a calamitous performance to have been driven by financial gain, most likely (but not necessarily exclusively) from betting markets. This is quite sensible and proper and I don’t see how any sports fan would disagree with it.

But equally, it seems to me that this principle has gone out of the window when it comes to the Olympic movement being given sponsorship money. If every medallist is seen to be wearing Adidas kit, then what people will see is quite simply not a reflection of what really happened.

Apart from seeming to be unbelievably daft, is this a case of one rule where the sport can make money, and another where it can’t?

I can understand why racing stalwarts get seriously frustrated by the fact that bookmakers aren’t obliged to pay levy if they’re offshore (although why they should give a tinker’s about their tax position, and why they don’t embrace those who pay levy voluntarily as presenting a route to a possible solution, are two things I don’t get), but railing about it at the politicians misses the point.

If there were a simple solution, then of course they’d have done something about it! The fact is, there isn’t; and the bookmakers are always going to resist, fiercely (and rightly), an imperfect solution which attempts to impose on them restrictions that cannot be enforced on their global competition. There’s little point in saying that it can be enforced on their global competition, when Norway is proving in spades that, even with more draconian laws that would ever be introduced here, the level of enforcement is very inefficient indeed. Who wants a lower than 50% success rate, with the balance going to a black market which does nobody any good? If, as Charlie Brooks himself points out, “this is not about taxing offshore bookmakers. This is about protecting UK punters,” then how can it make sense for us to adopt the system of ‘many other countries’? Whatever the ills of the UK system, its clear upside is that it has by a distance the smallest black market of the lot.

Today’s admission from Norway shows that the whole problem is that it is extremely difficult to stop unlicensed operators, which should make it easy enough to see precisely why the issue is complicated: the more restrictions and costs you impose, the more, in an internet world (particularly), the black market increases. Politicians in France may deny it, but by their own numbers they have captured around 30 licensees among thousands of sites. Scandanavian honesty gives the lie to the more bombastic Gallic rhetoric: the fact is, it’s tricky.

That shouldn’t mean the problem can never be solved; but I would think that the sure-fire way to stop it being solved is to enter the new Bittar-led period for horseracing revisiting the same bombarded battlefield of the last ten years. It must surely be incumbent on all involved – yes, on both sides – to find new ground.

Is that so difficult? I know there are some people out there who just don’t want to pay levy, period; but that isn’t, in my experience at least, true of many bookmaking companies – certainly not among the names you would recognise. Their issue is less about paying than it is about having costs imposed on them which competitors do not have imposed on them in turn, without any realistic enforceability.

The solution, I think, might therefore be found in a change of approach. I’d love to see what impact might be made if Racing were to move away from its long-held view (which I get, but think is outdated for the purposes of negotiation) that “it’s our product, so you ought to pay us”. It seems to me that if today’s consistent umbrage at a perceived slight were instead replaced by some hand of friendship, some carrot alongside the stick, some willingness to work in partnership, some benefit in kind – some recognition, even, that Racing’s is not the only product debated here which can claim to be ‘the best in the world’, then the whole picture might be transformed.

Perhaps I’m naive. But I think the “it’s not complicated” and “we’ll come and arrest you” approach just makes the bookies laugh, and raises their hackles – a downside which I would imagine outweighs much of a racing reader’s immediate satisfaction at the breakfast table. With the gambling industry only needing the status quo, the fact that nothing has actually changed with many years of this sort of support suggests that it is time to move from the pulpit to the negotiating table. However many articles are written, politicians will never be able to ‘stop talking about it and just do it’ because they have two large industries with totally polarised views forever telling them different things. It’s up to the warring parties, not the law-makers, to find common ground.

Shock, horror – but get this if your weak constitution can take it: two horses, one at 1-50 and one at 1-25, got beaten.

Poor punters who backed them, someone who read it told me, were left ‘out of pocket’ – almost as if an operator had failed to pay out.

Or answer (b), they lumped on to something that they thought a certainty, and they were wrong. They didn’t collect winnings, in common with most punters, who also place bets that they think will win and are often wrong. The odds reflected the likelihood of the occurrence happening which is, well – what odds do.

Meanwhile, two other punters backed outsiders, at 50-1 and 25-1, and won. Oh – and some people who backed the winning horse in one instance got him at 319-1.

Good on all of them. Except, of course, that’s not the story. The story is that ‘the risks associated with this form of punting were never better illustrated than in the first two races at Newbury on Wednesday’.

This stuff really makes the news?

She replied, “I think it is the Right Thing To Do.”

This week, Ed Miliband ran around giving interviews after the unions went potty at his plans to back pay freezes. “I am doing this because I think it is the Right Thing To Do,” he told anyone who would listen.

Has ‘the Right Thing To Do’ become the most vacuous cliche in politics? Even Boris Johnson was at it the other day, and heaven knows he can string an erudite word or two together.

How many people in the country do stuff – anything – because they think it is the wrong thing to do? Surely almost everyone does whatever it is they do because they think it’s the right thing to do. If they didn’t think that, they wouldn’t do it.

Why doesn’t anyone ever ask them, and why do they never explain, why they think that? Surely that’s the… er… RTTD?