Ollie had a (successful) go at trumping Dylan, on camera. He is s a smart boy, in his way.

Elsewhere I’ve been starting a new book which will chronicle Stoke’s Premiership season. It’s always hard to home in on your tone when you’re setting out on something. Here’s an extract of the first draft of the first draft of the beginning.

1. Fat Boy’s Sports Bar

So, here we are, gathered around a table outside this bar in the Place du Luxembourg, Brussels. The penultimate match of our season (we hope) is about to kick off. Inside Fat Boy’s there are seven or eight screens showing Sky coverage of a live lunchtime game between Chelsea and Manchester United. It is me who is dispatched to the bar for a round. It’s the second half of the game, service is frantic, but slow. While I wait I listen as a man and a woman seated on barstools beside me discuss the situation on the screens. ‘Oooh,’ she says, as a ball goes wide. ‘What position are we in the table?’ he asks. She looks at the paper, to check. Man Utd and Chelsea and are first and second respectively. This is not a matter that needs checking, not if you are an actual fan of an actual football team.

I pass nine pints of Jupiler lager backwards and outside through the relay of my son, Jack, who in turn hands them on to his mate John. John is a late addition to this weekend. We left Norwich, where we live, at one in the morning, in order to drive to Birmingham where we were to catch a flight from the airport at six am. I picked Jack up in Norwich city centre, where he’d been with John, and with their mates, in a bar. They are nineteen and eighteen respectively.
‘Can you give John a lift home, dad?’
‘Hop in,’ I said.
I detoured to pick up Graham, another Stoke supporter who lives in Norwich. Between Graham’s house and John’s house, Graham filled John in on the details of the forty eight hours ahead. These included half-arsedly watching the Man U-Chelsea game - we’d catch that somewhere as a prelude to listening to the serious business, our match, on a laptop. Then we were going to catch a train to this place called Dender, twenty miles from Brussels, to see whether our previous manager, Johan Boskamp, a fat Dutchman who is everything that Pulis is not, could pull off the great escape and keep this Dender team in the Belgium top flight, a division about which none of us cared a jot. John was excited by these details, and voiced the wish that it would be great to come along too: it would be much better than going to work at his Saturday job in an electrical retailers on an industrial estate. I asked him if he knew where his passport was. Fifteen minutes later, having picked up a toothbrush and a pair of pants, he was on the road with us.

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