A marble bust of Kevin Myarse’s senatorial features deserves to be placed in Pseuds Corner in honour of the hack’s paean to Manchester United’s thumping of Roma during the week. Having gone through the formality of establishing his Decline-of-the-West credentials (“ I don’t particularly like modern soccer players, with their culture of overpaid celebrity, extravagant drunkenness, and cold-hearted sexual promiscuity”), he segues into the kind of purple prose (with a smattering of light misogyny masquerading as bluff common sense) that makes Cicerco sound like Bertie Ahern after six pints of Bass:

“Besides being incredibly rare, this kind of phenomenon is uniquely male; groups of women simply do not undergo such transforming alchemy. And when this extraordinary spell is cast over brilliant athletes whose bodies are perfect, and whose minds are attuned to one another, then a sort of athletic consecration occurs.

Eleven men are transubstantiated into a single harmonious unity, playing to a conductor of intuition they cannot see or hear, but whose instructions they understand and follow. […]

And it’s strangely comforting that such magic happens. It confirms that science understands so little about human nature, when the mysteries of the male-pack instinct combine with sheer physical perfection, at a time and place which no one has the power to choose or predict. A synthesis of the brilliance of both the team as a whole, and of all its individual players, is thus briefly conjured out of the ether, before the unknown catalyst responsible for it vanishes like the Pied Piper, perhaps never to touch any of their lives again.” [And so on…]