He banished all irrelevancies from his canalised mind. His great ham of a face was tickling as though aswarm with insects, but there was no room left in his brain to receive the messages which his nerve endings were presumably delivering—his brain was full.

United's hopes of mounting a serious response suffered a blow within two minutes of the restart when Evans, who had endured a miserable afternoon, lost concentration and allowed Balotelli to steal in behind him. The defender's only reaction was to haul the Italian down, resulting in an inevitable red card.

‘Better an ultra-leftist than a Menshevik,’ said Rosa Kaletsky.

Yobbery, in this instance, is one signifier of a certain social problem or set of problems...