Salut! Sunderland presents a challenge to Arsenal supporters – the poster of the best comment received by 10am tomorrow WED NOV 24 will be offered a Nick Hornby book (regular, that is, not special edition) of his of her choice …

We’ve had our say. Sunderland fans, even those who have a lot of admiration for the players Arsène Wenger chooses and the way they play for him, think he went way beyond the limits of reason and fairness in his post-match comments. Notably this:

“Sunderland were aggressive but you expect that. I think that they tried to stop us from playing, sometimes on the fringes of the rule, but that’s part of the game.”

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Colin Randall treads difficult domestic territory, braves the disapproval of a French wife and two half-French daughters and, setting himself up as judge, jury and La Cour de Cassation, finds two of the above guilty as charged …

Not every Englishman is a BNP thug who steams through French railway carriages singing: “If it wasn’t for the English, you’d be Krauts.”

We don’t all subscribe to the “lovely country, shame about the people” jibe – though I actually heard it recently on the lips of my French barber (a necessarily short encounter). Some of us even marry ‘em, Frenchwomen that is not the barbers.

But what are we to make of the behaviour of three Frenchmen, clues to whose identities appear in the headline? Two are easy to guess; the third is largely unknown in England unless you support Sunderland and therefore feel that Jean-Louis Triaud, president of the Girondins de Bordeaux football club, is a cross between arrogant oaf and prize clown.
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