No one likes to be honoured by a clip like this. A year from now, we all hope to be looking back on the season’s glories from Titus Bramble, if join us he does, and not a new bunch of calamities. Scroll down for a much-respected Wigan fan’s warm commendation. And Titus: the clip is meant in fun …

What we wanted was John Mensah back. What it looks as if we are going to get is Titus Bramble, for a reported £750,000-£1m from Wigan (have we simply given up on Mensah? Tragic if so).
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Long before Bill Taylor set up home in the other Toronto, the one that that isn’t quite capital of Canada, he lived near Toronto, Co Durham. In Bishop Auckland, to be precise, home of great conker trees in the Bishop’s park and – during his boyhood – the all-conquering Two Blues at Kingsway. Bishop Auckland amateur football club won trophies galore, looked down on those of us in places like Shildon and Ferryhill and, in the eccentric but outstanding goalkeeper Harry Sharratt, had a clown prince of their own to rival Len Shackleton. Bill looks back on a magical era …

Clichés tend to become clichés because they’re true. So I make no apologies for repeating one now – the opening line from L P Hartley’s fair-to-middling 1953 novel, The Go-Between:

“The past is another country; they do things differently there.”

My past is in another country – England, where I grew up during the 1950s watching what was probably the finest amateur football team of all time.
Bishop Auckland.

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