Pick up the new issue of When Saturday Comes and who’s that on page 34? Why, it’s TMFD’s own Dave Boyle with an article on the madness of escalating squad numbers – an article that may be familiar to this blog’s handful of patient readers as it first appeared here a month or two ago. This is I think the first time an FT post has morphed into a real actual printed magazine article and short of the LRB seeing sense and giving Vic Fluro a comics column it might be the last for a while too.
LMA Manager 2004, my own window onto the beautiful game, has caught the shirt number fever – every time you buy a player you have to assign him a number, a pointless bit of realism that has zero effect on the gameplay as far as I can tell. These numbers go up to a whopping 99: the virtual Daves in the stands would be having a fit.