Football Daily | Spying some tasty match-ups, from Wrexham v Saints to desperation derbies

Sign up now! Sign up now! Sign up now? Sign up now! Before an engorged international break we have a gala weekend of derby games. Some of them are familiar, others rather longer in the waiting, others spurious in their definition but shoehorned in for tea-timely email purposes. Thursday night’s Bigger Vase defeat by Ferencvaros was not a great result for angry Martin O’Neill’s Celtic, coming three days before the Old Firm/Glasgow derby (delete as applicable according to adherence to Scottish company law), and four days after losing to Rangers in the Old Firm/Glasgow derby. In Spain, Atlético v Real Madrid will see Diego Simeone and José Mourinho bring the morbo ruckus to the sidelines. A football match might actually break out, though that cannot be guaranteed when considering the managers involved.

I also met Ludek Miklosko ( yesterday’s Football Daily letters ), but in a way that now seems rather surreal. When I was a kid, my junior Sunday league team trained at West Ham’s Chadwell Heath training ground every Friday night in their sports hall. In them days, anyone could drive into the car park and walk through the gym to the hall – and on one particular night my dad dropped me and a teammate off and told us he’d be back in an hour. When we walked into the hall we were more than surprised to find that our team had cancelled training, with nobody else turning up, and half of the West Ham first team were in there doing drills instead. With nowhere to go (and no mobile phones) they invited us to join in. As an Arsenal fan, I didn’t really care much for West Ham players, but their goalkeeper was a lovely man and spent most of the hour playing with us and encouraging shots. I never forgot Ludo after that night” – Nicholas Larkin. I was struck by the sentiment of…