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He was a douhgnut, says Les

Les Padfield, author of Scouting for Moyes, was on a fascinating BBC Five Live programme on Tuesday night. He and David Pleat, the veteran former Spurs manager, were studio guests on a show investigating the life of a football scout.

Les was a wonderful interviewee, partly because he doesn’t rely on the game to provide him with a living. So while David Pleat was occasionally circumspect and the other men interviewed like Tony Pulis and Stan Allardyce didn’t give too much away Les can be, and was, sometimes engagingly indiscreet. He called one player a ‘doughnut’ and wondered why football clubs were often badly administered.
And according to the presenter, Mark Chapman, there were so many questions coming in by text that he might have a repeat performance. I felt like texting to ask why Les got the sack from Bolton Wanderers shortly after the book came out. But I didn’t have the nerve.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b013cfr7/5_live_Sport_Scouting_in_Football/
 
I was at the England v India Test match at Trent Bridge on the Saturday. First time I’d been there and I could see why everybody thinks it’s such a great ground. Watching modern cricket can be a little worrying though. I was in one of the loos in the New Stand (they must have used a marketing company to think up that one) when I heard a gruff male voice ask in a northern accent: ‘zip me up at the back will you?’
I didn’t know where to look, that sort of thing doesn’t happen in the public toilets in Cheltenham. I turned around to see a gaggle of men in inflatable fancy dress. The only way to fasten them was by a zip at the back!
My host for the day was a member of Ian Bell’s benefit committee so it was just as well that we weren’t there 24 hours later. He might well have over-reacted to the ‘run-out’ incident. Granted that Bell was a little dozy in assuming play was over for tea, but Kumar clearly thought the ball had touched the boundary rope and reacted as such. The umpires should have sorted it out there and then but from what I read the Indian captain MS Dhoni three times refused to withdraw the appeal. Apparently it took an intervention by Sachin Tendulkar for common sense to prevail.