Roll forward sixteen years and the mass media are up in arms once more about how many foreigners are soaked into the draped fabric of our cultured cloth.

The BBC website is displaying elaborate graphs (in colour!) depicting the percentage change in homegrown players - fact.

PFA chief Gordon Taylor is answering more calls than the customer service team at Heathrow Terminal 5 - sort of fact.

And Sir Trevor McDonald is sleuthing around the streets of Droylsden trying to uncover foreign sweatshop football refugees who threaten to swell even further the most distorted of distorted stats - not a fact in the slightest, but an entertaining image nonetheless.

So alright then, maybe only a third of Premier League players are now English, but that's to our league's immense credit - not detriment - surely?

We have cultivated a slick and polished brand that's the envy of every other domestic league, the world over. And we're slagging it off? Huh?

And besides which, why should it be only the top divisions who can enjoy a bit of je ne sais pas pourquoi these days?

I regularly pay money to watch a bunch of cloggers kick lumps out of each other in the Conference/Blue Square Premier/top tier of non-league football .. whadeva. Last season we had a Frenchman, a Brazilian and a Cameroonian plying their trade for us; indeed, the latter has just gone to join his country's Olympic squad.