Too long it has been since the lovely man, Thierry Henry of Arsenal, my Kylie, has graced these pages so I will give him much space:

These are troubling times. The man without reason, Sepp Blatter, head of FIFA, actually said that a game could well have rightly ended with a walk off when England's black players were met with racist crap at Spain last week. In addition, a Blackburn fan was banned today the maxiumum years from going to see a soccer game for making stupid, stupid monkey taunts on the weekend - you see in England the stupid think it is clever to make monkey sounds at the greatest who happen have an African background. In the 80s the entirely lovely John Barnes of Liverpool played at least the first part of a career in a venue where this was done by the thousands...of his own fans. In England now, this particular sort of stupid fan is fortunately rare or quiet (compared to Spain at least) and, when they are sober...and in the dock, some of the worst are apparently mortified with themselves - as Jason Perryman, 22, from Lawson Street in Chorley apparently was in court today.

So, when the significantly beautiful and significantly black Arsenal's visited PSV in Holland today in the Champion's league, there was some honest to goodness bracing. A game involving PSV and ADO Den Haag was recently abandoned by the ref due to race-based chanting from the stands - though, according to the exceptionally excellent When Saturday Comes (a magazine all should just buy to have access to a great magazine about something, anything), the racist taunts were mainly from ADO fans. Fortunately, the lighter was as far as the bad stuff seemed to go tonight in the 1-1 tie between the Gooners and PSV. Next stop for Arsenal are the champions of Norway at home which should put the lovely men through to the real tournament - the final top 16 teams in Euopean club football. Read about it all at Arseblog.