Humphries has been described as “the Bill Bryson of sports writing”. Well, sports writing, and especially football writing doesn’t particularly need “a Bill Bryson”. People do, I accept, enjoy reading about the minute details of the life of the sports writer, or what colour the upholstry is on the Irish team bus as it rattles across the highways and byways of Poland. The thing is though, Humphries manages to say precious little for all his hyperbole. I have never read him presenting a lucid argument, addressing a serious issue in sport, without recourse to trivia and trivialisation. Perhaps he does not possess that ability, or perhaps that simply isn’t what the punters expect of him when they reads his pieces. But if he does have the potential to become an “Irish Henry Winter” or an “Irish Kevin McCarra”, something Irish sports writing needs more than “a Bill Bryson”, he’ll have to do better than his current offerings. And if there were in Ireland writers as gifted as we are led to believe Humphries is, then surely the Irish Times and the Independent wouldn’t have to fill their sports pages with the British illuminaries of the Telegraph and the Guardian.