Express & Star

Mark Andrews on Saturday: Pep talks, food for thought, Biden, and why Gene Hunt may be having the last laugh

Read the latest musings from Mark Andrews.

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Would Gene Hunt be having the last laugh this week?

Footballers have been asked to stop hugging one another after goals, saying they are increasing the risk of spreading coronavirus. Which does seem a little odd given that the very nature of the game means that they spend much of their time in face-to-face contact, trying to win the ball off one another.

But I can't agree with Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola who thinks the new rules will be impossible to adhere to.

"I do not know if we will be able to do it," he says.

Well here's an idea. If the players start hugging after scoring, disallow the goal. Then see how hard it is.

Pep Guardiola – no hugging

Jeremy Clarkson has come in for a bit of stick after saying he was tired of people on benefits whingeing about the quality of the free meals being handed out to their children.

Critics have pointed out that he punched a colleague in the face because he didn't get a steak dinner. Which is a fair point.

But while Clarkson's comments may be hypocritical, it doesn't make them wrong, does it? Sure, some of the companies distributing the food parcels appear to have been taking liberties, charging £30 for a fiver's worth of fittle. That always happens when taxpayers' money is involved.

But if somebody handed me a free package of food, paid for by the taxes of White Van Man, Bob the Builder and Claire the Cleaner, my first reaction would be to say 'thank you'. Not take pictures of it on my smartphone and post them on social media complaining about the size of the carrots.

Jeremy Clarkson says parents should stop whingeing about food parcels

Judging from the BBC's coverage of Joe Biden's inauguration, you might think we had just witnessed an occasion more momentous than VE Day, VJ Day and the fall of the Berlin wall all rolled into one. Whereas what really happened was one politician took over from another in a country thousands of miles away.

Yet in November, when the same BBC asked Mr Biden for a comment in the wake of his election, Mr Biden rudely brushed the reporter aside. "BBC? I'm Irish!," he quipped.

And this week one of the new president's first actions was to once more remove the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office.

We may not mourn the departure of the uncouth, unpredictable, sore loser Donald Trump. But something tells me the new man is not going to be any great friend of this country either.

Joe Biden – friend of Britain?

Red faces for the boys in blue this week after it emerged 150,000 arrest records were wiped from the police national computer.

You can't help but think if they made a new version of Life On Mars, with DI Gene Hunt transported into the 21st century, that he would be having the last laugh.

"Tell me that again. You've lost all the dabs because instead of keeping them on boring old sheets of paper in a filing cabinet, you put them on some fancy computer which has wiped them all clean?"