First footballers' wives got a hard time for expressing preferences about which clubs their beloveds should leave or join (who could ever forget the brazen partner of Robert Jarni saying she'd prefer him to stay at Real Madrid, rather than move to lovely Coventry), now their mothers are at it.

In just about the only page of yesterday's News of the World that wasn't taken over by Jeffrey Archer's current difficulties, Maryese Henry, mother of Arsenal's Thierry, revealed (exclusively, of course) that he's fed up in London and wants to leave. "I worry about him - his head needs to be free of troubles for his feet to work on the pitch," she said. And what are the chief causes of Thierry's unhappiness? (1) He hates English food and misses his mother's red beans and pigs tails and (2) he misses his cats - "Jungle and Reglisse are very important to him". "Jesus wept," Arsene Wenger most probably said when he read the article.