(Pic: Laurie Rampling) I WAS going to make a gag about watching all 13 movies within the Halloween film series and it taking you about 20-and-a-half hours. Alternatively, there was another jest about how you could sit through 12 hours of horrors from West Bromwich Albion’s period under Eric Ramsay and it saving yourself a good seven hours to get some sleep. You choose. Either way, I can't be bothered to go down that pathway of humour; nobody is laughing right now. I’m not goi

An extract from THE SLUM SPORT , the story of 1985/86.     “Just tell it as it was” - the advice given me by Geoffrey Green, the great journalist of a bygone age, as I was off to cover my first football match for The Times. Chris Lepkowski has followed that advice with style with this book, The Slum Sport. The story here covers rather more than just 90 minutes, going back to the days before we had wall-to-wall coverage on TV; plotting the variations football has had with the

You’ll have seen the rumours, heard the gossip, gasped at the detail, and re-posted it to within an inch of your life. There was, according to the wild west of social media, a bust-up at the Albion training ground this week. Things have been played down by those close to the club. I have my own views around it all – that’s for another day. As always the truth lurks somewhere half-way between one side and another. But the bigger question is why is anyone remotely bothered that