The FA Cup

I can certainly agree with the last point.

Yes I haven't been comfortable with my club accepting gambling sponsorship as they did for a long while. Mobile phone company at the moment, which is better. Hope they don't revert. I don't buy replica shirts any more, but I would never have worn one with a gambling logo.

Lost to Peru, drew with Iran, defeated Netherlands (eventual finalists and one of the greatest teams never to have won the World Cup) but not by enough goals to qualify for the next phase on goal difference - although for my money Archie Gemmill's goal in that match is the greatest World Cup Finals goal ever. Whole bloody debacle etched in the memory. And yes the subsequent seemingly inevitable meetings with Brazil all the way to 1998. I feel exactly the same way about England. It's a shame but there it is.

I don't like gambling, I think it's a scourge on too many lives. I believe it shouldn't be allowed to advertise as an industry, particularly in places which are highly visible to children like football shirts.  It should be treated like tobacco.

Would you have allowed tobacco sponsorship in sport to have continued?

Well no but that's not the point I'm putting forward in relation to gambling. Obviously there is no question of illegal activities and products being advertised legally in any situation, but there is a good argument to be made that some legal activites and products should not be advertised in arenas frequented by children, and in some cases not at all, as is now, rightly, the case with smoking and tobacco products in this country.

I think we should, as a starting principle, try to prevent advertising of harmful activities and products being too visible to children. Professional football is a highly visible thing to many children. Obviously you can't prevent children being aware of these things but we should seek to remove associations between activites loved by children and potentially harmful messaging.

It's an imperfect world but there's a landing area between free-for-all and everything banned.

Fair enough. I was just thinking, when I as a teenager I had no interest in starting to smoke, due to me own breathing difficulties and having put up with breathing second hand smoke from all my grandparents, aunts and uncles since birth (they all knew I was asthmatic, and they all did it in my presence anyway - my maternal grandmother smoked 60 a day, she was a proper chain smoker). I was utterly sick of it at a very early age. But I knew every big cigarette, cigar and pipe tobacco brand, and I knew exactly which position in the "hierarchy" each one occupied. Which were cool, which were old person's, which were common, which were classy. I spent years absorbing all of this passively. Then I think of my children, who are both now mid-teens. Neither of them would have the first idea about any of that. If I asked them to name a cigarette brand, they'd probably be stumped beyond one or two.

I can only think this is due to advertising and sports sponsorship having been withdrawn from their view. However, if I asked them to name gambling outfits, I expect their knowledge would be as comprehensive as mine was of cigarettes in the 80s. Going on my own personal anecdotal evidence and feelings, I think yes, advertising of gambling companies should be banned, or at least removed from the view of children as far as possible.