Graeme Souness’s careless comments meant his point got lost in translation

It is one of the most reliable features of modern life that any piece of news, no matter how banal, must inspire an instant and violently polarised public response.

In its simplest form this boils down to the standard opposition of snowflakes and gammons. These are familiar, comforting categories by now. The snowflake is cloyingly pure, but also fragile, wet, melty and cold. The gammon is empurpled, stubborn, salty and thick with gristle. Both come with their own discrete areas of concern, left versus right, old versus young, furiously angry versus angrily furious.

This can lead to confusion when positions are less certain, when unhelpful things like nuance, balance or empathy start to intrude. What about those of us who sit unhappily in-between, exhibiting only the most despised characteristics of both extremes? What if you’re old but also fragile? What if you’re weak, fey, irritating but also fat-headed, red-faced and stubborn?

What if this leaves you as a kind of hybrid, a snow-ham, a gammon-flake, lost in the salty pink sludge of no-man’s land? Which camp to follow, what views to hold?

It is an uncomfortable place to be in a world full certainties. And it was there again at the weekend in the comments from Graeme Souness on Sky Sports after Chelsea v Spurs, that weird interlude where suddenly Souness was talking about the man’s game, about men going at it with men, about getting our game back; stuff that, even as he was saying it, made you want to reach into the screen and place a hand over his chiselled, grizzled jowls, to feel the iconic abrasion of the Souness moustache, and to say No, Graeme, this is not it.

This is not the incredibly ill-thought-out hill you should be so ready to die on. Even if you do seem