Often, when push comes to shove in radicalising a group of football supporters, it will take one, symbolic moment to push those that might otherwise have merely got on with the job of watching their team to realise that the time  for action is now.

Normal service is now to resume after the somewhat chaotic Christmas and New Year matches, but we’re going to spend a little time catching up with the last of the festive highlights from over the course of the last three days or so. We have six matches lined up for you this evening.

A new year may have begun, but familiar problems are already starting to make themselves clear with conflicting stories concerning the well-being of Blue Square Premier club Darlington.

At one hundred and fifteen pages and a little over forty-four thousand words – getting on, for the purposes of comparison, for two and a half times the size of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto – at least no-one can argue that the Football Associations independent commission into the allegations of racist language levied against Luis Suarez wasn’t thorough.

The Premier League title race, we have been told repeatedly over the last couple of weeks or so, is back on. Since getting knocked out of the Champions League by FC Basel, Manchester United have started to rediscover some of their familiar imperiousness, with sixteen goals in their last four Premier League matches – including five in two successive matches – while Manchester City have, with a defeat at Chelsea and a lacklustre draw at West Bromwich Albion, shown signs of chink in their previously impenetrable-looking armour.