Thanks for your concern Spain, but England’s most gifted player could probably do without the ghoulish speculation just at the moment.

As reported in last week’s Guardian, players with more than five seasons of Italian football in the 1980s and 1990s have reason to worry after fifty-one professional and amateur sportsmen died of Lou Gehrig’s disease - that’s six times more than the non-sporting national average. And now the Spanish press at Sport have taken the report and gone in search of fresh victims.

The disease is named after the great New York Yankees player, Lou Gehrig, who died of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis in 1941. As conditions go, it’s horrible, causing a swift onset of paralysis, weakening of the muscles and slurring of the speech, while the mind stays perfectly tuned in. It’s fatal.