The Coach and Horses: A modest-looking treasure in Clerkenwell (Photo: Ewan-M @ Flickr)

I didn’t have a ‘Food’ category on this here blog until today, but I was so impressed by a meal I ate this week that I felt compelled to share the experience.

It was while watching BBC2′s Great British Menu that I first became aware of the Coach and Horses pub in Clerkenwell, as it’s head chef, the impossibly young Henry Herbert, was one of the trio representing the south-west in the heats. Sadly, young Henry didn’t make it through, but his inventive take on Modern British food certainly found a fan in me. Ever since then, I’ve been dying to try his food.

And I wasn’t disappointed. The Coach and Horses is a quaint, ever so slightly ramshackle pub serving up Modern British food like it should be: locally sourced, unpretentious and utterly delicious.  Herbert makes whatever he can from scratch, be it breads, pies, pickles or the impressive range of charcuterie meats. There’s also an extensive and closely monitored wine and beer list. Most of his dishes are classics brought to life by little flourishes here and there: the pork belly, served with garlic mash and kohlrabi slaw, was sticky and sumptuous; the pistachio parfait with Alphonso mango and green peppercorn crisp sounded odd but tasted superb. It’s cosy, comforting food which perfectly complements the surroundings. The bill, for three people having three courses, not including drinks, came to a most reasonable £90. I can’t recommend the place enough.

The Coach and Horses

26-28 Ray Street, Clerkenwell, London, EC1R 3DJ

Telephone: 020 7378 8990

Email: eat@thecoachandhorses.com

Website: thecoachandhorses.com

Wine: Starts at £12, Champagne at £42

Opening hours: Mon-Fri, 12noon-3pm, 6-10pm

Top left: Nasa-employed aliens (seems unlikely); Top right: A giant wickerman at, um, Wickerman; Bottom left: Confusingly-named Swedish band I'm From Barcelona at End of the Road 2007; Bottom right: An aerial view of Lounge on the Farm

Summer is indisputably the finest of our four seasons. The azure sky is soft and warm, licked by faint, frothy clouds, the air sweetened and beautified by full-blossomed foliage and the sticky, smoky waft of grateful barbecues. In gardens far and wide, deckchairs are awoken from hibernation and parents dig out dusty paddling pools for their impossibly excited children. It is the season of Pimm’s, midnight kickabouts in the park and just the right amount of sunburn. And, of course, it is the season of festivals.

There cannot be a more joyous way to spend a weekend than at a festival. The combination of old friends (and even older tents), several crates of cider and many bags of Haribo is one that is all but guaranteed to bring pleasure. And that’s before you even hear any music.

Festivals have become a British institution, and millions of us fork out every summer for a few days of aural ecstasy. There is barely a summer weekend without some kind of event celebrating some kind of music. From gargantuan, multi-million pound affairs such as Glastonbury and T in the Park to small, independent festivals like End of the Road and Y Not, there is something for everyone.

Of course, that’s not to say that the possibilities have been exhausted. Music is so multifarious and nuanced that it is constantly being reworked and reinvented, and new genres pop up on a yearly, if not monthly, basis. You need look no further than the explosion of chillwave in 2010 to see that. And as artists eschew record labels in favour of online distribution and self-promotion through the likes of MySpace, the independent spirit of British music has never been stronger.

So if you love festivals but think you could do better, why not give it a shot? As many a mother has said, if you want something done properly, do it yourself. Many others have had a pop and pulled it off, like Sid Ambrose, the founder and creative director of Wickerman festival in Dumfries and Galloway, which is inspired by the 1973 horror film of the same name starring Edward Woodward and various people with bad Scottish accents. “I first got involved when I was about 17 years old and living in a rural area,” he says. “We used to travel down to the likes of Monsters of Rock and you had to hire buses and all that stuff. So I started putting on my own metal nights and it just grew from there.”

Taking the leap to establishing a festival wasn’t without its problems though. “I had to have a meeting with the police,” Sid explains, “and they were saying, ‘OK, what’s this music festival then?’ and I said, ‘Eh, well, it kind of celebrates an old cult movie where they burn a policeman to death.’ So it didn’t get off to the best of starts.”

Putting on a festival is, of course, a mammoth task, and the challenges extend way beyond appeasing the authorities and getting your license to hold an event. Rob da Bank, the Radio 1 DJ and Bestival founder, admits that some things are simply out of your control. “After you’ve got your license and started marketing and selling tickets, it’s things like the weather on the weekend, and, it sounds a bit morbid, but things like someone dying – it happens every year at one festival. But I don’t want to put people off, I love the fact there are so many new and exciting festivals. The more the merrier, I look forward to the competition. Bring it on.”

“[We thought] it would cost us around £70,000 to put it on, but it ended up costing us nearly £400,000″

While both Sid and Rob were already experienced at running club nights and promoting bands, having experience is not a prerequisite. Simon Taffe and Sofia Hagberg, who started End of the Road festival in 2006, had never organised an event before or even put on a gig – Simon was (and still is) a decorator, while Sofia’s background was in secretarial work. Their third partner, Philip Wicks, is Simon’s accountant.

The first year was, at times, touch and go, but with the help of family and friends they scraped together enough money and expertise to get the festival off the ground. “When Simon presented me with this idea, I just said, ‘Yes, of course, let’s do it’,” says Sofia. “When he showed me the paperwork, I think on that original piece of paper it said it would cost us around £70,000 to put it on, but it ended up costing us nearly £400,000. We weren’t prepared for that, to be honest. I would say if anyone today was thinking of starting a new festival, make sure you have the money first, because I had to take a personal loan from the bank and pretend that it was for redecorating my flat, and my ex-boyfriend loaned us some money. Simon was in the process of selling his house anyway, but he still doesn’t own a new house today. We were very close to pulling out a few times before the festival took place, but everything fell into place just in time.” Thankfully, they have since paid off their debts, and the festival has grown year on year, selling out for the first time in 2008. But their first year experience shows the importance of planning and organisation.

“The thing is not to overshoot in the first couple of years,” says Matt Gough, the founder of Canterbury’s Lounge on the Farm. “You need to build it from something that has a regular crowd and is achievable – it’s not realistic to think that you can take on something like Glastonbury in year one, it’s just not going to happen.”

Putting on a festival is not an easy task. Be prepared to have no life for at least two years. You’ll be flyering outside every gig possible, driving around other festivals, negotiating with bands, arranging security and so much more.

But don’t be disillusioned. In the words of Andy Rea, co-founder of 2000 Trees, a green, ethical festival based in Gloucestershire, “Go for it. If your heart is in it and you believe in what you want to create, it can happen.”

If you still think you’ve got the balls to start your own festival, the pros have offered up some invaluable tips. Pay close attention…

PLAN, PLAN, PLAN
Andy Rea: “[When we started] we held a meeting and sat around a table over an entire weekend to talk about everything, then we went away and researched everything and came back together to take it on. Plan for every eventuality – and expect much more to arise you hadn’t thought of.”
Sofia Hagberg: “You need to be very, very organised to put on a festival. It’s getting the research done before committing or embarking on actually doing it.”

BALANCE THE BOOKS
Sid Ambrose: “I think anyone starting even a small scale festival for 1,500 people, you’ll be talking tens of thousands of pounds. A lot of the money goes on police, security, fencing, toilets, first aid, doctor cover, all of these things before you even spend a penny on booking a band.”
Rob da Bank: “It costs millions to do a big festival, but you can start with a few hundred people in your garden for maybe a couple of thousand if you know some bands and you can pull in a few favours. But to make it a viable business, it needs money.”
Simon Taffe: “We lost a lot of money in the first year. I sold my house, I got my mate to remortgage his house, and lost a bit more on top of that. We’ve paid off all our debts now, but it took four years.”

PLAY NICE
SH: “I think relationships with everyone and anyone that you ever come across is one of the most important things. If you’re a bit arsey with an agent’s assistant, that means in three years’ time, when that assistant is the agent, they’re not going to want to book their bands with you. It’s such a small world within festival organising, you really don’t want to step on anyone’s toes if you can at all avoid it.”
AR: “Pick a landowner you feel you can work well with – we have a tremendous relationship with the farm owners who are brilliant people and fully behind us.”
RdB: “Think about local people too. Lulworth, where Camp Bestival is in Dorset, is a really small place. We made sure we held meetings in the town to show that we weren’t mad ravers coming to trash the place.”

HIRE SOME PROS
ST: “We almost didn’t get our license, but because we’d got some professionals on board who were experienced at putting on festivals the council had faith in us, we’d hired health and safety people who had worked with bigger festivals. If they have the confidence in the individual and your plans are well laid out it helps.”
SA: “I think the secret is to get somebody who’s a good organiser. It’s getting a good team around you and everybody playing to their strengths.”

PRODUCER IS PARAMOUNT
RdB: “You need a producer who really knows their onions – we were fortunate that we had someone who’d been doing Creamfields, because we didn’t have a bloody clue. We could get bands to play, but we needed someone to put up a fence, to get food units and everything else.”

BE DIFFERENT
RdB: “It needs to be something different. Find a niche and go for it. All the best festivals do their own thing. It’s important to look at what’s out there – lots of people have tried and failed by not realising that.”
ST: “Just booking indie bands won’t really work anymore because there’s so many festivals. Book as many bands as you can who are not playing other festivals, try and make it unique.”

GET A GOOD SITE
RdB: “Obviously the line up is important, but its second to the vibe. From the research we’ve done, people say that the atmosphere is the most important thing.”
ST: “Go the extra mile to make it as special as you can, pay attention to the details, making sure you get the whole look and feel of it as right as you can.”

ASK THE EXPERTS
SH: “Contact other festivals. We contacted lots and the most helpful were Wychwood, Secret Garden Party and Bestival, the organisers from those three festivals were so amazingly supportive.”
Matt Gough: “There’s plenty of people involved in the industry out there that are ready to help you out.”

DON’T GIVE UP
SH: “We were very close to pulling out a few times before the festival took place, but everything fell into place just in time. The first year was hanging on so many factors.
SA: “I suppose I was kind of naïve and a bit arrogant, I thought we could put on a festival that could compete with everybody else. But I think sometimes being naïve actually helps because you just don’t know the mountains ahead of you and if you did you would just give in. As they say, ignorance is bliss, and sometimes it actually is.”

The Festivals

2,000 Trees
July 16-17
Upcote Farm, Cheltenham
Sold out

Bestival
September 9-12
Robin Hill Country Park, Isle of Wight
Sold out

End of the Road
September 10-12
Larmer Tree Gardens, north Dorset
Weekend £130, no day tickets

Lounge on the Farm
July 9-11
Merton Farm, Canterbury
Weekend £95, day tickets £45

Wickerman
July 23-24
East Kirkcarswel Farm, Dumfries and Galloway
Weekend £85, Saturday plus camping, £58

Wow. It’s been a long time since I blogged. I can only apologise and offer the excuse that I have been mega-busy doing work experience. Still, I probably could have fitted a blog in. Ah well, no-one’s perfect.

Seeing as I have been doing work experience (at Loaded and now BBC Good Food), I might as well share with you some wisdom I have accrued via these placements. The following is a short list of advice I have been give about the world of journalism that I have found most useful. It’s not groundbreaking, but everybody likes a list. Anyway, here goes:

1. Phone five people and the story will write itself. As a student journo, I have seen many people email a contact when they could just as easily phone. In almost all circumstances, phoning is immeasurably more useful. Firstly, you get an immediate result. Email can leave you waiting for days. Secondly, you can alter your line of questioning as the conversation develops and perhaps elicit a mistake/admission/interesting or funny statement from the person you’re talking to. You can’t do that on email. Email hands over all the control.

2. Ideas are the life-blood of magazines. I suppose that’s kind of obvious, but it’s worth saying. Without ideas, you have nothing. You can be the best writer or the best designer or the best editor in the world, but if the story’s no good, it’s no good. Keep a note of every good idea you have. Everything that makes you stop and think. Everything that makes you laugh. Question everything.

3. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. It pays to be a bit ballsy. When you’re doing work experience, ask if you can claim travel/lunch expenses. If you’re asked to write an article, ask if you will be paid. Don’t be rude, just be straightforward. The worst thing that will happen is they say No.

4. There’s a lot more to magazines than the words on the page. Most people want to be journalists because they like writing or storytelling. But only a small part of journalism is the copy. There’s sub-editing, designing, laying out and organising pages, managing deadlines. Understanding the process of making a magazine is more important than simply being able to write.
There’s a lot more than that, but I’ll save it for a later post. Hopefully these points will be useful, or insightful.

Come May and the end of the season, there’s only going to be one contender for Scripturally Savvy Manager of the Year, and it’s going to be Owen Coyle. It’s been nothing short of a biblical rollercoaster for the former Ireland international, who started the season as God after working a series of miracles at Burnley to get them promoted back to the top-flight for the first time in 33 years. Alas, however, he succumbed to the temptation of pastures new when Bolton sacked Gary Megson at the arse end of last year, and was quick to take Phil Gartside’s 30 pieces of silver.

The Burnley faithful were less than impressed, labelling him a “Judas”, but Coyle wasn’t going down without some pedantry: “Was it Judas tonight? If we’re going to get biblical, then maybe it should have been Moses, because we did lead them from the wilderness, from the Championship to the Premier League… The only person aware of the facts surrounding the whole situation is myself, and I know I’ve conducted myself every step of the way in the right manner.”

Leaving aside how brilliant the phrase “if we’re going to get biblical” is, almost every aspect of the move is good from Coyle’s point of view. He gets a bigger paycheck, a bigger budget and the pulling power to attract (slightly) better players. And he’s already a fans’ favourite at the Reebok, having helped the Trotters achieve promotion to the Premier League as a player in the mid-90s. Bolton might not be the most glamorous job in the world, but it’s certainly a rung up the managerial ladder, and after two frankly remarkable years at Turf Moor, few would begrudge him the chance.

Apart from, eh, Burnley’s fans. Because, for all the furrowed brows and foul-mouthed chanting, football fans are a soppy and emotional lot. They buy tickets and shirts and programmes and get garish tattoos because they love their clubs like they ought to love their children, unconditionally and irrationally. In most other industries, it’s perfectly acceptable to move between jobs like Coyle has done. But not football. Football fans are ruled by their hearts, and they invest heavily, both emotionally and financially. If you do them over, they’ll let you know.

Which isn’t necessarily a problem if you just ignore it. Coyle’s mistake was rising to the fans’ bait. Sure, he understood the Burnley fans’ anger, he said, but he had behaved “in the right manner” when he departed. Oh, Owen. Poor, naive Owen. The details matter not a jot. He could have made a personal appearance at every single Burnley season ticket holder’s house to explain his reasons for leaving, kissed their feet and pleaded for forgiveness, but it still wouldn’t have made any difference.

Football fans don’t care how dignified you are when you decide to piss off, because you’ve still decided to piss off, and that’s all that matters. As a colleague of mine put it, “If your husband left you for the neighbour, you wouldn’t still give him a great reception just because he put up a few shelves before he went, would you?”

Burnley’s fans were never going to like it when Coyle left, but he should have been prepared for that. The club has overachieved tremendously in the last year to reach the big boys’ league, but getting there is the easy bit. Staying is a hell of a lot harder, and now that they’ve lost their talisman it looks nigh on impossible. I hope they aren’t relegated, but it would be a terribly Premier League ending to this woozy fairytale if they were.

The attempts of Celtic to wrest the SPL title back from the southside of Glasgow have, so far, been rather tame. All in all, the first half of the season has been rather disappointing for the green half of Glasgow. The Europa League proved far too difficult a challenge and they were booted out at the first stage. Defeat by Hearts in the League Cup quarter finals wasn’t quite so ignominious but still disappointing. Failure to provide Rangers with much of a challenge atop the table is far more worrying.

Of course, the Glasgow goldfish bowl has its own unique pressures, and most managers would not find themselves under pressure after just a few months in the job. Hell, big Tone Mowbray has barely had a chance to overhaul his squad. Jan Venegoor of Hesselink, Bobo Balde, Paul Hartley and Shunsuke Nakamura left in the summer, but with the exception of Nakamura, who was all set to leave long before Mowbray arrived, they would have been unlikely to figure much anyway. Marc Antoine Fortune came in for £3.8m (which could buy) but apart from that the only addition was Landy N’Guemo, on loan from Nancy, who’s turned out to be a tough li’l nut in the middle of the park and one of Celtic’s best players this season.

Plenty more have been shown the door this January: Gary Caldwell hot-footed it to Wigan after refusing to sign a new contract, and Willo Flood, Barry Robson and Chris Killen joined Mowbray’s predecessor Gordon Strachan at  Middlesbrough. Celtic’s squad is now rather thin, but Mowbray finally has the scope to craft his own team which plays by his own style, which is starkly different to Strachan’s. So far Celtic have brought in Korean midfielder Ki Sung-Yong, Dutch defender Jos Hooiveld and Norwegian teenager Thomas Rogne. No, me neither. But bringing in unknown players is, of course, no bad thing. Who had heard of Ole Gunner Solskjaer when Alex Ferguson signed him up at Man United? The fact is, however, that Celtic have signed these lads because they can’t get more established players to come. Bids for Preston’s Sean St Ledger and Villa’s Curtis Davies were rejected last week, and Phillipe Senderos of Arsenal moved on loan to Everton instead. To be honest, even if the bids for the first two had been accepted, would they really have moved up north? I doubt it.

Celtic may still be a powerful and prestigious club, but it does not have the financial clout it did at the beginning of the century. The days of buying the likes of Chris Sutton, John Hartson and Neil Lennon for £6m-plus are over. And Celtic will have to learn to cope.

The reality for homeless people, however, is starkly different. For them, Christmas is a cold, lonely and potentially deadly time of year. Winter is one of the busiest times for homeless charities in Britain as rough sleepers make a bid to escape the harsh outdoors and secure a warm hostel bed.

Marky Quinn with a copy of his new help booklet

No-one understands the plight of homeless people more than Marky Quinn. A former head chef, he found himself sleeping rough after being forced out of his flat in Cardiff by abusive neighbours. “I wasn’t one part of their culture; they used to give me verbal, even physical abuse sometimes. I lived on the top floor, so there was no escape. I had to go down the stairs and they were all thee doing their thing and it just got to me too much.

“The last straw was when I got burgled twice in one week and I just though, no, I’d rather be on the street. It was a harsh move to make but I thought, in this day and age, nobody in their right mind was going to let me sleep on the street – how gullible I was.”

Quinn slept rough on the streets of Cardiff on and off for over two years. He slept in car parks, doorways, even a bush in Bute Park. He lived without possessions, without food, and without dignity, turning to drink for comfort and struggling to survive.

But thanks to his own determination and perseverance – and invaluable support from The Big Issue and homeless charity The Wallich – Marky managed to break out of the cycle.

The introduction to the Rough Guide to Sleeping Rough

Now he has written a booklet based on his experiences as a rough sleeper, the Rough Guide to Rough Sleeping in Cardiff, to help those still struggling on the streets of Wales’s capital. The pocket-sized waterproof guide, which was printed by The Wallich, gives advice on how to stay safe on the streets, where to find free food and clean clothes and who to go to for help.

“I used to volunteer down the Huggard Centre,” Quinn explains. “That was heartbreaking: three years on I saw people down there who were on the street when I was and they’re still on the street. I just want to take them home, which I know I can’t. There aren’t enough amenities out there, and the little few are not really that well advertised. That’s why I came up with the idea of the rough sleepers.”

The problem of visibility is a big problem when it comes to homelessness. The official figures report that levels of homeless have declined in the last four years, but these figures refer only to “statutory homelessness“, which encompasses only those who are eligible for assistance, are unintentionally homeless and fall within a “priority need” group.

What’s more, many of those who are actually eligible for support do not realise and miss out. This is particularly common with people who have left the Armed Force or have been released from prison. “A shocking proportion of homeless people are ex-Army,” Carl Chappel, Homelessness Policy and Campaigns Officer for Cymorth Cymru told me. “They come out and realise that they can’t cope because they’re in a whole different world. People who lose their accommodation because they are in prison often struggle when they get out too.”

All of which means the true levels of homelessness are extremely difficult to know. “There’s a hidden population of homelessness,” said Chappel. “Some people will see the service and some people won’t, and we only know about those people who receive a service.”

Charities and organisations are doing what they can to raise the visibility of homeless people in Cardiff. Llamau, a charity working principally with young homeless people, organised a street-inspired fashion show called Fluorescent Adolescent at the Coal Exchange in November, and Cardiff Council ran a photo competition and exhibition for homeless people, Notes from a City, which will be shown at the Old Library in The Hayes until December 23.

There is a lot to be done to get homeless people in Cardiff off the streets and into homes, but if the Assembly, the Council and the various charities can continue to work together, fewer and fewer people will have to spend Christmas on the streets.

Paywalls and paid content are the hot topics in journalism right now. Rupert Murdoch has been banging on about charging for News Corporation‘s online content for yonks and Johnston Press announced last week it is to charge for the online content of six of its local papers.

There are, it seems, two primary methods of funding online content: one is to offer it for free and host advertising; the other is to charge for it it some way, be it micro-payments or subscription. Almost all news publishers currently operate the first model, although a few, such as the Financial Times and NewsCorp’s Wall Street Journal, charge. The FT has something like 120,000 subscribers, eaching paying about £90 a year, which tides them over nicely.

What makes these publications different from, say, The Times or The Sun, however, is that they are specialised. And this makes all the difference. “Any site offering the same mass-market content found elsewhere should beware of raising the paywall,” said Rob Andrews of Paid Content UK. ”Readers are more likely to decamp to an alternative news source than to whip out their credit card.” Indeed, a Harris Poll conducted by Paid Content suggested that only 5 per cent of online users would pay for their favourite news site if it introduced charges.

Which is why, perhaps, NewsCorp will struggle to make it work a lot more than JP, whose titles are much more specialised. It is essential to have content that people can’t get elsewhere.

The basis for people’s stringent objections to paying for online content is basically that they’ve never, ever had to.  “What won’t work – what can’t work – is to pretend that the last 15 years never happened,” Arianna Huffington said on the Guardian website. “The future is to be found elsewhere. It is a linked economy. It is search engines. It is online advertising. It is citizen journalism and foundation-supported investigative funds.”

It is, as she says, a “hybrid future”, employing old media values such as fairness, accuracy and high-impact investigative journalism within the  the new transparent, interactive and immediate framework.

And it is, above all, pretty exciting.

The blogs are in, and the strong opinions are out. What do you think? Who is the sportsperson of the Noughties? Not happy with the options? Write your own sporting tribute and let me know. I can almost taste the adrenaline in my mouth. Delicious.

This issue was brought home to me last week by a lecture from Joanna Geary, Web Development Editor (Business) for The Times. She didn’t study journalism, but has, in only a few years in the industry, landed herself a pretty awesome job at one of the country’s (nay, the world’s) most prestigious newspapers.

As a Journalism student, paying thousands of pounds to study, this should be pretty galling. And it would be – if I wasn’t already aware that you don’t need a qualification in journalism. That’s not to say it isn’t worthwhile; depending on where you study, you will garner a lot of incredibly useful skills and techniques that will make you, hopefully, very employable. But I probably wouldn’t have taken this course if I had got a job in the industry. It’s a means to an end.

Having said that, I hope that studying at one of Britain’s most respected journalism schools will, firstly, help me land a few rungs up the industry ladder and, secondly, give me a better chance of keeping any job I get, because I’ll actually be able to, y’know, do it.

Crucially, when it comes to job time, I’ll have been blogging and tweeting and been generally communicating with people, writing and talking  about all sorts of issues, journalistic or not. The best (or the most effective) journalism courses are practical and vocational: you don’t just ‘studying’, you actually practise as a journalist. Publishers want staff who don’t need a whole heap of training, so if you can get that training elsewhere then you’ll be much more attractive to employers.

So the virtue of journalism courses – or the good ones, at least – is to give you the best training and the best chance of getting a job. If you manage to find employment without training then great, but if you don’t, the best chance you stand of getting into the industry is to immerse yourself in the profession.

Step forward, Henrik Larsson. You are a wonderful man.

You may notice in the above photo that ol’ Henke adorns the colours of my beloved Celtic (not, for the record, “Glasgow Celtic”); I will admit that perhaps my reasons for nominating the super Swede are not entirely objective, but when it comes to the fanaticism of sport, where does objectivity fit in?

Henrik Larsson is a man very close to my heart. I once pinned a friend against a wall because he insisted Larsson was not world class. While this may have been a touch heavy-handed, I believe I was vindicated that very evening, the night of the 2006 Champions League final, when m’boy Henrik, a 61st minute substitute, provided both assists for his team’s goals as Barça triumphed came back from 1-0 down to beat Arsenal 2-1. After the game, Thierry Henry said, “Everyone was talking about Ronaldinho before the game. I didn’t see him today and I didn’t see Eto’o. Henrik Larsson made the difference.”

His spells at Barça and Man Utd proved that, even in the later stages of his career, he was a player of immense class, charisma and skill. I have never seen anyone make runs like Larsson. He is a football genius.

His goal-scoring record is simply phenomenal. He has scored goals consistently at every club he has played for, and at every level, from SPL games against Dunfermline to European finals against Porto and Arsenal to World Cup and European Championship matches.

But his iconic status is not due simply to his playing ability.  Henke encapsulated the true spirit of football; he was dedicated, committed, fair, honest and unselfish. He only picked up a handful of bookings throughout his long career, and was never emboiled in any controversy or scandal. As Rob Smyth said in the Guardian, “Larsson is one of football’s good guys, a consummate professional”.

I’m not saying he’s the best footballer of the decade. But, as an all-round athlete and ambassador for sport, there are few as iconic.

Take a look at the other candidates here:

Roger Federer by Josh Pettitt
Ryan Giggs by Alain Tolhurst
Usian Bolt by Mike Brown
Michael Schumacher by Tom Victor
Zinedine Zidane by Rob Goodman
Shane Warne by Thomas Mooney
David Beckham by Will Gilgrass
Cristiano Ronaldo by Joe Curtis
Adam Gilchrist by Nick Moore