I'll start this by going back three years, almost to the day. It's October 7, 2018. We're at Anfield. TV pundit Graeme Souness was beside himself.

I'm not the praying sort, but how I wished for that goal. Me and tens of thousands of others. And Raul.

That concussion protocol is often not being taken seriously, and not properly administered, has been pretty obvious for some time.

My thoughts and opinions about soccer, a somewhat incoherent bustling jumble, received a jolt on Sunday morning.

A week or so ago I was busy damning FIFA and IFAB for not making rule changes that would ensure that soccer would be an entertaining game.

UEFA has ditched the away-goals rule. Good news or bad news? Neither, really. Simply a matter of facing up to the facts.

We now have the FA researchers sitting on a mountain of research, virtually all of which points in one direction.

Brutality? In soccer? Not very often, I would think. I don't ever remember using the word myself, and am pretty sure I haven't ever heard it from soccer people.

There has always been a lot of the "cometh the hour, cometh the man" about the Italians -- remember Paolo Rossi in 1982? or Andrea Pirlo in 2006?

Pep Guardiola-- the world's greatest soccer coach, it seems -- had assured us: this Champions League final would be a great "advert for football."

My aim was to see whether the Frank De Boer blight had been eliminated, whether Atlanta was rediscovering its Latin style.

So U.S. Soccer is to implement concussion substitutions in 2021. Well, about time. I mean, that's good news ... isn't it?

This must genuinely be a case of less meaning more. Emil Cohill has died, age 81. The long-time secretary (for over 40 years, would you believe that?) of the Cosmopolitan Junior Soccer League.

I return, yet again, and without apology, to the role of goalkeepers in the modern game. Once again there has been a very nasty injury: in the Premier League.

A big toe offside? Can that really qualify as "gaining an advantage" or "interfering with play or an opponent"?