SHOCKS aplenty on The Match, as Graham Taylor announced the squad of 22 celebrities that he will take to St James’ Park next month for this year’s big encounter with the Legends. No Nick Pickard from Hollyoaks, no Dave Jones from Sky Sports News and (here’s the real bone-shaker) no Philip Olivier from Brookside.

Talk about ripping up the form book. That’s like Steve McClaren leaving out, not just David Beckham, but also Steven Gerrard and John Terry. Both Pickard and Olivier featured in Taylor’s starting line-ups for the previous two encounters, since when Olivier has added to his celebrity sports credentials by taking gold in The Games, Channel 4’s showbiz Olympics.

As for Jones, if there is a more tenacious or capable full back in television news at the moment, I would be surprised. Taylor liked him enough to give him a run-out in the last series, when the plucky newscaster hardly disgraced himself and, this time around, Jones had again performed like a Trojan in the bleep test. (Note: the bleep test has nothing to do with censorship for strong language. It’s an endurance trial wherein you run up and down in a gym until you are sick.) These players must have gone into the second stage of the trial phase, at the Kassam Stadium, in Oxford, thinking they had done enough to warrant a place, only to be told they didn’t figure in Taylor’s plans and needed to leave, with the likes of DJ Chappers and Kenzie, from Blazin’ Squad.

At least Jones has a job to go back to — something that couldn’t confidently be said for many of the 47 celebrity triallists that Taylor has now said goodbye to. For many of these resting soap actors and parts from long-imploded boy bands, The Match represented a chance to be plucked from obscurity and thrust on to the big stage. Now they’ve got to go back to singing on cruise ships or auditioning for the part of the third tractor driver in Emmerdale. Celebrity football can be very cruel.

In search of reasons, Jones said: “I looked deep into Graham’s eyes, but then he looked away.” Olivier reacted more bitterly, accusing Taylor, in so many words, of losing the plot. “It just doesn’t add up,” Olivier said. “But then again, that’s Graham Taylor.” One understands the level of Olivier’s disappointment, but even so, I don’t think I will have been alone in feeling that slating the manager so quickly after a personal disappointment lacked class. The general idea is that you wait a couple of months and then stitch him up in a book.

Taylor had only the following consolation to offer: “There can’t be a winner in football unless there’s a loser.” That’s a valuable reflection, worth collecting along with some of Taylor’s many philosophical thoughts from this series, including, “You win things by being a team”, “The only thing that matters is the next minute”, and (my favourite) “A dream is a dream that you want to achieve” — a rhetorical profundity containing more than a hint of Mariah Carey.

Clearly, under Taylor, the broader lesson is never far away. As the manager told Sam Robertson, from Coronation Street: “There’s not always an escape route in life, son.” Robertson earned himself this little homily merely by overelaborating in the final third, and one had to wonder what kind of ornate, worldly-wise lecture he would get from Taylor if he did something really wicked.

Sermons aside, Taylor has opted to bring in the lively Craig Kelly, from Hotel Babylon, while retaining Leo Ihenacho, from Love Island, as a reserve option. And the manager has switched Martin “Chariots” Offiah to left back, to solve problems on the left that have dogged celebrity football since time immemorial.

Up front, where the celebrities have traditionally struggled, Taylor again seems likely to favour the partnership of Darren Campbell, the former Olympic sprinter, and Harvey, from So Solid Crew. Campbell, inevitably, has pace to burn and ought to be able to ask a few questions of a Legends defence, which, remember, consists entirely of retired professional players who last trained on a regular basis in about 1992 and, accordingly, have little to burn except fat.

With Harvey, though, it could go either way. Off the pitch, he seems perfectly pleasant. Just how pleasant we were able to see in a conveniently timed repeat of Footballers’ Pads, a through-the-keyhole programme from 2004, wherein Harvey, as host, was absolutely charming about the terracotta candle-holders in Andy Gray’s converted 18th-century barn in Warwickshire.

On the pitch, however, the So Solid Crew man becomes a home-made nail bomb, capable of going off in the face of anybody — opponent, official or team-mate. In brief, he makes Craig Bellamy look like Bobby Moore and seems to be a high-risk strategy.

Still, one assumes that Taylor knows what he is doing. Then again, one dimly recalls assuming this in the past, and not being completely right.

GILES SMITH RETURNS
ON THURSDAY