When this revivalist night was all over, Sir Bobby Charlton - dear, avuncular Sir Bobby - a man who is a perpetual link with the team-mates he left behind at Munich and who has become a kind of foster father to so many at Old Trafford, attempted to explain the extraordinary affection for Eric Cantona.In some respects it is obvious. A man who walked away from United without so much as an adieu 15 months ago. In several ways, a curious kind of hero to worship, albeit one fabulously gifted. Yet, as the virtually full house of 55,210 rose as one to serenade him with the "Marseillaise" and swirled their tricolores with such gusto it could have been the Champs-Elysees on Liberation Day, you feel those prematurely departed would have approved. Four earnest, well-scrubbed, Brylcreemed figures stare out of the monochrome advertisement from 1957, reproduced in the Munich tribute match programme, Forty Years On. They are Duncan Edwards, David Pegg, Roger Byrne and Dennis Viollet, the boy-racers of their day, when drop- handlebars were decidedly in vogue. "Busby's Babes on Raleigh cycles - champions all", read the slogan.

You wondered if any of the three who perished on that snow-bound runway the following year - the one survivor was Viollet - were peering down from their heaven as this night's events unfolded. What would those young men, members of the so-called "team of the century", when football was part of an innocent, altogether less cynical and pecuniary-obsessed sporting milieu, have made of Old Trafford's reception to every xenophobe's image of a stereotypical strutting, haughty, sometimes petulant Frenchman? Un grand poseur, or, to put it another way, a Gaul with gall, according to his detractors, whose turned up collar reflected egocentricity rather than eccentricity, and whose conduct has ranged from merely surly to assault on a spectator. But who will advise the advisers? Somebody should have.STEVE TONGUE. It was a pity that his ghost-writer, David Davies, the FA's director of public affairs, did not consider more carefully the effect of making these affairs public; or that a trusted aide like Ray Clemence, well versed in media affairs, did not talk him out of it. As for the perils of serialisation in the tabloids, Hoddle need have looked no further than another former Spurs colleague, Steve Perryman, who was once comprehensively stitched up in the same situation.The idea for the book, Hoddle writes, was born in conversations with his agent, or "adviser" No surprise there. Before all the self-justification and regular swipes at the media begin, there is a genuinely poignant moment in the first chapter of the book as he returns home at six o'clock on Sunday morning after World Cup qualification in Rome, the conquering hero empty inside as he faces up to telling his wife and three young children that he is leaving them.As Hoddle must now realise, this book was an ill-advised venture.

"Drunk Gazza Trashed My Room" - even if the said trashing was hardly in the Led Zeppelin class - was not new news, for Gascoigne himself had already admitted it in the same newspaper.On the other hand, Hoddle's determination never to pick Chris Sutton again; his explanation of why the friendly in Caen was played behind closed doors; and of why Dion Dublin is not just another John Fashanu, could all usefully have been aired at the time. Instead he has waited until now to further upset Sutton's manager Roy Hodgson, has a prolonged dig at Alex Ferguson - another club manager he cannot afford to alienate - and confirms many in their worst prejudices about him by studying the Express horoscope page ("incredibly, 100 per cent spot on") and insisting that his biggest - indeed, only - mistake lay in not taking the faith-healer Eileen Drewery to France.Sadly, and crassly, the Express horoscope is linked to the one hitherto undiscussed area of Hoddle's life, the break-up of his marriage. of why I did what I did" (My 1998 World Cup Story, by Glenn Hoddle Andre Deutsch, pounds 17.99) is all too familiar. Day after day he sat in front of the microphones and cameras and was asked precisely why he had done what he did.So revelations granted to the Sun, for its reputed pounds 200,000 serialisation, or to book-buyers for their pounds 17.99, are distinctly limited and have been understandably resented. I hope.For all that the debate was smart and stimulating, though, it was still an uncomfortable reminder of what will be available to the average viewer when Sky finally succeeds in buying up every last morsel of live sport.