Net worth

Then - and this is the really good bit - Rustu, pictured below, redeemed himself by saving a key penalty in the shoot-out to decide who loses to Germany in the semi-final.

All this just gives me a chance to bang on about goalkeepers.

Some months ago I wrote a column in the print bit of the Post (my swansong, as it happens) highlighting some of the many and varied characters who have played in goal. People like Albert Camus, Julio Iglesias, Luciano Pavarotti and the last Pope. There's also Steve Harley, the Cockney Rebel singer, and Che Guevara, the famous 60s poster model, not forgetting David Icke.

If you're interested go to www.goalkeepersaredifferent.com.

If you doubt the oddness of wearers of the No 1 jersey, check out wikipedia entries on Rene Higuita, the Colombian who did a scorpion kick clearance in a friendly with England, or the free-kick specialist Jose Luis Chilavert, who bagged a hat trick in one match.

Weeks after I had written this stuff I made another discovery - which this piece gives a chance to pass on: Sherlock Holmes was also a goalkeeper. He has all the character traits of a goalkeeper, if you think about it - the same things that shaped the Albert Camus masterpiece The Outsider.

In truth, it was a fact about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Holmes, that I unearthed. While starting out as a doctor in Southsea, he played in goal for the first incarnation of Portsmouth FC. He also played cricket for the MCC - but that's something for the boys in green who like Bob Dylan to follow up.

Now, spookily, I've just received a letter arrived from a sister including a cutting from my hometown weekly newspaper - the journal which started me on the long and winding road which has led to this obscure corner of the internet.

Like all such publications, my hometown weekly can't get enough nostalgia. It costs nothing, fills acres of space for little more than a fraction of the wages of a junior reporter or the inconvenience of a work experience drudge and is hugely popular with readers - look at the Birmingham Mail.

Processing and filing old postcards and school photographs was part of my first job as a junior reporter, along with writing up wedding and funeral reports. I distinctly recall 50-year-old postcards written in bold copperplate by gentlemen in offices and shops in the town during the morning telling their wives when they would be home that evening. Yes, guaranteed same-day delivery for local cards for the price of a stamp. The Edwardian equivalent of texting.

Anyway, the cutting from my sister featured yours truly as the goalkeeper in the Roman Hill Junior School football team which had won some trophy or other. It dates, frighteningly, from the 1950s, and I can't remember a thing about it. All the smiling lads with their short back and sides haircuts and big football boots might just as well be images from the Bayeux Tapestry for all they mean to me.

One of my former team-mates took the picture in to the newspaper office and supplied all the names. I can't remember ever being that smiling little boy in a woollen goalkeeper's jersey in the centre of the back row with a strange lopsided fringe. It's weird to think that I've graduated from compiling that nostalgia page to actually featuring in it.

Weirder still to think that the chap who stood as my best man 40-plus years ago when we were newly-qualified journalists together is still working on that paper. He's chief reporter. I must email him one day to see if the office has kept the incredible antique typewriter all we junior reporters had to use. I later graduated to my own Olivetti which I mentioned some time ago.

It's bizarre to recall in these days of blogs, Twitter, SMS iPhones and all the rest that this old office machine with its ribbon of faded black, had three banks of keys - lower case, hold down shift for CAPITAL letters and supershift for numb3rs (how's that for being down with the kids!).

Some time in its years of service the lower case 'p' key had fallen off, so we had to use the next door 'o' and go through our copy putting a stem on with our fountain pens (no biros back then). A real oain. Once I missed some so a WI produce result got into the paper with a prize for oarsnio wine.

Spellchecks weren't even a twinkle in Bill Gates's father's eye back then. Haooy days!