Wilfried Zaha would not shrink in a Manchester United shirt now...

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Forty million quid for a Chelsea reserve. The day Mohamed Salah signed for Liverpool the verdict was not universally positive.

Salah had done well in Serie A but his spell at Stamford Bridge had been unsuccessful. Just 19 games, just 10 starts. For Liverpool, it seemed an expensive gamble, a fee of £37m rising to £44m for a player who couldn't make the team with a rival.

Reviewing reports from the time, Salah's fee was described as 'staggering', his form at Chelsea 'underwhelming'.

Wilfried Zaha is thriving back at Crystal Palace and may well find elite clubs come calling 

The winger endured a torrid time after getting a big move to Manchester United in 2013

As for headlines, one would have been forgiven for thinking his first name was not Mohamed, but Chelsea Flop.

Now look at him. Top goalscorer in the Premier League on 14 and credited with keeping Liverpool in firm Champions League contention, with so much uncertainty around the future of Philippe Coutinho.

Salah is one of the successes of the season. Kevin De Bruyne is, too, emerging as arguably the most influential midfield player in Europe, having travelled from Chelsea to Manchester City, via the Bundesliga.

So what price Wilfried Zaha? A lot of attention has gone on the players that have left Chelsea and returned with acclaim to major clubs, but could Zaha yet make Manchester United regret their parting, too?

Unlike Salah and De Bruyne on their return, he has proved himself in the Premier League. We already know he can handle English football.

Salah came back to England a changed man. 'Everything has improved,' he said. 'Even my personality is different. I was a kid — 20, 21. Now I'm four years older. Everything is different.'

Mohamed Salah had to leave the bright lights of the Premier League to prove his quality

And it is. Eden Hazard recalled Salah as an outstanding prospect. 'In training, he would do everything,' he said. And how often have we heard that of young players at the biggest clubs? That they impress away from the spotlight but struggle with the standards and responsibility demanded in matches, or that they thrive in training but are not trusted beyond and their confidence suffers?

Who knows why Salah and De Bruyne failed to make an impact at Chelsea, given their enormous ability? It is too easy to blame the manager, Jose Mourinho, who, after all, won the Premier League without them.

Equally, nobody would argue Zaha looked a Manchester United player on his form at Old Trafford. But now? United would surely love him — as would just about any club in the top six, even Manchester City.

Roy Hodgson deserves great credit for the direction in which he has steered Crystal Palace since succeeding Frank de Boer, but without doubt Zaha has been his greatest asset.

It is no surprise that he is now being linked with elite clubs again. Chelsea are said to be interested in a move in the January window.

Leaving aside the fact that Palace would be mad to sell — the bottom half is far too bunched for safety to be presumed in the next few weeks — it will still be a shock if Zaha sees out his career peak in south London.

If not January, then the summer may bring another offer he cannot refuse.

Nor should he. There is every chance that Zaha, like Salah, like De Bruyne, has grown into the player English football thought had been recruited the first time, the one that developed away from the harsh scrutiny of the Premier League elite.

Roma are not a small club, but they do not live with the same pressure as Chelsea. Their last league title was 2001, their previous one 1983. They reached the European Cup final in 1984, but did not return to the competition for 17 years. In the last 14 campaigns, Chelsea have missed out on Champions League football once, Roma on six occasions.

Kevin De Bruyne was allowed to leave by Chelsea but is now one of the league's best players

So Roma, like Wolfsburg for De Bruyne, afforded the perfect opportunity to realise potential away from the high expectations at Chelsea, where the manager does not tend to survive the failure to win the league or a European trophy.

It will have been the same for Zaha at Palace, a club he knew and where he felt comfortable. He arrived at Old Trafford at a difficult time. He was bought by Sir Alex Ferguson, loaned back to Palace for the remainder of the season, and the club he then joined was managed by David Moyes.

Zaha was another considered to show potential in training by his United team-mates but he was raw and his finishing was not at the level we see now.

Equally, Moyes soon lost faith in Zaha's ability to carry out instructions in a regimented United side, and his lack of maturity led him to make mistakes off the field — turning up for a flight at Manchester Airport in a T-shirt and jeans, when the instruction had specifically requested a suit be worn.

He lived in a different part of Cheshire to the other players and appeared overawed by them.

Midway through his first season he was loaned to Cardiff and in two years at United he played four games, getting marked down as another of those young players who shrank in the red shirt.

When he returned to Palace permanently, that was considered his level.

Clearly, it isn't. Palace may make Zaha feel at home but they do not represent the limit of Zaha's potential. He is 25, the same age as Salah, a year younger than De Bruyne and, like them, Zaha has evolved. Things change with maturity. One club's flop becomes another club's treasure.

How FIFA's dodgy pal can reign in Spain

FIFA's rule against government interference was introduced to protect the game from meddling dictators in countries without freedom.

Increasingly, however, it is used to stop corrupt FIFA cronies being brought to justice. The threat to expel Spain from the 2018 World Cup is a case in point.

FIFA has written to the Spanish federation warning it would be a breach of the rules if the Consejo Superior de Deportes, the national sports council, forced it to stage a presidential election following the arrest and suspension of former FIFA vice-president Angel Maria Villar Llona.

He was apprehended in July and resigned his positions with FIFA and UEFA, but is still president of the Spanish federation. Unsurprisingly, the sports council find this unsatisfactory.

FIFA expressed concern and reminded the federation it must remain independent of third-party interference — the sanction being suspension of the national team.

And who brought this complaint? None other than Villar Llona, the gentleman under arrest.

Truly Gianni Infantino’s new broom is sweeping the stables clean — as his new best mate Gary Lineker would no doubt tell us.

Sorry Clare, how did you forget Zara?

Clare Connor, ECB head of women’s cricket, has taken great exception to Geoff Boycott’s commentary during this Ashes series. ‘God, the arrogant, all-knowing opinions of Boycott are bordering on unbearable this morning,’ she tweeted during the Test in Adelaide.

And Boycott does have a Marmite element, true. At least, however, his views are based on personal experience, and fact.

On the night of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award, Connor tweeted: ‘As a little girl, I grew up watching SPOTY with my Mum and Dad.

‘They never had an answer for me when I asked why no women were nominated. Thankfully, parents don’t have to fudge an answer to that question now. Well done.’

Actually, they didn’t have to fudge it then. If Mr and Mrs Connor were across their subject, they could have told little Clare that there have always been female winners of SPOTY, including three in consecutive years between 1962 and 1964, Anita Lonsbrough, Dorothy Hyman and Mary Rand.

Ann Jones won in 1969, Princess Anne in 1971, Mary Peters in 1972, Virginia Wade in 1977, the year after Connor was born. Indeed, one might also question those childhood memories, considering Jayne Torvill won it — with her partner Christopher Dean — when Clare was eight, Fatima Whitbread when she was 11 and Liz McColgan when she was 15. Sally Gunnell was in the top three in three of Connor’s teenage years, too.

And here’s the irony. The last female winner of the main prize was Zara Phillips in 2006, making this the longest period of male dominance in the award’s history, 11 years.

Clare has got far more fudging to do than her parents ever had.

Zara Phillips, 11 years ago, was the last woman to win SPOTY - an irony lost on Clare Connor

Cummins absence was real hard luck

Now the Ashes is lost, more than a few commentators have been bemoaning the absence of Ben Stokes. Certainly it disrupted the balance of the team and England were weaker for it, but the distance between Australia and England was such it would be hard to argue he made the difference.

Anyway, we brought it on ourselves. Given the circumstances of Stokes’s absence, it is hard to be too sympathetic.

Pat Cummins, however, is a different story. Cummins, playing his first home Test series, has been outstanding. He has averaged 46 with the bat, at No 9, and taken 11 wickets at an average of 30.09, including the England captain three times. His figures would place him second in England’s averages, with bat and ball. 

Cummins made his Test debut at the age of 18, but injuries destroyed his early career. When he returned to the scene in March he had been five years, three months and 27 days out of the game. Cummins missed two Ashes tours in England — he was a late call-up in 2015, but only made the one-day series — and both went the hosts’ way.

England may bemoan the absence of Stokes, but Cummins’ injuries may have played an equally important part in Australia’s defeats — and his wounds were not self-inflicted.

Pat Cummins missed out on five years of his Test career after being blighted with injuries

No hitch, it's all fine Harry 

Apart from those trapped in poorly observed situation comedies, no man really cares about weddings. They don’t mind the jolly-up, but you don’t get that with a Royal Wedding. You just watch on television, stone cold sober, for what feels like a lifetime. Commentators enthuse over the hats, and the dress, and who sits where and all the stuff no man cares about, unless he’s Ross from Friends.

Meaning, everyone has got it wrong about Prince Harry. He’s taken one for the team.

He hasn’t mistakenly double booked his big day with the FA Cup final; he’s given everyone who needs it, male or female, a free pass. ‘Well, I’d love to keep you company, but you see it’s the biggest match of the year and — yes, I know they don’t really clash, but it’s the build-up, it’s all part of the occasion, and they’re going to be on the bus and there’s usually Jimmy Tarbuck and, anyway, if you need me I’ll be in the pub…’

Also, Harry did the 6am bacon sandwiches when William got hitched. He’s a legend.

Manuel Lanzini made the same mistake as Victor Moses, playing for Chelsea in last season’s FA Cup final. If Lanzini was tired at Stoke, as his manager David Moyes claims, why did he run the length of the pitch before collapsing to the ground in the opposition penalty area?

Antonio Conte offered a similar excuse for Moses at Wembley. Yet if the little lambs are exhausted, better to have a lie down in their own penalty area and forgo all that exhausting running. Don’t modern clubs have sports science departments that are supposed to be across this?

Manuel Lanzini has been retroactively punished by the FA for his dive against Stoke

The perception is that Wayne Rooney’s transfer to Everton has been a failure. The reality is that, with ten Premier League goals this season after the game with Swansea, Rooney is more prolific than Gabriel Jesus at Manchester City, any player at Arsenal, or any member of Gareth Southgate’s England squad bar Harry Kane and Raheem Sterling.

Some of the more fashionable names — Richarlison at Watford, Leroy Sane — wouldn’t mind Rooney’s record, either. And more than any other player at Everton, he has tried to pick up the slack left by Romelu Lukaku’s departure. Sam Allardyce would have been playing a more daunting game of catch-up without him, that is for certain.

A defeat for odds-on favourite Anthony Joshua at Sports Personality of the Year might serve as a warning to those who place their main events in the graveyards of digital and pay-per-view. The numbers, financially, will make it all worthwhile, but in terms of the love of the common people, not enough of them saw Joshua in action this year.

The greatest achievements of Mo Farah’s career have all been beamed directly into our homes. We remember sharing them with loved ones, or as a community. Makes a difference, that.

Anthony Joshua may have lost out on SPOTY because his big wins came on pay-per-view

Neil's nasty side is duly noted 

Neil Warnock claims he was betrayed by fourth official Andy Woolmer during last week’s match between Cardiff and Reading.

What was Woolmer’s heinous crime? He wrote down the stuff that Warnock said to him, resulting in an FA misconduct charge and a £2,000 fine. Yet if Warnock had been civil, or biased but reasonable even, one imagines there would have been no consequence. We can only imagine what he said, therefore, was nasty and abusive, particularly as Warnock has been advised to plead guilty by the League Managers Association.

So who has truly betrayed the spirit of the game? The official doing his job or the manager who thought he deserved to be bullied for that?