WHEN TIME STANDS STILL.....

Picture the scene, if you will. Bluewater Shopping Thingy yesterday- pre-Christmas rush in full swing. Waterstones bookshop - seething with browsers. I`m in the sports book section, which is crowded with people thumbing their way through various tomes. I pick up a copy of Peter Crouch`s autobiography and decide it`s not something I really want to buy (someone really should tell him about vocabulary) so I am reading it in instalments - a chapter each time I visit - as Crouchy once had a productive time at Southampton before securing his `dream move` to Liverpool.

After a few minutes, I happen to look up and there, across a crowded bookstall, is someone I think I recognise. You know how it is - you`ve seen that person before but you can`t understand why on earth he should be where he was - you feel he should be somewhere else, miles away doing something else. And so I wasn`t completely convinced that it really was......Jermaine Wright.

In fact, I have since had independant confirmation of this sighting of Southampton`s midfielder-cum-full back from an impeccable source. I still don`t know why he wasn`t at Saints` Marchwood training ground putting in the effort to see him through a crowded yuletide fixture list, but I guess he was having a day off following the 0-0 home draw against Sheffield Wednesday the previous evening. (A vast improvement on the 5-0 drubbing inflicted on Saints at the Owls ground a few weeks back.)

The episode in Waterstones did, however, contain one of those rare surreal moments when time seems to stand still. As I looked across at this dapper, expensively dressed figure, there was brief eye contact between us. I think Jermaine could sense that I wasn`t quite sure who he was and, in those fleeting seconds, I could also sense that he wasn`t quite sure who I was either. And yet, there was just the hint that one box-to-box midfield dynamo with a good engine and an eye for a pass recognised those same qualities in the other.....or maybe not.