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Alistair Bruce-Ball, Chris Sutton and Statman Dave are joined by comedian Luke Kempner to discuss the big FPL (and Celebrity Traitors) topics of the week. WARNING: Spoilers ahead! Can Ali rekindle his love of FPL? Is it time to sell Joao Pedro and Viktor Gyokeres? Can we finally trust Reece James? Why didnâ€t the faithfuls banish Jonathan Ross last week?

A slightly different Sutton Death sees Chris and Luke go head-to-head on famous football fans and a listener is in disbelief after his son plays an inspired triple-captain.

Make sure you enter your team into the BBC Sport League! The all-important code is bbcfpl.

To get in touch – email fpl@bbc.co.uk or Voice notes on WhatsApp to 0800 028 9369.

Premier League commentaries on 5 Live and BBC Sounds this week –

Saturday 25th October – Chelsea v Sunderland – 3pm

Saturday 25th October – Newcastle v Fulham – 3pm (Sports Extra)

Saturday 25th October – Manchester United v Brighton – 5:30pm

Sunday 26th October – Arsenal v Crystal Palace – 2pm

Sunday 26th October – Aston Villa v Manchester City – 2pm (Sports Extra)

Sunday 26th October – Bournemouth v Nottingham Forest – 2pm (Sports Extra 2)

Sunday 26th October – Wolves v Burnley – 2pm (Sports Extra 3)

Sunday 26th October – Everton v Tottenham – 4:30pm

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Grace Wood & Adam LaverYorkshire

PA Media

Dickie Bird’s funeral cortege passes the umpire’s statue in Barnsley

Cricketing stars from Yorkshire and beyond were among the mourners who gathered to say farewell to legendary umpire Dickie Bird at his funeral earlier.

The Barnsley-born son of a miner was 92 when he died “peacefully at home” on 22 September, according to Yorkshire County Cricket Club.

The service at St Mary’s Church in Barnsley was attended by former England cricketers Sir Geoffrey Boycott and Michael Vaughan and was followed by a private family-only cremation and a wake at the town hall.

Well-wishers gathered at the statue of Bird on Church Lane where the funeral procession paused for a moment of reflection.

Anthony Devlin/PA Wire

Dickie Bird died on 22 September aged 92

The invited guests also included Yorkshire chair Colin Graves and former director of cricket Martyn Moxon, the sports commentator John Helm and the ex-sports minister Richard Caborn.

Sir Geoffrey and Graves both gave eulogies and a poem by local poet Ian McMillan was read out.

Sir Geoffrey made sure the colourful character of his friend of almost 70 years shined through.

“I first met Dickie Bird when I was 15, at the time I was playing cricket for Hemsworth Grammar School,” Sir Geoffrey said to a packed church.

“He called me Gerald for years.”

He added: “Surprisingly with all the nerves he had as a batsman, he became a great umpire because he could channel all that nervous energy into good decisions.

“Dickie was refreshingly different. Eccentric but fair. It would be hard to find anyone who didn’t like him.”

PA Media

Sir Geoffery Boycott paid tribute to his old friend Dickie Bird

Bird officiated in 66 Tests and 76 one-day internationals, including three World Cup finals, between 1973 and 1996.

He began as a player, batting for Yorkshire and Leicestershire before an injury cut short his career in 1964.

Bird was awarded an MBE in 1986, an OBE in 2012 and the Freedom of Barnsley in 2000.

In 2009 he was immortalised by a statue in Barnsley that depicted him raising his index finger to indicate a batsman was out.

At Yorkshire’s home ground, Headingley, he paid for a balcony outside the dressing room for the players to sit and watch the game. Both the balcony and a clock at the ground bear his name.

Reuters

Dickie Bird retired as an umpire at the age of 65 after a career spanning 30 years

Former England and Yorkshire cricketer Ryan Sidebottom said Bird was so committed to Yorkshire cricket that he would be on the pitch even for county matches he wasn’t umpiring.

He said: “He’d be out looking at the wicket and wandering around. But it looked like he’d just come in from a night out, like an 1980s John Travolta, because he had the full suit on with a large collar and tie and really fancy suits and flared trousers.

“We used to see him regularly with different suits, some naughty suits, some proper naughty suits.”

Bowler Sidebottom retired in 2017, after taking more than 1,000 career wickets, and he said Bird “absolutely loved” the sport.

“Great bloke and a lovely man who would do anything for Yorkshire cricket. He just loved Yorkshire, he was so passionate about the game and Yorkshire in general,” he said.

And it was love for Yorkshire, and its people, that chair of Yorkshire County Cricket Club Colin Graves remembered at his funeral.

“He had a reputation for not being the first at the bar, but he was a very generous man indeed,” he said, adding that almost 1,000 children had been recipients of grants from him.

Among the junior cricketers to have received financial awards from Dickie was Harry Brook – now an England international.

Paul Barker/PA Wire

Dickie Bird was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Leeds in 1997

Speaking to the BBC when he turned 90 two years ago, Bird said his secret to a long life had been his love of sport and exercise.

“I run, I go out down to the local football ground here in the local park and I lap around the ground. I feel that’s done me good.

“I’d like people, elderly people, if they could to just try and do a few exercises, move your arms, run on the spot, it occupies the brain.

“I’ll keep my exercises up as long as I can.”

As a young man, he played for Barnsley Cricket Club alongside Boycott and the journalist and broadcaster Sir Michael Parkinson.

Dickie Bird shares secret to healthy life at 90

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Some fans hate being stepped over inside the stadium and just want to enjoy the action in peace. Others wonâ€t sit anywhere else except the end of a row, and are prepared to pay a premium for the privilege.

The extra cost of an aisle seat has reached $25 at the Melbourne Formula One Grand Prix, as part of a trend adopted at sporting events such as the MotoGP at Phillip Island and the Australian Open tennis, as well as at some music concerts, to price tickets on the edge of bays higher than those in the middle.

A spokesperson for Tennis Australia confirmed aisle seat pricing was first introduced at the Melbourne Park major in 2022, with a “modest premium†of $5, “responding to fan preferences for extra legroom and easier accessâ€.

The Australian Open is placing a premium of between $5 and $15 on aisle seats for the 2026 tournament, although not all bays in all sessions carry the extra charge.

Academic research, including a study published last year in the Sport Business and Management journal, has found aisle seats at sporting events are more valuable than others on the secondary market.

Dr Alex Belli, a senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Melbourne, said people are prepared to pay more for easier access to toilets and food vendors, and to be able to get in and out without disturbing other patrons.

“Consumers do not mind paying extra for convenience, a phenomenon commonly referred to as ‘convenience premiumâ€,†he said.

In one of the sideline bays on the lower bowl of Rod Laver Arena for the first 2026 Open evening session, an ordinary seat costs $319, while the two seats on either side of the stairs cost $334. A similar aisle seat on the same night at Margaret Court Arena costs $139 in a bay where seats otherwise cost $129.

“Data showed aisle seats consistently sold first, confirming strong demand,†Tennis Australiaâ€s spokesperson said. “Today, aisle seats remain equally popular as non-aisle options, with a small premium applied based on demand.â€

The premium at the Melbourne Grand Prix has increased to $25 per aisle seat for the 2026 race, up from $20 this year and $15 in 2023. A ticket at the Webber Stand on the Friday costs $135, but in one of the four seats at either end of a row, the cost is $160. At the MotoGP in Phillip Island this weekend, aisle seats cost $15 extra.

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Prof Nitika Garg, a consumer behaviour researcher from UNSW, said itâ€s likely aisle premiums will continue to rise if the seats continue to sell, but sports and promoters risk a backlash. “[Increases to aisle seat prices] would be a function of demand, whether thatâ€s the right thing to do is unclear,†she said.

Dynamic pricing is being adopted broadly in a range of industries, although some forms have drawn criticism including from the government.

Garg said the idea of dynamic pricing was to “take out as much of the marginal profit as you can from each customer based on their willingness to pay, but thatâ€s not usually the best approach because people want to feel like they werenâ€t really exploited. People want to feel like, ‘yes, youâ€re a business and you want to make a profitâ€, but they donâ€t want to be wrung out of every cent.â€

Sports could consider “bundling†costs – or avoiding splitting separate charges – to prevent consumer resentment, Garg said, or look to the example of airlines and use loyalty programs to offer the choice of aisle seats as a reward.

The practice of applying aisle premiums has also been evident at music concerts, and was first widely reported by Billboard magazine in 2019.

Not all sports are wedded to the aisle premium. Those who have watched a day of Test cricket are familiar with the increasing tempo of patrons†bathroom breaks into the afternoon session and the challenge for some to navigate out of a row.

But ticketing officials in Cricket Australia have not received enough feedback to warrant pursuing aisle pricing. And the practice has yet to take hold at other summer sporting stalwarts in the NBL and the A-Leagues.

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Making history is such an overused phrase in sport. There’s a danger we start to believe it’s easy, expected, nothing special. Or that it just happens by magic in an instant on a golf green or a rugby pitch. We envisage “Henry V speeches†on the eve of battle urging players to make their mark on history moments before stepping into the arena. But at the weekend, two of the finest sports teams in the world demonstrated how months and years of intentional, deep culture-building are necessary to create a team identity to underpin the highest levels of performance.

Although at starkly different ends of the commercial sports world, both the European Ryder Cup team and the England women’s rugby team deliberately cultivated a shared sense of what it meant for each team to create history together. Europe knew they had to defy the odds to win away for the first time since 2012, while the Red Roses hadn’t won the World Cup since 2014, losing in the previous two finals.

So what did these teams draw on to ensure they could bring their best game in those make or break moments? Performing under pressure at that level is not about training harder or putting the game‑face on. It’s not enough to be fuelled purely by individual, extrinsic drivers “to be the bestâ€. That’s always there within an athlete’s psyche, but when you need to dig really deep – whether it’s facing a hostile environment at Bethpage Black, or Canada scoring first against you in the World Cup final at Twickenham’s Allianz Stadium. You need deep-rooted foundations to ground you, to hold your nerve and find your best performance, and to develop the instincts that help a team to achieve more together than they could alone.

Rather than feel negatively pressured or weighed down by history as we have seen in the past, these athletes, captains, vice-captains and coaches respected, researched and embraced the history of their sports. They understood how the past, present and future would connect when they took to the field of play. And then they used this understanding to make sense of their unique responsibility to write the next chapter together, finding joy in the opportunity and privilege to do so.

Behind the scenes in the Europe locker room, “This is our time, this is our place†was emblazoned on the wall, accompanied by names, jerseys and stories of those who had made their mark, focusing on the European Ryder Cup teams that had beaten the odds to win in the US. The dates of the four previous wins were written on the walls: 1987, 1995, 2004 and 2012 with the four shirts of those winning away teams hanging up. This wasn’t just about words, it was about jerseys worn and sweated in by their predecessors. Their shared challenge was to add one more shirt to the rail.

A similarly profound history swirled around the Red Roses. The Trail of Roses installation at the London Eye celebrated every woman who had pulled on an England shirt, the pioneers and trailblazers on whose shoulders the current team knew they stood. This was a moment to show how far the women’s game had come since the first World Cup in 1991 and point to the immense future potential. Echoing the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team philosophy of taking care of the jersey before passing it on in better shape to the next player, these supremely talented golfers and rugby players drew on this sense of lineage to reach out and connect with their audiences. All the while, they gained perspective, meaning and humility for themselves, qualities that are key components of human resilience.

Former players (from left) Maxine Edwards, Janis Ross, Karen Almond, Emma Mitchell at the Trail of Roses, an installation featuring 267 giant red roses to represent every England women’s rugby player. Photograph: Stripe

Both teams set their ambitions far beyond winning. Luke Donald, the European captain, reaffirmed that they weren’t just playing to win, they were playing for each other, for all those who dreamed of playing for Europe in the future, for something far greater than themselves. Continuing to draw on the work with the performance coach Owen Eastwood that shaped his captaincy and team-building skills two years ago in Rome, Donald commissioned a moving video that featured many of the 37 European men who had won an away Ryder Cup, including current members of the team and himself – a powerful reinforcement of their overarching mission.

Donald knew he needed to invest in both the data and the culture, the quantitative and the qualitative. One vice-captain, Edoardo Molinari, crunched the stats to inform pairings while another, José María Olazábal, captain from the last Europe team to win on foreign soil, brought past inspiration. Donald spent time listening to the players, figuring out how to prepare and set them up to thrive and play their best game at Bethpage Black: creating a shared purpose, connecting them to each other and then giving them autonomy to lead themselves once on the course.

New Zealander John Mitchell, the Red Roses’ head coach, similarly prioritised culture-building since joining in 2023. The Red Roses emulated one of the core team strengths of England’s women footballers by ensuring the team spirit for those among the replacements felt as strong as those on the pitch. They also shared the Lionesses’ ambition to create a lasting positive impact after the tournament through inspiring younger girls watching, the upcoming generation of players, as well as global rugby leaders to see the future potential of the sport.

Both of these glorious sports teams have shown us that the true value of their sporting success lies in the depth of connection to their predecessors, those watching now and future generations to come. Developing a deep and deliberate historical consciousness is becoming a core part of how modern elite sports teams build resilient cultures to take their performance to the next level.

US spectators’ behaviour at the Ryder Cup (US fan ugliness at the Ryder Cup was merely a reflection of Trump’s all-caps America, 28 September) reminded me how shrewd George Orwell was when, in 1945, he said serious sport was “war minus the shootingâ€. Sadly, how topical too. Perhaps women’s increasingly popular sport will do better.
John Bailey
St Albans

One of the great pleasures of the use of subtitles is spotting the mondegreens (Most of gen Z watch TV with the subtitles on – and I understand why, 27 September). Among my favourites over the years: “night vision giggles†for “gogglesâ€, “sliced alone†for “Sly Stalloneâ€, “we found two deadly oceans†for “two dead Laotians†and “raw shock test†for “Rorschach testâ€.
Ruth Eversley
Paulton, Somerset

I can’t agree strongly enough with Chris Ramshaw’s letter about mumbled dialogue (29 September). And sometimes the speech is too fast for the subtitles to be read before the next barrage.
Alyson Elliman
Carshalton Beeches, London

Another hack for bread and butter pudding (Letters, 26 September) is hot cross buns, buttered and cut into strips. The sultanas and raisins in the buns also save a trip to the shop.
Ann Smith
Churchdown, Gloucestershire

I can’t see what all the fuss is about on digital ID (Letters, 29 September). Look how well the government did with the NHS test and trace system.
Pete Bibby
Sheffield

My bike bell gives a friendly single-note “pingâ€, which causes pedestrians or horse riders ahead of me to stop and check their phones (Letters, 29 September).
Ross Speirs
Watlington, Oxfordshire

Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Pleaseemail us your letter and it will be considered for publication in ourletters section.

The Miami Dolphins are 0-3 to start the season, so they might need a fresh look to change things up.

And they will have just that for Monday’s AFC East showdown against the New York Jets.

Tua Tagovailoa, Tyreek Hill and the rest of the Dolphins took the field at Hard Rock Stadium wearing their “Dark Water” uniforms, which are largely dark with the team’s colors sprinkled in through various locations:

“On September 29, the Dolphins will debut their newest uniform against the New York Jets on Monday Night Football as part of the Nike Rivalries Collection,” the team’s official website explained.

“This design is unlike any before, featuring dark aquatic tones made to represent a team who hunts in dark waters. Complete with orange accents and sleek dark blue touches throughout, these uniforms are as fierce as the competition between longtime rivals when they meet in prime time.”

Eight teams in total are participating in the Rivalries uniform looks in 2025, with the AFC East and NFC West participating.

The Arizona Cardinals became the first team to wear their designs during Thursday’s loss to the Seattle Seahawks.

Miami is hoping for a better result than Arizona and its first win of the season. The Dolphins lost to the Indianapolis Colts, New England Patriots and Buffalo Bills to start the 2025 campaign.

They should at least be relatively fresh for Monday’s contest, as the Week 3 loss to Buffalo came on Thursday Night Football. Not playing until Monday in Week 4 means they have enjoyed something of a mini-bye ahead of the game against the Jets.

New York is also 0-3, so there figures to be some desperation on the field Monday.

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SAIF ZAIB – (NORTHAMPTONSHIRE) – 61%

1,387 runs, average 66.04, six centuries, six half-centuries

Saif Zaib has been a beacon of light in a season of struggle for Northamptonshire.

Batting at number five, he has often been called upon to rescue a brittle batting line-up from which no other batter features in Division Two’s top twenty run-scorers.

He converted six of his 12 50-plus scores into three figures while also chipping in with 13 wickets with his slow left-armers.

The good news for Northants fans is he remains under contract until the end of the 2027 season.

TOM ABELL (SOMERSET) – 52%

1,022 runs, average 51.10, three centuries, five half-centuries

Though his side’s push for a maiden Division One title faltered in the final month of the season, 2025 was another fine year for Tom Abell.

A century in the penultimate round was his third of the campaign and saw him into four figures for the season with an average of more than 50.

The 31-year-old also helped his club to the T20 Blast title.

MARCUS HARRIS (LANCASHIRE) – 46%

1,027 runs, average 60.41, three centuries, five half-centuries

Former Australia Test batter Marcus Harris has had a year to remember after joining Lancashire.

The 33-year-old initially signed as an overseas for the Championship and One-Day Cup this summer but swiftly put pen to paper on a deal for another two years.

The former Leicestershire and Gloucestershire man – who has won 14 Test caps – made a blistering start, passing 800 runs in May, though his momentum did wane in the second half of the season as Lancashire were unable to mount a push for promotion from Division Two.

Having been part of the 2024 team, Glamorgan’s Colin Ingram was edged into fourth in the voting by Harris.

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