You're going to. Welcome. Welcome back everybody. I'm glad you're with me. It's a pretty somber morning after a night where I thought we'd be able to talk about the joy, the bafflement, the invention, the confusion, the heartbreak, the aggression, the arguments, the... the an event which polarizes opinion which causes massive waves of euphoria and despair and instead

it's a broadcast where it's going to test me a great deal because the only place to start is with the genuinely tragic death of Grant Wall. Once of Sports Illustrated, now of

CBS, who died in the Media Tribune last night when the Holland Argentina game was in an extra time. It's a moment first of all to say that for his family

this must be beyond unbearable. It must feel like they've been robbed of somebody.

His brother, for whom he wore that rainbow t-shirt trying to go into one of their early games,

Wales game.

His brother has spoken out in social media saying,

I'm gay, I'm the reason that Grant wore that

t-shirt trying to get into the stadium.

But of course given how

pugnacious and opinionated Grant was about things that he had issues with

the likelihood is because of the way that Qatar treats homosexuality and the rights that gay people don't have. I think there's every chance Grant would have worn that

t-shirt anyway. He'd been ill for a few days with something that the Medical

Center that was available to all journalists

and diagnosed as likely to be bronchitis and he died it's it's a loss of somebody who, I've known a little bit the first person to rave about

Grant to me was Gabriel Marcotti who said that he was the, by far the preeminent writer on on sport but particularly

football in the US Gabriel and I'm now talking maybe 15-16 years ago, said that he felt Grant Wall was one of the leading

writers on sport in the world. It was long-form pieces for Sports Illustrated, an organization that he fell out with a little bit when he left them,

but he lit up while he was there.

Those long reeds were researched and

thoughtful and provocative and interesting.

And the people who broadcast to edit and publish this

...