LET it be known that on May 7 2023 – a historic weekend in many ways – scientists discovered the existence of “time-wasting”, a breakthrough which I believe is being named as the Howe Continuum in excitable research papers.

In the past, this phenomenon had simply only been known as “good game management”, but its true form has now been identified after the close study of football players in red and white shirts.

That’s right folks, nobody ever – ever! – has chipped a few seconds off the clock when winning a football match before Arsenal so cynically brought things to a grinding halt once ahead against Newcastle United on Sunday.

How typical of Arsenal – one of only two teams to score more than 80 goals this season in the Premier League – to invent this mysterious new strategy of protecting a winning position.

Having struggled to find much to attack Arsenal with this season, we’ve reached the part where the usual mob of fan media, TV pundits and newspaper columnists needing to fill space by jumping on a trending topic have landed on… taking too long to take a goal kick.

Needless to say, time-wasting is one of the most irritating things in football, unless it’s your side doing it. It’s gone on forever and all teams do it.

My team. Your team.

Surely, Eddie Howe, the Newcastle manager, must have afforded himself a little smile after commenting on Arsenal’s go-slow. Nobody forgets how his team kept sitting on the floor to puncture the match the two teams played at the Emirates earlier in the season – and they weren’t even winning the game back then.

During the Qatar World Cup there were all sorts of condescending comments about the large amounts of injury time played at the end of each match. Our press corps and commentators thought it was such a hoot and began riffing along the lines of “who knows – there’s probably 20 minutes left in this one” when the final whistle drew near in the later stages.

There were a million different things wrong with the winter World Cup, but actually playing the right time was not one of them.

If we want to see a full match, the guys with the timers here should just stop the clock too.