This was lunch in Norwich with a potentially brilliant young footballer, bright, witty and inordinately conscious of the good fortune that had come to him after the unpromising start signalled by his and his younger brother's abandonment by their father, a Nigerian barrister.

The emerging star drove away in a red sports car, trailing his optimism. Twenty years later he hanged himself in a lock-up garage in Shoreditch.

The complicated story of Justin Fashanu is known well enough but it has taken the retelling of it this week in a television documentary by his niece Amal to remind us, if we hadn't noticed, that the national game has still to move on from the intolerance that was at least partly responsible for the tragic end to a life which had come to promise so much."