National Football Museum

While in Salford I decided to nip across the Irwell into Manchester to visit the National Football Museum, a modern shard of glass on the outside, and a typically modern museum on the inside with lots of flashing or fragmented screens pandering to those (maybe now a majority) with the attention span of a gnat but the ability to see seven things at once; to be fair much of the contents are of interest, with old memorabilia – shirts, photos, programmes, trophies and even balls – displayed among the video booths and interactive games, but the higgledy-piggledy nature provided no discernable narrative to me, although one pleasant surprise was some interesting artwork ranging from the sublime (exquisite – and very expensive - footballer portraits by royal artist Darren Baker) through the eccentric (King Eric by Michael Browne after Piero Della Francisca’s Resurrection of Christ) to the downright bizarre (the statue of Michael Jackson recently removed from outside Craven Cottage).