Dispatches from the frontline: Ryan Giggs's favourite Chinese meal is chilli lamb. There is a plate on the wall of Wing's restaurant in Manchester signed by Giggs, endorsing the dish. According to the owner Wing Shing Chu, the Manchester United veteran, despite his well-advertised preference for variety in the boudoir, orders the same thing on every visit. I am able to bring you this latest intelligence thanks to my subscription to MUTV.
The many millions of you not similarly endowed may also wish to know that after Sir Alex Ferguson removes his chewing gum of an evening, he likes to get his laughing tackle around some soft noodles – you would have thought the word "soft" might deter him, but until they start serving "well hard noodles", that's what he gets – and Wayne Rooney's favoured starter is salt-and-pepper spare ribs.
These latest revelations were in a programme called Red Dragons' Kitchen, one of countless shows on MUTV featuring United players in smart restaurants, the channel's favoured ballast, in between the lame-brained phone-ins and coverage of reserve matches.
As it happens, I have eaten in Wing's and found it perfectly fine, if a little pretentious and overpriced, for food not vastly different from the cheap and cheerful places elsewhere in Manchester's Chinatown. Not that that would be a consideration for those earning bulging weekly envelopes in the bright, shiny world of Premier League football.
Lower down the league ladder, things are different. If you were looking for a handy metaphor for the state of football below the Premier League, Blackpool v Hull City on Sky on Friday night would do. Blackpool took to the field in shirts carrying the name of their sponsor, Wonga.com, while Hull's bore that of Cash Converters; a loan firm versus a pawnbroker, more or less. Hard times. The fans' chants, echoing round a half-empty stadium (or half-full, if you are one of those people), Sky's Friday night second team, and a deal of banal football completed the picture.
It was not much more festive at Leeds United on Saturday. The appointment of Neil Warnock means Leeds now have a charmless manager to go with their charmless chairman – which was obviously not the line being sold by Sky, who spoke to Warnock before the match. The new manager was able to reveal the previously well-kept secret that Ken Bates's heart "is in the right place", by which I assume he meant Monte Carlo.
He also declared himself pleased with the way Leeds fans had taken to the Warnock-Bates axis, which is clearly not the whole picture. As someone living rather closer to Elland Road than the Principality of Monaco, I should say the fans' resistance has been so lowered by administration, points deductions, the sale of their best players, and various other indignities, that you could instal a regime of Pol Pot and Piers Morgan and they'd just shrug, and turn up as usual.
Some of them would anyway. Sky pundit Gary McAllister's pre-match prediction of a full house, attracted by a match against the league leaders, and the "two big egos" now guiding Leeds, was way out. A crowd of 20,000 of the most tribal fans in the country tells me that in these difficult times, several thousand others are taking the line that, like Wing's, Bates might be charging rather too much for moderate fare.
Still, if you have missed the cutaways of Warnock snarling in his technical area, berating the fourth official, and his post-match whingeing, you will welcome his return. "I expect a referee and a linesman to spot a blatant handball," was his typical whinge after Leeds's defeat in a match they dominated. Others might say that Southampton had benefited from the eternal Championship truth that with a decent goalie, a well-drilled defence, and a reliable goalscorer, it is a league in which you will often get away with it.
If Southampton's keeper Kelvin Davis was instrumental to the win at Leeds, his performance was eclipsed by the goalkeeping display of the season so far in the thrilling Liverpool–Arsenal match on Saturday. But for Wojciech Szczesny in Arsenal's goal, Liverpool would undoubtedly have been out of sight by half‑time – gratefully acknowledged in post-match interviews by manager Arsène Wenger, and goalscorer Robin van Persie. The cheerful Dutchman demonstrated his command of idiomatic English by graciously admitting "we nicked it", without losing sight of the footballer's sacred duty when faced with a post-match mic, to preface every observation with "to be fair".
The three Championship matches over the weekend – the BBC televised Cardiff City v West Ham United on Sunday – were always going to look a little drab measured against another exciting and unlikely Arsenal comeback. BBC commentator Jonathan Pearce did try his hardest, though, to sell us Sunday's game, with some nonsense about the "haunted eyes" of the Cardiff players after defeat in the Carling Cup final, and the indispensable information that the last time West Ham won in Cardiff "the nation was dancing to the No1 in the charts, Working My Way Back To You by the Detroit Spinners". I'd drop the scripted intro if I were you, Jonathan.
Finally, thanks to ITV sports journo Luke McLaughlin, writing in a personal capacity, who noted a rare appearance by Matt Le Tissier as Sky co-commentator for the Liverpool match. "Le Tissier said 'he'll be disappointed with that' an awful lot," Luke tweeted me. "He'll be disappointed with that."