6. The game is afoot

As millions of TV viewers settled down last Sunday to watch Tim out of the office and the spectacularly named Benedict Cumberbatch muddle through an expensively constructed riddle in Sherlock and even more around the world munched their way through popcorn whilst observing Jude Law and Robert Downy Jnr in the more extensively titled Sherlock Holmes I can't imagine many would have spent any length of time considering the genius expert penmanship of the original manuscripts from Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle himself has a fascinating back story including being a ships doctor on a West African voyage, a political figure campaigning about Congo ( I can only imagine LuaLua's gratitude), his works were banned in the Soviet Union for reasons I can't grasp and he was a close personal friend of Harry Houdini. Of course his most famous achievement was playing in goal for Portsmouth football club, kind of. He left Portsmouth in 1890, 8 years before Pompey were formed with one Matt Reilly in goal, but Doyle certainly played amateur football for AFC Portsmouth under the pseudonym A C Smith, and a number of AFC Portsmouth players joined Pompey when they were formed so he was a forerunner. I like to think as he waited for games to kick off he would mutter to himself: 'the game is afoot'