It seems Monseuir Gaillard has put his head above the parapet again.
After a month in hiding UEFA's head of spin, subterfuge, mystery, intrigue and darks arts has re-emerged to tell the world that English football fans are not so bad after all.
Apparently, they suffer from their reputation.
Quelle surprise.
Anyone who has followed an English team to Europe at any time over the last decade will be only too well aware that merely being from this part of the world is enough to allow some foreign police forces to treat you like you're the scum of the earth.

Germany is probably the only country you will visit as an English football fan and be treated with respect and decency; which may be the case because, whisper it quietly, German culture is so similar to our own (particularly when it comes to having a bevy at the match).
Spain isn't too bad as the local police tend to just watch you getting as drunk as you like and seeing as it's a place where football hooliganism has never been a major problem they expect the rival fans to get on well - as evidenced most recently by Liverpool at Barcelona and Everton at Villarreal.
But go to Southern Europe and the problems really begin. The combination of police forces with a reputation for resorting to the baton far too easily, well known and well established problems with football hooligans and thousands of visiting fans who are determined to get drunk is never likely to be a healthy one.
More often than not, it is a clash of cultures rather than a premeditated outbreak of violence which is the cause of trouble.
As Gaillard quite rightly pointed out (you can't imagine how hard it was for me to write that) the English drinking culture does not travel particularly well.
Southern Europeans just aren't used to seeing vast crowds of men staggering around city centre streets, p***ing up walls and singing mildly abusive songs.
And like it or not, this is exactly what happens when English football fans descend on continental cities.
Not everyone does this, of course, but experience tells us that the vast majority do.
Knowing this and knowing that it doesn't always go down that well it begs the question of why UEFA are still to do anything about it?
I don't mean bans or any similar draconian measures, although I'm sure that would be exactly what certain people at European football's governing body would like.
All it would take to defuse the situation is to give visiting stewards more power than they currently have when English fans are in town.
Liverpool Football Club sent hundreds of stewards to Athens in a bid to iron out any problems but they were restricted to the role of glorified go-betweens because they were not granted any jurisdiction in the Greek capital.
This meant their advice was not heeded and they were powerless to intervene when things went as badly wrong as they did prior to the Champions League final.
It goes without saying that English stewards have an experience of dealing with English football fans which is unmatched anywhere on the continent.
So why not let them use their expertise when and where it matters most?
They know the problems which can arise and they have dealt with them on many occasions before so surely it makes sense to allow them to do so when as many as 40,000 English fans are attending a game on foreign soil.
This solution to the culture clash between fans and police has been suggested before but UEFA have never treated the suggestion seriously enough to act upon it.
But in the wake of Athens and with the likes of Gaillard finally seeming to realise what the real problem is the time must now have come to take the sting out of the situation by granting English stewards responsibility for English fans when they are on foreign soil.

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