FA sucks the fun out of Sunday mornings with ridiculous media blackout on kids' football scores... they've all seen Sesame Street, they can count themselves!

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There isn’t a news blackout in Syria right now. On the night of the terror attacks in Paris, we could watch as horror unfolded inside the Bataclan theatre. But if the FA get their way, the details of Under 8s football matches will be subject to reporting restrictions.

No scores, no scorers, no local paper namechecks any more. The FA have identified the real enemies of football and it turns out it’s your granny and her scrapbook. She’s destroying morale, the spiteful old moo. She’s sucking all the fun out of it for the rest of them with her blurry black and white pictures and Sellotaped two-paragraph match reports.

The FA believe to even identify a player in a match in the Under 7s to Under 11s can be harmful to development. Not his, necessarily. If he’s in the news because he’s scored 10 again, he’s probably loving it. But what of the defeated? How will they feel to pick up the weekly free-sheet and find they lost 14-0 again? 

The FA has banned the publication of results for youth games across England in a bid to protect morale 

Well, here’s a newsflash from the father of boys. If it’s your lad in goal, he knows. They’re eight; they’re not idiots. They can count. They’ve all seen Sesame Street. If they’ve lost, they will be fully aware, without having to look in the small print of the sports section of the local paper.

If football isn’t fun for some of the littler ones it is because there seems to be little equivalent of rugby’s mercy rule — if it reaches 50 points before half-time, shake hands, declare the match over, do something else for the second half — so mismatches are more traumatic. It’s the battering the kids don’t want; press scrutiny doesn’t bother them.

Primary age children don’t read local newspapers anyway. They get shown if their picture appears playing the trumpet or as part of the nativity play — or are we to blank those faces out now, for all those who got gypped for the role of Joseph and ended up cast as a sheep? 

Knowing that local print media is on its uppers, however, the FA have widened their net. So not only can local papers no longer report the usual round of Sunday morning scoring feats, there can be no mention of them on any social media outlets. If someone asks little Johnny how he got on, he can’t reply, lest a private conversation about his last-minute winner causes another child to question his future in the game.

Nobody is quite sure what happens if an eight-year-old does blab the result. Maybe Greg Dyke comes round and strangles his cat. Maybe the club are banished from the next round of dog faeces avoidance training. Maybe the FA march on and take their ball away.

It is all such hammer-to-crack-a-nut nonsense.

One of my sons went from reasonable schoolboy level to losing interest and now plays hockey. He tired of it because the FA took too long to work out that a 10-year-old shouldn’t be guarding the same size goal as Petr Cech, not because he was worried about the reviews in the Ilford Recorder. 

The FA believes that overly one-sided scorelines can have a negative effect on a child's confidence 

The news blackout is all part of a whole initiative to reshape youth football and its aims are noble. Smaller pitches, smaller goals, smaller-sided games, less emphasis on results in the younger age groups. It’s all sensible stuff and long overdue.

I remember Robert, the lapsed goalkeeper, sitting in Sir Trevor Brooking’s office and talking to him about it in 2007, after England had failed to qualify for the European Championship.

It was clear the game needed an overhaul. More focus on skill, technique and fun, less on wars of attrition where the biggest boys booted the ball to oblivion on what looked like the Somme battlefield, in the hope of securing an away win and 14th place.

It was back then the FA decided to do away with league tables and published scorelines for those between seven and 11. It was controversial, but it was important to move away from telling kids winning was all that mattered. This latest directive, though, is as extreme as any park-pitch Jose Mourinho screaming instructions and bullying the teenage ref. This sucks some of the fun out of Sunday morning just the same. 

 The FA's decision applies to newspapers, club and league websites and social media posts 

A message of congratulation on the club website, a smudged thumbnail on page 76, where was the harm? ‘One-sided scorelines can act as a disincentive to continue playing for many children,’ says the FA. And this is true. But the scoreline is the issue, not any media furore. This isn’t the Premier League. Reports do not single out the losers. ‘Another nightmare performance by calamity goalkeeper Charlie Croker, 7, condemned Rec Park Under 8s to their fifth home defeat of the season…’

No, local reports, even social media, never bully. Typically, these are harmless morsels of encouragement, the odd photo of some tiny gap-toothed Jamie Vardy, smiling. Usually because he, or she, has scored a goal — or plenty — and achieved the point of the game. And inconveniently that means someone has won and someone has lost and that there may, tucked away in some scrapbook on a grandma’s shelf, be evidence of that.

And why not? These are kids, not FA coaching projects. And it would be nice to remember them that way.