ATTENTION Remainers! Attention! I trust you observed, and are tearing your hair out at, the spectacular own goal by the EU. No? You missed it? How could you, for it was scored by the EU’s top striker, Angela Merkel.

She might not be EU captain, aka President of the EU Council (unless that role belongs to the President of the EU Commission; you tell me, you’re the EU fan), but we all know the German Chancellor is the player who counts most on the field. All eyes are usually on her, and her reaction, at any critical point.

Well, I suppose you might have missed the own goal because play at the time was slack. A little excitement had passed when our captain, Prime Minister Theresa May, succeeded in keeping her own goal in tact when outnumbered and encircled by her EU counterparts at an encounter in Brussels. But Mrs Merkel was back on home soil, in Berlin, when she somehow landed the ball in her own net.

She slipped up dribbling around the issue of freedom of movement, on which she said this: “Were we to make an exception for the free movement of people with Britain, this would mean we would endanger principles of the whole internal market in the European Union, because everyone will then want these exceptions.”

The key word is “everyone”. Even if Mrs Merkel didn’t mean that every nation is as unhappy with the EU’s uncontrolled internal immigration as Britain - though some are – the picture is of every EU nation being saddled with policies its people do not want – foisted on to them by the unelected EU elite.

Regardless of what Brexit might finally mean on any one of thousands of issues, here is the compelling reason why we need to free ourselves from the EU – to preserve the democracy it has taken us centuries to forge.

ANDY MURRAY rules the tennis world. He deserves to. At his level we can (almost) take his superb skill for granted. But what stamina, mental as well as physical. It’s probably that which, in the end, has elevated him above his peers.

I still dislike The Mouth – but he’s not abusing anybody, unless it’s himself. He’s a decent sportsman – and modest with it. “I might only be here for one week” was his response to becoming No 1, astoundingly the first British player to reach that pinnacle. “I never thought I’d be here,” he reflected on sealing his position – and you felt he meant it.

I hope you noticed some words by brother Jamie, a triple Grand Slam doubles champion, before Andy clinched the top spot. “A lot of people have gone into our success over the years. Grandparents ferrying us back and forth from school to uni, to give us a chance to practise. Parents driving us down to England every weekend because in Scotland we didn’t have the tournaments…”

Nice sentiments - incidentally putting in perspective that tacky stunt by the then SNP leader Alex Salmond, holding the Scottish flag to catch the camera during Andy’s 2013 Wimbledon final victory over Novak Djokovic. Turns out Andy wouldn’t have been there, or have become World No 1, without England.