The differences are obvious: he doesn’t have a shock of guitar-hero hair, or a nose so busted it resembles the last rocky scramble on a high Lakeland fell, and while he has never enjoyed the luxury of playing for a champion club side, he has been spared the burden of leading an amateur international team guaranteed to lose by 60-plus points whenever they run into professional opposition. Yet the similarities between Jac and Jacques, the one-man packs of the modern age, are more striking still.

Plenty of us were guilty of trotting out the hackneyed old line about “never seeing his like again...