Everyone agrees: there is something terribly wrong with Cristiano Ronaldo.
He must still be feeling the effects of that summer wrangle between Manchester United and Real Madrid.
He seems aloof. He often refuses to pass. He celebrates his goals with little more than a shrug. Something MUST be bothering him.
Wait, hold on. Weren't those the exact same characteristics he displayed when he was the best player in the world?
The cocksure arrogance, the shoo-ing away team-mates at free-kicks, the minimal goal celebrations that say 'yeah, I am great, what of it?'
And as for passing to team-mates, ED would suggest you don't score 42 goals from the wing without a fairly selfish streak.
Particularly as his assists consist almost entirely - as one did last night - of goal attempts that accidentally find their way to a team-mate.
In any case, how can anyone criticise Ronaldo's body language when he plays in the same team as Dimitar Berbatov? It's like saying Simon Cowell is a bit camp when he's sitting in a room with Gok Wan, Dale Winton and Paul O'Grady.
Berbs cheerfully admitted after bagging a languid and entirely offside brace that, at Tottenham, he sometimes hid and gave less than 100 per cent.
Clearly this is nothing Spurs fans don't know already - and they would still swap Darren Bent at 110 per cent for Berbatov at 60 - but ED was taken aback by his eagerness to announce to a prime-time audience that he doesn't always try.
Although maybe, as ED preached yesterday, he was just being honest and we should all cut him some slack.
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Neither of Berbatov's goals in the 3-0 win against Celtic should have stood, as both times he was offside. And, shortly after the second goal, Wayne Rooney had a valid strike disallowed when he was onside.
Not a vintage evening for Belgian linesmen Peter Hermans and Alex Verstraeten.
After the game ITV pundit Andy Townsend, having had a replay clip foisted on him seconds earlier, gamely attempted to explain why the goals might, by the letter of the law, have been onside.
But, like Berbatov, it quickly became clear that his heart was not in it, and he abandoned his explanation with a quasi-boastful "I've got no idea!"
Yes, God forbid that a man who played over 500 professional football matches, and is now paid hundreds of thousands of pounds a year to analyse the game, should know the rules.
The information he was fed in his earpiece was basically correct. The offside 'line' is judged as the part of the second-last defender that is closest to his own goal - not including parts of his body that cannot legally touch the ball.
That, Townsend may need reminding, means his arms.
So a player can look offside but, if the defender is sticking a leg out towards his own goal, he may well play the striker on. Although that wasn't the case yesterday.
The law might be a bit tiresome but it is rather dispiriting that so few people know it, given the number of contentious offsides and the amount of debate the provoke.
Likewise Habib Beye's red card for a foul on Robinho against Manchester City caused uproar because of the Newcastle player's faint contact with the ball jut before he scythed the Brazilian down.
It seems like a simple rule of thumb: if you touch the ball first, it can't be a foul. Just get a toe on it, and anything that happens after that is nice and legal. Even decapitation.
Sadly, the laws of the game don't agree. Even remotely. There is nothing in there to say that you are allowed to win the ball and then surgically remove an opponent's kneecaps milliseconds later.
And, annoying as media whore darling Graham Poll might be, he does at least know the rules, and it was thoroughly depressing to see him roundly castigated for pointing out a rule that people don't necessarily agree with.
While cricket fans take a perverse and geeky delight in being able to recite all the modes of dismissal (don't forget 'obstructed the field'!), football fans, players and often managers simply can't be bothered to learn how the game works. They're only going to scream at the ref anyway.
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When Thaksin Shinawatra bought Manchester City, who could have predicted that 18 months later he would be sentenced to prison?
Well, OK, anyone could have. And many did.
After all, he was already wanted by the Thai government on corruption charges and had been described by Human Rights Watch as "a human rights abuser of the worst kind".
Early Doors would suggest that Josef Stalin was a worse abuser of human rights, but you get the picture.
Thaksin remains at City as one of four honorary presidents for no other reason than to stay out of a Thai prison. Which, when Early Doors thinks about it, is actually a pretty good reason to have a made-up job.
His colleagues in the veritable sweat-shop that is honorary presidency of a Premier League club are Michael Horwich, Ian Niven MBE and Keith Pinner.
ED can't be sure but it thinks they are the authoritarian former Prime Ministers of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia respectively.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of Thaksin's rule in Thailand - and Early Doors isn't really in a position to pass judgment - the tale hardly represents a triumph for the Premier League's fit-and-proper person test, applied to all prospective club owners.
The test is so easy to pass it must have been modelled on a Media Studies GCSE - Thaksin sailed through and the FA's Lord Triesman recently claimed that Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe would pass.
Mind you - presiding over hyperinflation, refusing to accept the results of officially-sanctioned contests and berating international organisations (the archetypal club v country row) seems like the perfect way to gear up for the business of running a football club.
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QUOTE OF THE DAY 1: Jose Mourinho defends Didier Drogba against accusations of diving, March 2006: "Sometimes he is a player who does not get what he deserves, Drogba is a fighter ... He is the type of player I would say, 'With you I could go to every war.'"
QUOTE OF THE DAY 2: Jose Mourinho on Drogba again: "I am no longer Chelsea coach and I do not have to defend them any more. I think it is correct if I say Drogba is a diver."
Incidentally, if, as Mourinho claims: "I hate diving," you'd think he might have mentioned it to Drogba at some point during the three years he played for him at Chelsea.
Other big Premier League divers, Mourinho reckons, include Cristiano Ronaldo, Fernando Torres and Robin van Persie. The latter two might feel somewhat aggrieved at getting fingered ahead of their immeasurably more collapsible team-mates Steven Gerrard and Emmanuel Adebayor.
FOREIGN VIEW: "Sweet defeat" reckons Marca, who look on the bright side after Real Madrid's 2-1 reverse at Juventus. They are certainly more upbeat than a colleague of ED's who lost an absolute bundle betting on Zenit St Petersburg to beat BATE Borisov. Remember, kids, gambling is neither big nor clever.
COMING UP: As ever, we have live coverage of all eight Champions League games. Chelsea play Roma, whose recent performances have been even more wretched than Al Pacino's. And Liverpool take on Atletico Madrid at an unspecified racism and violence-free haven somewhere in Spain. Oh, right, it's the Vicente Calderon.