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Gawky and bespectacled but with the brio of a scrapper, Pearlman was dressed like a quintessential sports geek: black-and-yellow Pittsburgh Pirates hat and Pittsburgh Maulers shirt, the latter a long-gone professional football team.

The young bespectacled journalism graduate is a conservative Muslim.

Denis Law stood on the platform at Huddersfield train station; slim, bespectacled and 15-years old, so small and so inconsequential that the waiting officials from his new club didn’t pick him out in the crowd.

Shannon, bespectacled and business-casual, admires his son’s handiwork and starts his own tune in a sweet falsetto: “To think this all leads to us / It’s quite beautiful even to think about...”

When I visit on a Wednesday evening, the bespectacled Neufeld is nervous.