Columnist and season-ticket holder Giles Smith has been considering the evolution of the goal celebration, and considers John Terry quite the expert.

To be honest, I thought he must have got himself a new tattoo. That was my first thought when John Terry came hurtling towards me (and, for that matter, a few thousand other people) on Sunday afternoon, pulling the short sleeve of his shirt up onto his shoulder and wrenching at his captain's armband.

I thought he must have got a new tattoo and that he was tugging the shirt up and pulling the armband away in order to expose this tattoo, so that we could see it, and whatever message it contained - probably a message relating to the recent difficulties, and most likely on an uplifting, or even closure-seeking, theme.

And, even in that quickly unfolding moment, I had enough time to experience a small tug of uneasiness, bordering on disappointment. Because it occurred to me that, if the point of this goal celebration was to show off an argument-clinching tattoo on his upper arm, then the whole thing was being done mostly with television in mind - and with me (and those few thousand other people) as, at best, a bit of an afterthought.

Only television cameras, after all, would have been able to see the tattoo in enough detail to get the point across. Holding up a tattoo isn't exactly what you would call a stadium-oriented gesture, given that tattoos tend to be much smaller, even, than slogans scrawled on undershirts, which themselves can have trouble getting their full impact across to people in Row N and beyond.

Unless, of course, we're talking about David Beckham's tattoos, many of which appear to be life-size. Indeed, some of Beckham's may well not be tattoos at all, in fact, but actually brass rubbings - the simple result of laying the midfielder on a cathedral tomb somewhere and going over him really hard with a crayon.

But that's Beckham. An upper arm tattoo on John Terry, by contrast, small enough to be at least partly concealed by a captain's armband, would need the magic of television to convey its message. Fine for those at home in their sitting rooms, but for those of us in the Matthew Harding Upper… well, even with our glasses on, we'd be struggling.

And that would have meant shades of Beckham again. In his pomp, at both club and international level, Beckham was always a master of the goal celebration performed directly in front of the photographers - as if, even in the heat of the action, he had one eye on the next day's back pages and the way the story would play more broadly.

But, of course, on Sunday - as it became clear when the celebration unfolded, down there on the touchline, in a pile of blue-shirted bodies - there was no tattoo. Terry's celebration turned out to be about the armband, rather than about anything the armband was concealing, and it enabled one to feel that this was no pre-meditated, coldly calculated photo-opportunity - hence its rather touchingly fumbled and slightly confusing appearance. Moreover, it seemed to be done chiefly for the benefit of the people who were right there to see it. It put the fans in the ground first, in other words, as all good decent-minded celebrations should.

We do quite well for goal celebrations in general in my part of the ground. But then, if you're adjacent to or above a corner flag (and this wasn't something I was able to bank on, back when the old West Stand was demolished and a random seat re-allocation sent me off in this direction), you're going to see quite a bit of action in this regard.

The corner flag, or the vicinity of the corner flag, has become pretty much the prime destination for the modern-day goal celebrant - the place they naturally head for to do their necessary celebrating. What Spain has long been to budget holidays in the sun, the corner flag now is to goal celebrations.

Yes, periodically, a goalscorer will sprint right back to the dug-outs on the half-way line - either to leap movingly into the arms of the coaching staff and substitutes or (equally movingly) to make a point to Rafa Benitez. And just occasionally, logic dictates that a goal celebration must take place as close as possible to wherever the opposing fans are stationed.

Far more frequently, though, the corner flag is the desired target area, providing both a decent distance for a bit of post-goal sprinting or hopping or knee-sliding, and also a natural terminus for that sprinting/ hopping/ knee-sliding. The idea, in ordinary circumstances, of heading back up the pitch and celebrating somewhere in the vicinity of the centre circle, or even doing some celebrating on the edge of the penalty area in which you just scored, simply makes no sense in 2010. It would be like reintroducing gas light or traction engines.

Anyway, with a few internal problems happily laid to rest by Terry's cathartic celebration, not to mention the FA Cup victory over Stoke which it confirmed, it was nice to be able to relax a little and (for the first time in ages, it felt like) enjoy some other people's football-related spats, without feeling personally involved or implicated in any way.

Like, for instance, the whole 'Red Knights' saga, in which a small team of bankers, fresh from bringing the global economy to the brink of doom, suddenly declare themselves the saviours of Manchester United - thus making ownership by the Glazers look, by contrast, suddenly rather attractive. Lots of fun to be had there.

Or like the difference of opinion occasioned by Chris Waddle's comments about Theo Walcott. The former England international, now a BBC Radio 5 Live pundit, announced that Walcott was, in his opinion, not in possession of 'a footballing brain'. Arsene Wenger (who, whatever else you may care to say about him, always offers excellent value in these situations) replied that, 'Walcott has a footballing brain. He also has a brain' - a sensational put-down, almost worthy of Oscar Wilde (and I'm not being sarcastic).

And Walcott, too, hardly disappointed onlookers by saying, when confronted with Waddle's verdict, that he 'didn't really listen to the opinions of people who are outside football'. One can't know for sure, of course, but it is entirely possible that Waddle will have been even more stung by the casual suggestion that he is someone who is outside football than he will have been by the casual suggestion that he is someone who has no brain.

Great stuff, in any case. And as people are always saying - football is all about opinions.