It seems faintly ridiculous to ask this man how upset he will be if Everton qualify for the Champions’ League but miss out. Or, indeed, if they fail even to qualify, having been in the top four for most of the season. There are more important things to worry about in life.On the other hand, as Stubbs acknowledges, people who love football can’t help but give it disproportionate status in their lives. It would surely be unthinkable for Liverpool, albeit in triumph rather than shame, to deny Everton again?”Yeah, it wouldn’t go down too well,” says Stubbs, laughing at his own understatement.”With that [1985] team it’s been a case of ‘what if’, because it was on the brink of greatness. Football’s a passionate game and we love it ahead of things we maybe shouldn’t love it ahead of, but … people lost lives.”If anyone can be expected to put football in perspective it is Stubbs, who has twice been stricken by cancer, has had a testicle removed, and has survived a 12-hour operation to remove a tumour from the base of his spine during which his bowels had to be taken out and put back in again.

But with the amount of people who lost their lives it was the right decision [to ban English clubs]. But it still seems worth discussing with Stubbs, the more so because of the emotive whiff of history: the last time Everton qualified for Europe’s premier club competition, by winning the 1984-85 League Championship when he was a teenager standing on the Gwladys Street terraces, they were denied a place in the European Cup because of the shameful behaviour of Liverpool fans at Heysel. The Spanish FA duly chose Real Madrid to defend their crown and booted fourth-placed Real Zaragoza into the Uefa Cup.Of course, a quandary that may depend on a stuttering Everton getting four points from the last three games, or on an inconsistent Liverpool beating arguably the two best teams in Europe, should Milan progress to the final, is a quandary that has every chance of fizzling out. And the blazers at the Football Association, whose decision it would be, have also indicated that they would probably favour blue over red. On the other hand, Liverpool’s Spanish manager Rafael Benitez – whom Everton fans have cheerfully nicknamed Rafael Beneath-us – has already been brandishing a precedent from five years ago, when Real Madrid won the European Cup but finished fifth in La Liga. Bede is winning market share, particularly thanks to an industry-wide shift to thinner chips. Brokers who have seen the company say it is putting on a bullish show.London AsiaMore progress for London Asia Capital, the mini-investment bank working in China and surrounding countries.

It has been appointed to restructure two Chinese companies – a local government-owned coal mining company called Tianneng, and Hubei Pharma, a spin-off from a long-established drugs business.London Asia aims to smarten up Chinese companies to make them suitable for investment from the West, and it gets success fees and preferential investment terms for its trouble.. It reformats, rather than develops simple games, making them available for PCs, for use as in-flight entertainment or for mobile phones.The company is raising £1.5m, valuing it at £5.2m, with the cash funding the publication of new games.BedeSpeculative investors looking for a risky punt might want to look over Bede.The venerable Evolution Securities, Bede’s broker, has just underwritten a £9.3m placing to give the microchip technology company the cash to boost marketing. The semiconductor industry is investing again after the post-Millennium downturn (which hit just after Bede floated, sadly for its blue-chip investors). The company said any extra sales generated would be on top of existing market forecasts.Bede’s “X-ray metrology” tools use X-rays to measure and check the quality of chips. Macmillan may have boasted that “you’ve never had it so good” but, by the time of the 1964 election, no one really believed that line anymore. Constant pressure on the exchange rate, associated with an awkward balance of payments position, had elicited the beginnings of a “stop-go” economic cycle.

Former executives at Morgan Stanley have refused to call off their campaign to oust the investment banking giant’s chief executive Philip Purcell, despite concessions from the board. The stock was priced at almost half the price-earnings valuation of a similar company, March Networks, which came to market last week.IncaGoldYou would have thought that the stock market has had its fill of computer games companies, after a string of disasters but, just as Eidos is gasping its last breaths before being taken over, here comes IncaGold.The idea is that Inca is lower on excitement, higher on profit than other games developers who have gone before. The company, another spin-out from the Israeli technology company Emblaze, operates CCTV systems and has just won a security contract for the new Heathrow Terminal 5. The company was stung by that reaction into issuing a new statement – the day after – saying the decrease was unjustified because those orders and others could bring in up to £3m before the end of the financial year.Visual DefenceVisual Defence, which has raised £26m and floats on Friday worth £45m, ought to see its shares perform well on their debut. The other is to restructure the finance facility,” he said.Scotty says it will break even in the current quarter, thanks to sales of video communications technology for trial by medical services in the Netherlands, by a regional police force in the UK, and in the new Eurocopter.Last year’s fund raising was done at 4p, but the stock dipped as low as 1.875p after last week’s disappointing results. Mr Weber said he recognised the dilutive effect of the facility and was seeking to minimise further dilution “There are two ways of doing that One is a capital raising from existing or new shareholders.