To print or not to print? It’s not unusual for journalists to be asked to pull a story - and there is usually a judgement call to make about relating to its effects and the public interest.

However, to be asked not to run football results is taking censorship to a whole new level.

Bizarrely, the issue of U11s football scores has become front page news elsewhere in the county after Caroline McRoyall, chief executive of the Surrey County FA, took exception to the results which appear in the Surrey Mirror.

Ms McRoyall quoted the FA Youth Review which is “designed to make youth football more child centred and less results orientated”.

To a degree that’s laudable. Who wants their little Johnny to fail and be upset?

But that hardly transfers into reality because life itself is competitive.

If same little Johnny can’t be bothered to read or write or can’t add up should we be upsetting him by telling him he’s passed his exams anyway?

Perhaps every child should leave school with a sackful of A grades so as not to hurt their feelings (did anyone say that happens already?).

However, there is an entirely different argument in all this. As recently as the early 2000s the Surrey Comet devoted half a page of its sports section to football results - both adults and youngsters.

We also ran mini reports of Kingston Little League games. Bowls was also given a similar treatment.

The pressures on space became more acute and, at the start of one season, the decision rightly or wrongly was taken that the space could be better used.

The reaction? One or two of the people who provided the results weren’t too happy, but from everyone else, not a murmur.

Following the introduction of the internet, and without anyone really noticing, printing a whole host of football results five or six days later had become obsolete.

As, coincidentally, had printing lengthy match reports on games that took place the previous weekend.

So while Ms McRoyall may have taken political correctness a little too far, it does beg the question more than a decade on of why some newspapers still lavish vast amounts of space on scores in all print.

And one thing is for certain, whatever youth football scores are, they’re not front page news.