THE biggest act of hypocrisy of any national newspaper during Euro `96 was perpetrated by the Daily Mirror on Thursday morning and it could end up with them being sued by their own football correspondent Harry Harris.

That morning the Mirror printed a back page with the word Traitors over pictures of their football men Nigel Clarke, Frank Wiechula and Tony Stenson in the stocks with Harry Harris apparently being led away to the Tower by a growling Yeoman with an axe.

A letter from "The Sports Editor" read "I have had them arrested on behalf of the nation. Their crime? Traitors to the cause of English football."

Which you might think was all very funny except that to be fair to Harris et al, it's the sports editor, David "Barmy" Balmforth, who comes up with the most vitriolic anti-England nonsense. Harry Harris doesn't sit at Wembley and draw donkey's ears on players or come up with crap vegetable jokes.

In fact a Mirror photographer had been specifically told to break the England camp's rules and disturb England's best player on the eve of a vital game to get a picture of Gazza fishing. And who ordered him? Balmforth.

As a result the snapper came within a foot of running over Gazza's toe and putting him out of Euro `96. So who is the real traitor? Fax the Mirror.

However, Mirror readers who were invited to fax Barmy demanding his head might recall that 86 per cent of them wanted Gazza dropped barely three weeks ago. Perhaps they would care to give themselves up at the Tower of London.

Anyway, unlike the rest, Harris flatly refused to be put, in the stocks by the Mirror so they grafted his picture by line on to someone else's body to get their yeoman photo. Harris, according to associates, is hopping mad and is contemplating, legal action.

The Mirror's plummeting editorial values were equally well illustrated by their puerile front page on the day of the Holland match imploring readers to show their patriotism by "not going near a windmill, drawing a moustache on any Van Gogh you see, calling the Dutch Embassy and asking for the number of the Dutch Mountaineering club and telling Ruud Gullit he's got a silly haircut."

Meanwhile, France's preparation for the quarter-final with Holland today at Anfield was disrupted when a police out-rider took the party the wrong way up the M62. They flew from Newcastle to their new base in Bolton to try to save some time. But on the way to training at Anfield, their escort got lost and took them into the Pennines - wasting nearly two hours.