Dan Gosling’s goal for Everton last night with two minutes left on the clock was exactly what people mean when they burble vaguely about the magic of the FA Cup. Perhaps those commentators and pundits who vocally doubt whether all these foreign players and managers quite ‘get’ what the FA Cup is all about are right after all. If Rafael Benitez really ‘got’ the FA Cup then he’d have brought on a teenager who nobody had heard of too and let the Magic Of The FA Cup do the rest, wouldn’t he?

Of course, many of you won’t have seen the only goal of a match that, whilst reasonably compelling, was lacking in quality. This is because ITV accidentally went to a commercial break early, and in many parts of the country the next thing viewers saw was Everton celebrating.

Even before this happened, I’d been thinking that there’s something inherently wrong about watching FA Cup coverage on ITV. You feel like you’re watching a dodgy bootleg copy of the competition, or a Tesco Value version. It’s like being a kid and getting given Mega Blox instead of proper Lego by a well-meaning relative who doesn’t know there’s a difference. It’s not just that the BBC does the coverage better, although they do: their presentation team is better, their direction is better, their their graphics are better, and when it comes to highlights packages, their editing is better. Even apart from all that, it just doesn’t quite feel like the FA Cup.

I was one of the lucky ones who got pictures back just in time to see Van der Meyde cross to Gosling. But ITV’s blunder, a momentary error which quite simply ruined three hours of coverage, moved well beyond any sense of aesthetic preference for BBC coverage. It was apparently down to an automated system which failed to take account of overruns. Well, fair enough: I mean, who could have imagined that a game of knockout football might overrun?

Will the FA take note of this? Probably not, as it simply comes down to who pays them the most money – although it’s said the BBC pundits’ tendency to criticise the England team when they were playing poorly upset the poor lambs and led them to favour ITV. (This being the case, I do wonder what they made of ’Arry Redknapp laying into England’s mildly lacklustre performance against the Czechs last August, which was not only disproportionate but plainly self-interested as ’Arry had made it plain he wanted the England manager’s job.)

This was insulting to the BBC, which put a lot of work into re-establishing the reputation of the Cup when the FA was letting it wither on the vine: making Cup weekends into big events, introducing Sunday teatime matches and trailing it across all platforms. By contrast, the FA Cup/England deal the FA made with ITV and Setanta has gone poorly thus far. Setanta’s coverage is horrible and amateurish, opening England games with some right hackneyed patriotic nonsense depicting three CGI lions roaring over the White Cliffs of Dover and then some actor reading a cod-theatrical ramble about England’s recent travails. They also embarrassed the FA by demanding silly money for the England-Croatia highlights – no terrestrial broadcaster is going to pay seven figures for second-hand content that goes out after 10:30pm.

ITV’s splitting of the FA Cup, meanwhile, gives poorer value for non-Setanta subscribers than the BBC’s did, with two matches per weekend instead of three and no Sunday-night highlights package. Last night’s cock-up was a new low. I’d suggest that
Damn! I made an absolutely killer point just there to round off my argument, sorry you missed that. Technical hitch.

For a club who’ve often thrived on their underdog status, Manchester City may well be feeling the culture shock of being a team who people want to see fail. The press coverage of the Kaka deal-that-never-was demonstrates a substantial level of ill feeling towards the gauchely super-rich City: the media is happy to benefit from the lurid stories the club is generating, but happier to kick the club after a failure. A speculative attempt to pull off the most audacious transfer in football history has resulted in them being painted as bunglers.

The Observer reported at the weekend on rumours in Italy that Silvio Berlusconi had followed a strategy that had no intention of selling Kaka, but would provide good PR for Milan when the player stayed. (First news of the transfer broke on a Berlusconi-owned website.) This idea is given credibility by City and Milan’s differing accounts of what stage negotiations had reached before the deal collapsed: City claim they never talked to the player, but Milan claim it was Kaka’s decision. Kaka’s get-a-room statement of undying love for his present club seems aimed at emphasising this.

City’s chairman Garry Cook, who is fast emerging as a man so awful he makes Peter Kenyon merely look like scum by comparison, has been left to bluster about Milan ‘bottling’ the deal in a desperate attempt to make the situation less embarrassing for City. If Milan never planned to sell Kaka – and I agree with Mark Lawrenson (that’s a first) that the club wouldn’t have risked a £100m asset by continuing to play him if a deal was imminent – then it has undeniably worked out well for them. They’ve confirmed the loyalty of their best player and, although they had good reason to cash in on him (the fee would have wiped out the club’s debts), they have ultimately done what the fans wanted.

It’s also far from inconceivable that Milan were keen to put City in their place. However much Sir Alex laughs it off, City’s new spending power is bound to be of concern to Europe’s big clubs, who know that City have enough cash to unsettle any player. Milan have done themselves, and every other club with a player City might want to buy, a favour by embarrassing City.
Although Kaka might have seemed the obvious choice for such a massive bid, his image as football’s boy scout would have taken a heavy knock. Would it have been worth the huge piles of cash to play for a club which can’t offer Champions League football until the season after next at the very earliest, and is genuinely at risk of relegation this year? (It would be satisfying to see Cook’s reaction if that happened: he has stated that he would like promotion and relegation to be abolished. Added to the fact that Cook is a lifelong Birmingham City supporter, this tells you all you need to know about him.)

Milan have done the football equivalent of taking the nouveau-riche members of the country club down a peg or two. By emphasising the (possibly untrue) notion that Kaka himself made the decision, Milan have made it more difficult for other players to accept the City shilling. As they look to secure Premiership survival, City would do well to choke it down, stop playing fantasy football and instead keep looking for players like Wayne Bridge – a very good player, proven in the Premiership, who already has a few winner’s medals but would like to be first-choice somewhere.

‘We’re not anybody's fool,’ Cook said yesterday. ‘The perception that we are out there throwing money around is simply not true.’ City have just purchased Nigel De Jong for a fee reported to be £17m. The BBC notes that a clause in the midfielder’s contract would have allowed him to leave in the summer for £1.8m. Draw your own, presumably hilarious, conclusions.

Having watched a first-choice Villa team go out of the FA Cup in the third round to Man United for the fourth time in seven seasons, I feel particularly aggrieved by the practice of other clubs of a similar standing putting out less-than-full-strength teams this weekend. We're all aware by now that the big boys are likely to rest key players, especially if they're playing lower-division opposition - which is fair enough, as they shouldn't need their entire first-choice XI to beat a team from League One. It's also understandable that clubs sitting in the basement of the Premiership are going to concentrate on the league, because survival is worth a lot, lot more than a trophy.

However, this season it's been noted that clubs who are, surely, in no danger of getting relegated - the Evertons and the Blackburns - tried to get away with resting a few, and have got dumped out in amusingly embarassing fashion. It's been suggested that, for these clubs, getting into Europe is more of a priority. Yet it's unlikely that they'll make the European Cup (it's not a league and half the teams aren't champions), and even if they do they'll have to play a qualifying round - we all remember Everton's gargantuan effort to string together enough "gritty" one-nil wins to make fourth place in 2005, only to go out immediately to Sevilla (whom, it should be noted, a team like Arsenal or Liverpool would probably have avoided in the draw on account of their good recent European records: it's easy to forget how many good teams go into that qualifying round, because our representatives usually draw someone fairly beatable).

So teams who are prioritising "being in Europe" are, in effect, prioritising the UEFA Cup. Now... sorry, but how much does that really add to a season since the big boys decided they should all play each other every season rather than wasting time playing the champions of Luxembourg? OK, so the UEFA cup adds a bit of cash to a club's coffers, but is the opportunity to play Aris Salonika and FC Brann really that enticing - to fans or players? Don't get me wrong, I'm keenly hoping that Villa make it this year, but I'd hate to think we were sacrificing any chance of winning the FA Cup or even the League Cup for the sake of our efforts to make the UEFA Cup.

The game is about winning things, not "being in" things. Conspicuously, the only English club to have won the UEFA Cup in over twenty years is Liverpool, in the days before it was possible to be crowned the champions of Europe after scraping fourth place in your domestic league, and the only English clubs to have won any European honours at all since the Heysel ban was lifted are now members of the Big Four. The others have a habit of muddling through against teams you've never heard of (and who, frankly, often sound made-up), then getting beaten by the first genuinely decent side they encounter. I, for one, was far more enthused in the 1990s when Villa won two League Cups than I was when we went out of the UEFA Cup on away goals in a 1998 quarter-final against Atletico Madrid. In fact, I didn't even remember that we got as far as the quarters that season - I had to look it up on Wikipedia - but I clearly remember the League Cup wins. Which proves my point quite well, I think.

Well, here we go on another thrilling cycle of boom-and-bust expectations for the England team. After a few weeks of we-can’t-beat-anyone-probably-not-even-Kazakhstan type despair, we’ve got a new manager and we’re talking about winning the World Cup again. What’s doubly ridiculous about this is that we’re already hearing concerns that whilst Fabio Capello may win us some games (I hear he is quite good at that), we won’t do it very stylishly.

Let’s step back from that statement, to make sure we’ve really taken it in: some people are worried that Fabio Capello will destroy the England team’s propensity for playing attractive football. Apart from being a beggars-can’t-be-choosers situation on a par with a group of crack-addicted tramps wondering which Fortnums Christmas hamper to order, how often have you ever seen England play really attractive football?

We’ve only ever pulled it off intermittently. The 4-1 win over Holland in 1996, remember, was followed by the turgid 0-0 against Spain. The 5-1 against Germany (which, though a marvellous result, was full of comedy defending – Germany simply failed to punish ours) was followed by a scrappy 2-0 against Albania. I suspect that if you ask around, you’ll find that most people who aren’t England fans will not think of England as an exciting team to watch.

The fact is, teams tend to play more attractive football when they actually keep the ball, and regardless of any concerns about too many foreigners in the Premiership or players being paid too much, keeping possession has been the England team’s problem for as long as I’ve been watching them. The good performances usually come when we sort that out.

This is why I think Capello is the ideal manager for England right now, because I think he will put an emphasis on possession. I can’t see him going for full-on catenaccio, because England will never make a system like that work, but I think he will want to see tight possession football, and that’s more likely to win games for England than trying to play a sparkling, free-flowing game. Yes, the man was sacked from Real Madrid for winning too defensively. But that’s Real Madrid, who don’t buy defenders because they’re boring. And, lest we forget, Capello’s England haven’t even started playing yet, never mind winning ugly in the predicted fashion.

Apart from anything else, it’s not as if there are other potential managers who could get England playing attractive football – least of all the English candidates, who have had to master the conservative style necessary to hold your own in the Premiership mid-table these days. Harry Redknapp might have managed it, but only by bringing in a bunch of prodigiously talented Africans and Eastern Europeans who suddenly discover hitherto unsuspected English grandparents.

Worst. England manager. Ever.

That’s not just my opinion – the statistics back it up. He has the worst record of anybody to have done the job. He’s dropped 13 points in 16 months’ worth of qualifiers, compared with Eriksson’s 11 dropped in five years. For about two days I’ve had ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ by Joni Mitchell stuck in my head, and it’s suddenly become spookily relevant. I don’t want to say I told you so, but… actually, I do. Many England fans took qualification for granted and failed to see just how much Sven was delivering. This is the all-English alternative. Ah, the pride.

It’s hard not to feel that Sven would’ve got the necessary result against Croatia, given that he did so in the final match of every qualifying campaign and group stage he oversaw. In fact, Eriksson wouldn’t have needed the astonishing lifeline McClaren got. Many England fans banged on about Sven’s ‘passionless’ nature on the sidelines: at least he looked like he was thinking about the game. Against Croatia we saw McClaren stood with his brolly looking for all the world like a man waiting for a bus.

To be fair, Sven’s final matches as manager were deeply unimpressive: the World Cup was a disappointment in terms of performance, although arguably not in terms of achievement. The quarter-finals are about as well as we usually do in these things, unless we’re on home soil. But McClaren has totally failed to eradicate that hangover, offering instead empty gestures and meaningless soundbites. Of course, we’ll have the debate about just how good the team actually is, and we should examine the problems behind the team, but Eriksson did so much more with the same group of players and, Beckham aside, they should be hitting their peak rather than heading into decline.

Though I hate McClaren, I wasn’t one of those who wanted England to lose just to prove myself right. However, if I may take a leaf out of the big ginger fuckwit’s book for a moment and Take The Positives, this may well not be a bad thing. I’d rather we lost out on getting to a Euros, sacked the coach now, and started sorting things out, than stumbled over the line, had a crappy tournament (don’t forget, the group stages are usually harder in the Euros than in the World Cup), ‘kept faith’ with a rubbish manager and got found out in World Cup qualifying. We need a better coach, the ‘golden generation’ need a wake-up call and that’s what we’re hopefully going to get.

We will hear more about the need for ‘pride and passion’. I for one am sick of all this God-for-Harry bollocks that constantly surrounds any debate about the underachievement of the England team. It’s not pride or passion we need, it’s basic competence (although admittedly a bit of hard work wouldn’t go amiss). That’s what delivered our best performances of McClaren’s reign, the wins over Israel and Russia that convinced many people, myself included, that the coach had screwed the wheels back onto a faltering campaign (more by accident than design, given that the best performers were those covering for injuries). We passed and kept the ball well, something which we suddenly seemed incapable of in the final couple of matches. Other teams – Croatia, for one – seem to find this the easiest thing in the world.

That’s where the emphasis should be, and I think we’re more likely to get it from a non-English coach. Obviously, as a Villa fan, I have a vested interest in them not picking Martin O’Neill, who would nevertheless do a great job, I think – and surely the FA won’t want him unless he’s sharpened up those all-important PowerPoint skills. Given that O’Neill apparently doesn’t want the job now, and neither do any of the other prospective candidates, Fabio Capello is already looking a great bet. He immediately declared his keen interest, which proves once and for all that he is indeed mental. However, he’s available, he’s had a lot of success, he favours a creative but cautious approach and he wasn’t afraid to drop superstars when he came in at Real Madrid. He sounds perfect.

Instead of looking for a yes-man, the FA might consider the benefits of his Mourinho-style outbursts in distracting media attention from whatever embarrassing crap they happen to be getting up to that week. Because they will, because the FA never bloody changes. It’s probably too much to hope they’ve learned enough humility to not piss off all the decent candidates this time.

I must admit to being a little suspicious of all these stories about strife at Chelsea, just because it’s surely what everyone who isn’t a Chelsea fan wants to hear. No more money! Mourinho’s off! Terry’s going with him! Lampard’s agent has found an obscure clause that lets him off his contract for £8 million! Peter Kenyon’s restaurant expense account has been frozen! Etc.

On the other hand, I feel a little vindicated: I’ve been saying for a while that Abramovitch wasn’t going to fund unlimited big-money signings, but given that Abramovitch is unimaginably wealthy, it’s hard to tell. That’s the whole ‘unimaginable’ part of it, you see. My thinking, though, has always been that he’s a businessman and however much cash he ploughs into Chelsea, he does want to get at least some of it back. This judgement was partly based on the fact that I’ve heard talk of a ‘five-year plan’ at Chelsea (although not the kind that Stalin was so fond of), whereby Chelsea would be generating enough money to no longer require the massive cash injections Abramovitch has been administering with his massive cash syringe.

It now seems likely that the £30 million for Shevchenko was the last hurrah of Chelsea’s silly-money era (as it will no doubt be described in the history books), designed to give Abramovitch’s little mate the accolade of world’s most expensive footballer (which looks more like a double-edged sword all the time, but Roman probably meant well). Chelsea have gone from signing the biggest transfer cheques world football has ever seen to griping about whether to offer Bolton more than £2 million for Tal Ben Haim. Vive la difference. It’s hardly surprising if Mourinho is indeed irritated with Abramovitch – but then, as Mourinho was reportedly keen to sign Milan Baros, Abramovitch is also entitled to think that Mourinho has gone absolutely fucking mad.

Villa fans have been dreaming about getting shot of Baros for about a year, and we’ve just been hoping that we could get enough cash for it to not be too embarrassing (annoyingly he reached his 50th appearance for the club against Manchester United last month, thereby obliging Villa to pay another instalment to Liverpool and raising the overall fee to £7 million… sob). Indeed, Villa have taken a leaf out of Chelsea’s book on this transfer: when the tedious Ashley Cole saga reached an impasse, it became a swap deal, enabling both clubs to claim victory. Likewise, if John Carew performs reasonably well for Villa – and he’s made a great start, adding another dimension to the attack by being able to run towards goal and hit the target – it’ll look like we robbed Lyon blind by fobbing off Baros on them, regardless of how much money we wasted on signing Baros in the first place. Thanks for the tip, Kenyon.

Still, if Mourinho does depart as has been widely predicted, I will miss him. He seems to have annoyed more and more people as time goes on, but these people seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that football management is a dignified profession. He does his job well and he’s provided me with a lot of amusement: no complaints. As for Chelsea themselves… well, I don’t want them to go on dominating the Premiership forever, but they always had one thing in their favour as far as I’m concerned: they aren’t a member of G14. See the previous column for why this is a good thing.

This week the G14 – the cabal of European super-clubs who are diligently attempting to ruin football – could be heard bleating at the appointment of Michel Platini as UEFA president. Yes, he’s mates with Sepp Blatter and that obviously counts against him, but the G14 mainly hates his plan to modify the Champions League (remember: it’s not a league and half the teams in it aren’t champions). Platini wants to reduce the top allocation of Champions League places – the one enjoyed by Italy, Spain and England – from four to three. Given that pretty much everybody agrees that Champions League money has totally distorted the Premiership to the point where only four clubs can conceivably win it, the only people who think this is a bad idea are those involved with those four clubs.

Alex Ferguson bizarrely said he couldn’t see how this would work: either the tournament would have to be made smaller or other countries would get two places. Either he’d been at the red wine when he said this, or he couldn’t be arsed to give it more than two seconds’ thought, because surely it’s obvious that Platini’s thinking is that some clubs from smaller countries can be spared the qualifying round and go straight into the lucrative group phase. This would not damage the tournament at all: you could argue that there would be less quality teams in the group phase under this system, but given that qualifiers FC Copenhagen managed to beat Man Utd this season, they are clearly capable of holding their own.

The fact that the big clubs are complaining that they depend upon Champions League revenue is very telling. They can predict with reasonable confidence that they’ll make it every year and, generally, they do. That shouldn’t be what the European Cup is about. It should be a big achievement just to make it at all. And the UEFA Cup should be a desirable consolation prize, whereas now it’s frankly a load of bollocks: you slog all season to make it to fifth in the table and you’re generally rewarded with a series of defiantly unglamorous trips to Eastern Europe to face hard-tackling teams on churned-up pitches. It’s like playing lower league sides in the FA Cup, only you have to travel further and you’re more likely to get beaten. Forcing some of the big boys to slum it in the UEFA Cup would certainly improve it, perhaps even to the point where someone other than Channel Five bids for the rights to show it.

Being a bit of a tedious sentimentalist when it comes to football, I’d like to have some more underdogs in the Champions League. But the G14 has no interest in underdogs, because their motto is ‘Let’s make sure we win everything there is for ever and ever’. Probably. Outgoing president Lennart Johansson has warned against standing up to the G14, fearing a breakaway, but we can’t let them pull that threat every time something happens which they don’t like. Theirs isn’t the only interest that needs to be catered to. Maybe the underdogs should form their own pan-European cabal. And maybe Villa could form a cabal of formerly great teams with hazy memories of the good old days, along with Nottingham Forest, Ajax and Internazionale.

As noted in my previous piece here, the little bubble of smug liberalism in which I live my life has recently been pierced by the realisation of just how little the sexual politics of many involved in the football industry has moved on in the last few decades. The notion that the presence of women in the game is detrimental and should be resisted was implicit in the manner of treatment dished out to the WAGs by critics of the top players. Helpfully, Luton Town’s manager Mike Newell has now made the attitude explicit by lambasting assistant referee (this is where my insistence on sticking to the term ‘linesman’ falls down) Amy Rayner’s performance in yesterday’s 3-2 home defeat at the hands of QPR.

‘She shouldn’t be here,’ Newell said after Rayner deemed that a challenge on Eyal Berkovic was not worthy of a penalty. ‘I know that sounds sexist but I am sexist.’ It’s hard to know what to write when someone says something like that. Any commentary I could offer seems somewhat redundant. ‘This is Championship football,’ he continued. ‘This is not park football, so what are women doing here? It is tokenism for the politically-correct idiots.’

Newell’s suggestion that Rayner was only awarded her position in order to include female officials in the game would be worthy of suspicion regardless of how he couched it. It might have been reasonable comment had he stated that he was sure there were women who were capable of officiating at a professional football match, but that Rayner was not one of them (although it would still be a subjective judgement depending on how well one believed she had done her job, since opinion on a referee's performance is never unanimous). But no, Newell believes it’s entirely fair to come out and use the words ‘I am sexist’ as qualification for judging how a woman has done her job. This is surely reason to dismiss his opinion immediately.

What does Newell believe women lack that makes them unsuited to assistant refereeing? All you need is an understanding of the game’s rules, decent eyesight, sufficient physical fitness to run up and down the line for ninety minutes, at least one functioning arm to raise the flag with, and the ability to make decisions quickly. I have seen women demonstrate all of those attributes. Certainly my girlfriend often makes better decisions than I do. And yes, the Berkovic decision was probably a penalty, but I can see the room for doubt there – he went down pretty easily, the contact seemed minor and the keeper was looking odds-on to get the ball, so Berkovic probably decided to play for the penalty. It’s a long way from the worst refereeing decision I’ve seen this season – and it’s not as if the profession is renowned for ruthless accuracy. According to Newell, Rayner made a poor decision because she’s a woman. Assuming this to be the case (as I say, the quality of a refereeing performance is always a matter for debate), what excuse do all the other officials have?

Snooker has recently adopted female referees, and the game is generally very excited about this development. This is partly because the standard snooker refereeing garb gives a lady the aspect of someone Gertrude Stein might have tried to chat up in the 1920s, and this has a certain appeal. But the integration has also been easier because the sedate pace and gentlemanly atmosphere of snooker creates less pressure on referees and hence post-match criticism of them is rare, whereas in football the slating of the referee is background noise. Newell is just another manager lashing out after a defeat, picking up on anything he can find that vindicates his team – and letting some pretty unpleasant opinions seep out in the process. Cast your mind back to when the first black referees entered the game and ask yourself whether anyone would get away with saying ‘I know it sounds racist but I am racist.’

‘This one could not be blamed on the WAGs,’ declared Richard Williams in today’s Guardian of England’s game against Macedonia. What he fails to acknowledge is that Saturday’s lacklustre performance fairly conclusively proved that blaming the WAGs – as Williams, and others, did repeatedly during the World Cup – was never valid. To be fair, I don’t think anybody ever placed all of the blame at the feet of the England players’ partners, but the idea that it was an issue worthy of raising at all, let alone with punishingly tedious regularity, struck me as pathetic.

To an extent, the obsession with the detrimental effect of the WAGs was just another way of bashing Sven-Goran Eriksson. Thanks to the sterling efforts of this nation’s press, working tirelessly as ever to uncover information in the public interest, we knew that he was a bit of a shagger. It therefore followed that he’d be more indulgent towards the England players including their wives and girlfriends in the World Cup entourage. So if it was a Sven idea, it logically followed that it was a bad idea in the minds of his many, many, many critics, offering the most damning condemnation that one can make of a football manager: that he was not, first and foremost, a ‘football man’.

Yet are we seriously expected to accept the notion that letting women get too close to the team is automatically a bad thing? Are we seriously ascribing the failures of England to pernicious female influence? If you do believe this, then for God’s sake grow up. You sound like those whingers who blame Yoko for breaking up The Beatles, rather than blaming The Beatles for breaking up The Beatles. But why accept that your heroes have fucked it up for themselves, when you can just blame a woman for intruding on the boys’ club?

England’s shortcomings at the World Cup were their own. The suggestion that the WAGs were a ‘distraction’ makes the players sound like hormonal pupils at a mixed secondary school. They’re big boys – more than that, they’re big rich millionaire boys – and they should be used to having women around. If Frank Lampard was distracted by anything at the World Cup, it was brushing up on his Spanish and imagining how he’d look in a red-and-blue striped shirt.

As ever, England exist in a culture of extremes. Nobody can decide whether this England team is one of the best for decades and has missed a huge opportunity for glory through under-performing, or was simply never that good in the first place. Owen Hargreaves used to be considered (by most people who aren’t me) a clown who had no business in the England team, now his absence through injury is a major blow. The team either needs to modernise or go back to basics. Amidst all this, the WAGs have emerged as easy targets but now that the media circus around them has died down, and England have shown themselves perfectly capable of being a bit crap under ordinary circumstances, it’s time to drop it. If you’re irritated by the amount of press coverage they receive, then stop reading the tabloids and stop buying Hello! They’re not the most admirable human beings who ever lived, but neither do they deserve vilification from critics who refuse to accept that football, and indeed the world, has moved on since the 1950s.

It’s times like this I’m glad I’m half-Scottish, frankly.

With my usual lightning reactions – reminiscent of Jean-Alain Boumsong tracking back to pick up a striker – I’d like to comment on last weekend’s Newcastle-Everton controversy. (Sorry for not posting for a couple of months – I’ve been busy.) Yes, Shola Ameobi was blatantly offside for the Newcastle goal. But there are two points that should be made regarding this.

Firstly, offside is actually impossible to enforce 100% accurately. It’s obviously a very necessary rule, to prevent goal-hanging, and it’s hard to think of a better way of doing this. I can’t think of a way to improve it, other than forcing the BBC to abandon those stupid little flag icons that pop up after every decision. But think about it: the crucial point is whether the player is offside at the moment his colleague plays the ball. The nature of the rule means that the two players will never be perfectly in line – if they are, there’s no offside. This means that the linesman (and he is a fucking linesman, whose idea was it that they should be ‘referee’s assistants’? Sepp Blatter’s probably) has to be looking at two directions simultaneously.

ANY offside decision therefore involves a certain amount of guesswork, as the linesman can either look at the passing or receiving player and has to judge what the other might be doing based on where he was last time he looked. Oh, and he doesn’t necessarily know at what moment he’s going to have to apply this, and he has to decide in a matter of seconds. Y'know, I get as pissed off as anybody when a decision goes against my team, or indeed when a decision goes in favour of a team I hate who always seem to get the rub of the bloody green. But mistakes are understandable.

And secondly, Everton were playing an offside trap. It is impossible to claim the moral high ground after playing an offside trap. Offside – whilst, as noted, very necessary – is probably the most boring element of the game. The only entertaining things about offside are (a) watching somebody explain it to somebody who doesn’t understand football and refusing to help them out, and (b) that joke about the Subbuteo version of the early 1990s Arsenal side having a back four that was fixed together on a plastic rod so you could always move them in a straight line. Hence, attempting to cause offsides to happen constitutes trying to make the game more boring.

There can be glory in a well-timed tackle, a goal-line clearance, even beating a man to the ball to put it out of play, but nobody ever gasps in awe at a really well-executed offside trap. (If I am wrong, drop me a line and tell me what your all-time favourite offside trap was. You freak.) So I have no sympathy at all. And let me tell you, it’s rare that I sympathise with Newcastle United. Think on that.

Well, this is a novel experience: the manager of Aston Villa is somebody I greatly admire and respect. It’s not that I’ve particularly disliked Villa’s managers in recent years, except O’Leary when the club started to struggle, but they haven’t exactly been of the highest calibre (except perhaps Ron Atkinson, who should be given his due for the success he brought to the club, in spite of his subsequent efforts to earn himself the public image of an addled racist).

Yet Martin O’Neill would have been one of my top choices for the job – I lived in Buckinghamshire in my teens and he was a local hero for his work at Wycombe Wanderers, and aside from a short and rather poor spell at Norwich City he’s brought success wherever he’s gone (and at three very different clubs). Seeing him perform punditry duties at the World Cup reminded me of how astute and likeable he is. In fact, I rate him so highly that I didn’t think Villa stood much chance of landing him. He was, to my mind, the obvious candidate for the England job once Scolari had turned it down, but the FA’s twattery in appointing Steve ‘I’ve got the credentials’ McClaren instead has turned out to be Villa’s gain.

Judging from O’Neill’s lack of interest in the three north-east jobs that have become vacant this summer, Villa have partly benefited from geography. Reports suggest that he didn’t want to move or commute too far, allowing him to continue to support his wife, and Birmingham is within easy driving distance of Wycombe. Although O’Neill’s choice may have been dictated by convenience rather than any great love for Villa, few fans will complain. At a club where pessimism has become the default position, it was remarkable to see fans rushing to the ground yesterday as if they’d been told that the first twenty people through the gates would win a year’s supply of balti pies and the chance to give Juan Pablo Angel a slap.

Let’s not forget that Villa have been tipped for relegation, and this newfound enthusiasm could go down the pan very quickly and take O’Neill’s reputation with it if the results don’t start coming in. Until there’s some movement on the ownership of the club, O’Neill will be working under the same restrictions that have frustrated his predecessors. Doug Ellis has promised ‘some funds’, but in the past ‘some funds’ has meant ‘a couple of million for some journeymen from Sunderland’. O’Neill has made no promises other than to try his best. This is probably wise. If nothing else, though, Villa fans can look forward to no longer wanting to throw things at the TV as their manager bullshits his way through another post-match interview.

I have never liked Nicky Campbell. I’m aware that this statement doesn’t exactly court controversy, and it isn’t intended in any kind of polemical way because I’ve never particularly disliked him either. He’s just there, at the edge of the nation’s collective consciousness, being affable yet bland.

Until now. Now I actively dislike him, after he penned a column for the Guardian this week decrying Aston Villa fans for being a bunch of deluded whiners. Apparently we should be grateful to Doug Ellis for cautiously steering the club through the mass-spending 1990s and bringing us out the other side solvent and secure, we should stop complaining about his lack of investment in the club, and we should give up on the notion of ever winning anything again because Chelsea have sewn everything up.

Well, excuse us for giving a toss about the club we support. Bear in mind, I’m speaking here as Mr Long-Distance Armchair Supporter: any right I have to be aggrieved pales into insignificance alongside the loyal season ticket holders who splash out thousands of pounds per year on tickets and travel to follow their club. I’m pretty pissed off as it is, so I can barely imagine how pissed off they feel about the situation. As I’ve said before, I am grateful to Ellis for the fact that Villa didn’t go the way of Leeds United, but it’s time for change.

I don’t think anybody’s expecting Villa to win the league as Campbell suggests, or even challenge for it any time in the foreseeable future. But teams like Bolton, Charlton and Everton have challenged for Europe in recent years on similar resources, and West Ham got to the Cup final. It’s not just about money, but the whole culture at Aston Villa: we can’t get good players to come, and on the occasions that they do come they don’t perform. In recent seasons we saw Birmingham City and West Brom tempting decent players simply by convincing them that the clubs were going places. Both of them got relegated in the end, but before that they convinced players to take a gamble on joining up. There is no longer any belief at Villa that such a gamble might possibly pay dividends, even if the risk of relegation is (slightly) lower.

Another major problem is that no decent manager will work under Ellis. This is crucial as the club’s recent managers have all lacked savvy in the transfer market and we’ve bought a lot of duffers. It’s a sad state of affairs when you’re enviously eyeing the players Portsmouth have managed to grab. The frontrunners for the Villa job are all strongly rumoured to want it only if a new chairman is appointed: the fans will doubtless be close to despair on this issue after reading reports of Ellis’ conduct during the meeting with prospective buyer Randy Lerner, whose straightforward cash offer (not a Glazer-style mortgage against future earnings, as reported elsewhere) foundered as Ellis shifted the goalposts, haggled over figures that had already been agreed, and insisted on retaining a role at Villa Park.

Being suspicious of any potential Americanization of football is one of English supporters’ favourite pastimes, along with bitching about the FA, picking England teams we think are miles better than whoever the current manager has selected, and sneering at talented foreign players for ‘showboating’. I am no exception. There are few things we enjoy more than being aghast at rumours they want to split the game into four quarters to boost ad revenue, or make the goals wider, or replace penalty shoot-outs with a keepy-uppy contest or whatever. (Smart work from Budweiser to notice this and build its recent ad campaigns around it.) But I did have sympathy for Lerner on this occasion, and rather wish he’d come back and have another pop at buying the club.

We can only hope that Ellis behaved this way because he was also suspicious of American interest, and doesn’t behave like an arse in the upcoming meetings with other buyers, because this deal needs to go through fast. All transfer dealings have been suspended until the ownership of the club is settled, for sensible reasons – but if the sale drags on too far into August we’ll end up rushing into a load of panic buys. Last time that happened we ended up with Eric Djemba-Djemba (and we’ve still got him, if anyone wants him). We also need a manager, and it’s evident that we’re not going to get one until Ellis goes. Not a decent one, anyway.

The thing that irritated me most about Campbell’s comments, though, was not really Villa-specific. It was his suggestion that Villa fans should content themselves with the fact of their club simply existing: not winning anything, not going out of business, and hopefully not being relegated. That actually suggests to me that the man doesn’t understand football. We all hold out the hope of doing better than we are: that applies to every football club, even Chelsea, who will be gagging to win the European Cup this season.

And does anybody seriously believe that Chelsea are going to go on dominating English football forever? The gap between the rich clubs and the rest has made the rate of change slower, but things will still change. A couple of seasons ago nobody could see Arsenal getting beaten, now few will give them any chance of winning the Premiership. I also believe that Chelsea cannot go on spending silly money indefinitely: they may be a rich man’s plaything, but Abramovitch will have a business plan for his club. And even if they do just keep spending, this is no guarantee of success: just look at Real Madrid. Maybe I’m wrong. If I am, the Premiership is set to become a very boring place. I blame the Champions League, but then I always do.

The ethics of those in control of top-flight football clubs are of course beyond reproach – just ask any Italian football fan – so naturally I don’t intend to suggest any impropriety when I make the following observations: (1) Doug Ellis appeared last season to fall out with David O’Leary; (2) O’Leary was due a substantial pay-off if his contract was terminated without due cause; (3) Ellis is a colossal tightarse; (4) suddenly, in the past week, a statement (supposedly issued by Aston Villa’s players) criticising Ellis has appeared, nobody seems to know where it came from and O’Leary has been cleared of any impropriety… yet Villa’s internal investigation has resulted in O’Leary’s dismissal, with a severance package that, we are told, reflects the outcome of the investigation.

If you choose to infer any impropriety from these observations, what a cynic you must be.

The incident with the so-called players’ revolt – which they all seem to have denied any involvement with since I last posted here – is one of the oddest events in the short history of the Premiership. Perhaps Villa will elect to explain what they discovered in the course of their investigation, as O’Leary’s departure has made matters no clearer. But surely the club can’t be entirely unhappy with the outcome. I was amazed that O’Leary wasn’t dumped immediately after the end of the season, having predicted his departure after the scoreless home draw with Fulham in April was followed by a 5-0 defeat away to Arsenal. The fact that it has now come after an incident which – whatever his relationship to it – seems to have allowed Villa to renegotiate his redundancy entitlement is terribly convenient for the board.

I’m not complaining, mind. I’ve wanted O’Leary out since it became clear early last season that 2003/4 was a flash in the pan, and if Villa have saved a bit of cash in getting him out then I hope that this will be spent on players (HA! I make joke). He’s turned out to be one of those annoying ‘admit no weakness’ managers who always over-rate the team’s performance, and I’d rather have a Martin O’Neill type manager who’s willing to be critical. In fact, I’d rather have Martin O’Neill, as he appears to be available, but sadly I think he’s too intelligent to take the job. I suspect we’ll end up with Curbishley: he’ll have his work cut out, but he’ll never get a better chance to prove he’s a top-class manager. In fact, if he can turn Villa around, he’s wasted in football and should be sent to balance the Japanese economy or something.

This was a big day in the recent history of Aston Villa. Today the club’s players put their names to a collective statement criticising Doug Ellis’ handling of Villa, a bold and rare move that speaks volumes about how troubled this famous old club – the club which spearheaded the formation of the English football league – has become.

Only you probably didn’t notice, because they released the fucking thing on the day that one of the biggest stories in world football broke. The statement quickly slid down the pecking order on Sky Sports News as the verdict came through from Turin that Juventus, Milan, Lazio and Fiorentina had all been found guilty of match-fixing. There’s a certain irony in the release of a complaint about mismanagement being so poorly managed itself.

It’s a shame because the statement itself is eye-catching by virtue of its comedy value, accusing Ellis of failing to stump up £300 to water the pitches and barring staff from putting a cup of coffee on expenses at the airport. As John Gregory noted, Ellis’ stinginess has been never been any secret – but this statement blows the whistle by supplying concrete examples beyond the constant lack of cash for players. Oh, and they mentioned that too, mainly the fact that Ellis refuses to find the money to sign James Milner, probably the club’s best player last season, on a permanent basis.

To be fair to Ellis, he didn’t go mad when everyone in football was spending silly money in the late 1990s, and we never got into financial trouble as a result: whoever you want to blame for the ridiculous inflation on players’ salaries in recent years, you can’t blame Doug. Furthermore, on the occasions when he has put up the money for new players in the last few years, the acquisitions have usually been uninspiring to say the least. Players like Juan Pablo Angel, Eric Djemba-Djemba and (shudder) Bosko Balaban have flopped at the club (Angel has played well at times, but not well enough to justify what he cost). When he gave David O’Leary the means to sign eight new players last year, he had the right to feel dissatisfied with the club’s poor showing this season.

However, it’s less surprising how poorly the club is doing considering the picture which the players have painted of life at Villa Park. One imagines that they sit around of an evening like Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen, comparing hardships: ‘I ’ad to pay for me own massage after training today.’ ‘I ’ad to do me own massage today.’ There’s no confidence in the club, and with a perpetually small squad, the players are entitled to feel that they are being unreasonably expected to out-perform teams with far better resources. This is a self-sustaining state of affairs, because decent players – even decent players who we could afford – won’t come and the club won’t get better. And Ellis, in characterising that, is blocking the team’s progress. Not that things are likely to get better in the immediate future, now that the players have gone public with how much they hate him.

The phrase ‘lack of ambition’ is so firmly attached to Villa these days that it might as well be our club motto. You should be able to buy mugs with it on from the club shop. If they sold well, maybe we could put up the cash for some new players.

Football fans and pundits are very keen on omens. These range from ‘Team X are never beaten by team Y when player Z is in the side’ – which, although usually partly coincidence-based, at least make some sort of sense – to the utterly meaningless likes of ‘Wolves have never beaten Port Vale on a Thursday fixture in February’ and the mythical ‘unlucky’ dressing-room at the Millennium Stadium. This trend sinks lower whenever England are involved in the World Cup, as we desperately search for correlations between now and 1966: the personal histories of the England squad, friendly results in the run-up to the tournament, world events, what was in the charts then and now – to the extent that a scrappy performance in the opening match against South American opponents is seen as a sure sign of ultimate victory.

At the start of this World Cup, Italian fans were pointing towards the pattern of their previous post-war final appearances: 1970, 1982, 1994. The twelve-year cycle pointed to another place in the final. Nothing else did, frankly: a squad considered less-than-vintage, turmoil in the domestic game and a group that was arguably just as tough as the more commented-on ‘group of death’. I predicted that at least one of the big teams would go out in the first round and picked Italy. But their omen has come good, and this seems to me to be terribly unfair. Our omens always seem to mean fuck all in the end. Why do theirs work out?

The answer, we must grudgingly admit, is that they’ve worked for their omen. A number of the hotly-tipped teams, particularly England and Brazil, turned out to be collections of talented individuals who failed to convince as a team. Italy have played as a unit, balancing their traditionally strong defence with fluidity and variety in attack (ten different players have scored) and just a little more adventure than we’ve seen from them in the past, enough to kill off Ghana, the Czechs and Ukraine in matches that, in the past, would have ambled to 1-0 and left neutrals wishing for Ahn Jung-Hwan to pop up and teach them another lesson. They even got a second against the Germans, despite only having got the first in the 119th minute.

As a result, my longstanding irritation with Italy has abated. This has already happened to me once this World Cup, with the no-longer-cynical Argentina, and they promptly went out – so Italy will probably now lose. I actually don’t mind much who wins the final, I’d just like to see a competitive match. My first World Cup Final was 1990: it was widely believed to be the worst ever, and the first one in which the losing team failed to score (that was what turned me against Argentina in the first place). Since then, every final has been a bit one-sided: Italy stifled the 1994 final against an unusually defensive Brazil, and never looked like winning it; Brazil managed to get worse on the way to the 1998 final, and meekly got beat by France; and the draw fell apart nicely for Germany in 2002, and they lost to the first really good side they met.

So I’m hoping tomorrow will be a good, see-saw game. Every World Cup final played in a year ending in six has seen the losing team score twice, so the omens are good.

All right, I got some things wrong. I thought 4-5-1 might work. I defended Sven bringing Walcott (although I did say we needed some more reliable cover for Owen and Rooney). I even thought Beckham should keep his place and England inarguably played better without him (although I think this is partly because the team realised they could no longer rely on him to rescue them with a moment of inspiration). But I would like to remind everybody that I’ve been a keen supporter of Owen Hargreaves for some time, and was defending him from the haters at the beginning of this tournament. Just in case this fact passed you by, readers.

When Hargreaves played in the first few matches, he did pretty well – but still not well enough to convince those who’d made up their mind that he was essentially useless. But then came Portugal, and he was immense. He seemed to run the length of that pitch fifty times: he practically made up for the loss of an eleventh man all on his own. This was literally the case at one point when his path was blocked by a defender, he looked up to make a pass to the left wing, saw there was nobody there because Joe Cole had gone off, and simply decided to run into the position where Cole would have been and then ran back inside. And he was still getting back and making crucial tackles throughout the match. And he was the only one to convert his penalty.

Not only was it England’s outstanding performance of the match, it was (given the lack of alternative contenders) the team’s outstanding performance of the tournament. Sadly, this is what it takes to impress England fans: not just performing your role effectively in a successful team, but actually running your guts out. We’re weird like that: we’d rather feel proud than win. Effortless players like Zidane are all right for fancy-dan foreign teams, but we like to see hard graft and, preferably, actual blood running down a player’s face and soaking into his shirt. (Top tip for future England players: win the fans over by having a razor blade in your shorts pocket and engineering a clash of heads with an opposition player. When you clutch your head in ‘pain’, sneakily slash it open, avoiding major arteries. As long as the FIFA officials don’t spot it and have you banned for life for carrying an offensive weapon on the field, you’re laughing.)

With Beckham no longer central to the team, the midfield should be rebuilt around Gerrard’s strengths – which means Hargreaves should take over the defensive duties that have stifled Gerrard for so long in England matches. You’d think I’d be satisfied with Hargreaves cementing his place in the team, wouldn’t you? But I’m not going to stop there. Instead, with Beckham having sensibly resigned the captaincy, I plan to commence my Hargreaves For Captain campaign. Just think – the first Canadian to captain England. We can make it happen.

Bringing Hargreaves into the set-up was one of Sven’s most controversial decisions, but has ultimately turned out to be one of his best. Yeah, Sven also made some bad decisions but I think we should focus on the future now rather than wasting time laying into him. There’s no need for an autopsy, we’ve been doing it as we went along – probably too much. The only thing most people have been able to agree on is that Sven was doing it wrong. The actual advice was often contradictory. People have been saying Sven should have done better with these great players… but everybody also seems to agree that they couldn’t all play in the same team. They’ve also said that the likes of Beckham, Lampard and Owen have underperformed, and that Rooney wasn’t fit enough. Take those players away and is the team really that great? Probably Sven’s biggest failing was that he did try to fit all those players into one team – that and his conservative habits.

For most of our history we’ve been a quarter-final team and Sven failed to raise us above that – but he didn't make us sink below it, which is more than you can say for a lot of England managers. With good young players coming through, the next manager has a solid base to build on. It’s just a shame that the next manager is a smug, clueless twat.

Another guest column today from Jim Smith (not the former Oxford United manager, I should add).

Sven-Goran Eriksson is an odd manager; one clearly more suited to league football than cup football (which is odd, 'cos international football is about winning cups and it's an international job he's doing), as shown by the way England handle themselves in qualifying and group stages, grinding out mostly wins, the occasional draw and the odd infrequent loss, totting up the points and being on top at the end. They then bottle it in the knock out games 'cos of the conservative way they often play.

We have much to be grateful to Eriksson for. His record is excellent (four competitive match loses, one of those on penalties, three quite easily achieved qualifications, three quarter finals) and he's made England a team that punch at their natural level, top ten if not top spot. One does have to suspect that Sven doesn't have the sheer nous and/or ruthlessness to tactically improvise sufficiently to overturn a game that his team are chasing, that he can't go the final yard. He lacks that which O'Neill, Saint Jose, Scolari and Hiddinck have. What Venables had. In that respect, the naysayers are right - he lets his players down there and he has stayed too long, but what he brought to England when he came in - organisation, efficiency, solid defending, a team spirit that goes beyond blind, stupid, ranting patriotism, shouldn't be forgotten. We thought he was mad when he said 'win the group' was his plan in the 2002 qualifiers, but win the group he did despite Keegan's lousy one point from six in the first two games. (Remember when Keegan played Gareth Southgate in midfield? What the Diego Forlan was all that about?)

I'm 100% certain that Portingale and Argentina fans (not to mention the Swedes or Mexicans or the Dutch) would much rather have ground out a 1 - 0 win in 93 minutes than fought the games they did instead and while I don't think that England will beat Portugal, it's something they are capable of. The worst thing about Britain (and I do mean Britain, not England, although the English are more guilty of this than the Scots in my experience) is an absolute inability to be moderate and balanced. Everything is amazing or shit. Doctor Who (according to its fans) is either in the middle of a golden age and everyone loves it or it's the worst thing ever and the ratings have collapsed. Tony Blair is either the most popular prime minister of all time, or he needs assassinating. England are either a brilliant team who should win everything and keep being robbed or they're lucky, fluky bastards who are overpaid, stupid and smug - and Ecuador are either really underrated, were brilliant against Poland, only lost to Germany 'cos they played their reserves and were going to really hurt England, or they're the weakest team in the last sixteen and even then England only just beat them. Where's the balance?

The British find enthusiasm embarrassing (actually, we find most things embarrassing) and I think that can be quite a good thing, because strident pride and nationalism and anger are a bit pish and lame, but relentless self-eviscerating cynicism isn't any better, really, and that's what a lot of the supposedly smarter end of the UK media do: substitute an embarrassed, off-hand, self-mocking and bet-hedging stance for the equally vile tabloid boldness and call it balance, but it isn't balance at all. It's a diametrically opposite but equally ludicrous position.

England are in the last eight. It's about right. That's our level. Not as good as Argentina, better than Sweden or America. About as good as Germany. For anything better than that, you need a bit of luck and luck is one thing this England side have always been short of. It must be encouraging to have got there without playing to the level that they can, surely? The worry is that maybe they'll never quite cohere and become the sum of their parts. With Rooney, Beckham, Gerrard and Lampard all being players that can change a game all by themselves you'd expect this squad to catch fire. But they haven't, and they probably won't, but they might.

As a mindless champion of the sporting underdog, I’ve been doing down Brazil’s chances of winning this World Cup (see previous post). This is partly because everybody else has been blithely proclaiming them to be favourites and I sincerely hope that they don’t walk their way to the trophy. However, it is also my genuine opinion that they won’t win it, and if they do go on to win it I promise not to go back and delete that bit. This opinion was partly based on what little I’d seen of them up to now (obviously good, but not clearly better than half a dozen other teams), and the unlikelihood of one team playing in four World Cup finals in a row, and one of those gut feelings which so rarely prove to be accurate.

I was therefore slightly relieved to see Brazil not being all that good against Croatia last night. Granted, we shouldn’t judge a team on their first outing, because we all know that England can play better than they did against Paraguay. However, even the below-par performance of Michael Owen was streets ahead of the showing from Brazil’s own former prodigy. If the 2002 tournament was Ronaldo’s equivalent of Elvis’s ’68 Comeback Special, then Croatia game was perhaps the beginning of his Vegas years.

Consider it. He’s overweight, he’s started making bizarre pronouncements (he recently called Pele ‘stupid’), and on Tuesday night he didn’t seem to care about the standard of his performance at all. I worked harder during that match than he did. (Seriously, I had my laptop on and did three pages of a script.) It was quite sad to watch, really.

Although it was also slightly funny, because for some reason Ronaldo has never been a very likeable player, has he? Unlike Ronaldinho, whose tricksy manoeuvres seem to exude a real joy for the game, Ronaldo has always had a sulky quality about him, as though he’s never come to terms with the idea that the other team also want to win the match, and they’re not just trying to stop him scoring because they want to upset him. On the evidence of the Croatia game that has now turned to arrogance. His single decent attempt on goal, a creditable long-range attempt, confirmed that his talent is still in there, but this was precisely what mitigated against any sympathy: it would be genuinely sad if he was trying hard but had lost his touch, but he instead he just didn’t seem like he was bothering.

Brazil as a whole, of course, are much better than Ronaldo. Croatia did make themselves hard to break down, Roberto Carlos was busy running up the wing, Ronaldinho wasn’t at his best but still caused problems, and Kaka’s goal will surely be in the running for best of the tournament. And they wouldn’t be the first team to improve during the tournament on the way to a win (West Germany and Argentina both lost group games on their way to victories in the 1970s, and Italy were of course dreadful in the first round in 1982). But Greece’s win at Euro 2004 should have been a wake-up call for the international superpowers, proving that a well-organised side can shoot down a team of galacticos if they work hard enough.

I think this World Cup will be won by a team that works hard. And if Ronaldo persists in being the footballing equivalent of Fat Elvis, their challenge for this trophy is going to have a heart attack on the toilet.

On a day like today, those claims that the Champions League is now a bigger event than the World Cup (admittedly usually advanced by managers of very big clubs, who have obvious reasons for saying that) look fairly silly, don’t they? When has anything in the Champions League been given this level of coverage, or seen this level of interest in its minutiae? There’s just no question about it, it’s the biggest thing in football. It’s also my favourite thing about football, and in a flurry of excitement I’m going to list some of the things I’m looking forward to.

Obscure matches. Tonight, ITV – noted caterers to the lowest common denominator – will screen Poland vs Ecuador in prime time. That’s the power of the World Cup – a match you wouldn’t usually cross the street to discover the result of suddenly becomes intensely interesting. Ideally I like to watch as many World Cup matches as possible, and I missed a lot of them last time due to the time difference. During this tournament I fully intend to enjoy Mexico vs Iran, Ukraine vs Tunisia and Ghana vs USA. I’ve realised that I’m scheduled to work on the afternoon of Japan vs Australia and am seriously thinking of taking the time off.

Complaining about whoever has sponsored ITV’s coverage. Every advertiser has been leaping on the World Cup bandwagon, regardless of whether the product has the remotest connection to football. Some of these ads have been great: the best of the bunch is Carlsberg’s all-star pub team. Some are poor: whoever did that Kellogg’s ad with the father and son eating cereal in front of a live match, it seems that nobody told them that this World Cup isn’t taking place in the Far East and will therefore be on at congruent times. But you can guarantee that the official sponsor of ITV’s coverage will come up with something that is at best poor, at worst actively irritating. I’ve actually come to look forward to this: watching ITV’s sports coverage is a necessary evil, so you might as well get some fun by mocking them. Their habit of pretending that the matches they’re not showing cannot be seen live anywhere is always good for laughs too.

Park Chu-young. And all the other players I’ve bought in Pro Evolution Soccer and never actually seen play in real life, such as Ryan Babel, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Johnny Heitinga, Xavi, Lee Woon-jae, Yuji Nakazawa, Masashi Oguro, Kim Nam-il and Naohiro Takahara (picking up Japanese and Korean players for cheap is a good way to get out of the second division in PES). I’ve singled out Park Chu-young (not to be confused with midfielder Park Ji-sung) because he’s my tip for Obscure Player Likely To Get Signed. He’s 20, currently playing for FC Seoul, and with an IQ of 150 he brings genuine meaning to the cliché ‘intelligent player’ – so I’m going around saying he’s one to watch in the hope of appearing to know something about football when in fact I just play a lot of PlayStation.

Surprises. I think another big team will go out in the first round this time – my money’s on Italy (not literally, I don’t have enough confidence in my predictions to put an actual bet on). With all the scandals kicking off back home, and a group that features two teams with a higher FIFA ranking (admittedly one of those is the USA, who have a perennially high ranking considering the actual quality of the team), it’s well set up for them to screw up. And overall it’s a very open tournament, with no obvious winner – everybody keeps saying Brazil are obviously the favourites, but I think this is just because nobody knows and Brazil are an uncontroversial choice (they win it a lot and everybody likes them). They made heavy weather of qualification and Arsenal showed that it’s possible to contain Ronaldinho. No team has ever reached four successive World Cup finals, and I’m going to stick my neck out and say it’s not going to happen this year. Plus, I’ve just drawn Croatia in the office sweepstake and stand to win upwards of ten pounds if they finish top scorers, so fingers crossed for a leaky Brazilian defence.

Alex Ferguson getting annoyed with Sven. Because apparently he has been, over the Rooney issue, but I’ve seen no evidence of it thus far. I can believe it’s happening, but the press is claiming that the managers are at loggerheads without supplying a single quote from anybody at Manchester United, and this rather takes all the fun out of it. I want to see Fergie stamping his little foot over the issue. And hopefully breaking a metatarsal.

That’s all for now, but don’t forget that the official MCFF fantasy football game is still open to entries until 1630hrs this afternoon at http://fantasyfootball.metro.co.uk.

I’m posting today for two reasons: firstly, to invite all readers to join the official MCFF Fantasy World Cup league at http://fantasyfootball.metro.co.uk. I’ve picked the Metro one, in spite of it being linked to a tawdry, pathetic rag of a newspaper, because (a) it’s free and (b) it has fairly sensible rules (unlike the ones which take all the skill out of it by putting no value on each player, so you can pick whoever you like, and one absurd league which allows three transfers PER DAY). Once you’ve created your team – or if you’ve already joined the Metro’s game – e-mail me at eddie@shinyshelf.com and I’ll give you the code for the MCFF league. But you’ll need to get a move on and get your team in before the tournament starts.

Apart from that, Jim Smith has sent me another guest column, which saves me putting one up for a few days.

For an Englishman to express a dislike of Diego Maradona is, I'm sure, far from uncommon. It is also far from uncommon for people to attempt to claim that it is an overreaction to despise Maradona for his infamous ‘Hand of God’ goal twenty years ago and that it is, frankly, just another example of English football supporters whinging and moaning about a decision that didn't go their way and that they (we) should just shut up and get over it.

Well, no, it isn't and no we shouldn't. The implications of the 'Hand of God' incident should be discussed more often than they are. They should be picked over until the lessons of the that game have been fully absorbed, not into the festering and often tedious resentment culture of ‘England was robbed’ but into football's perceptions of someone still perceived as one of the greats of the game.

The ‘Hand of God’ is an action in a wholly different class to your average footballing decision gone awry. This is not any mere example of rough and tumble or of the referee getting it wrong. (Although only the criminally stupid could believe that Maradona could out-jump Shilton; given their respective heights, it is actually impossible while both are within Earth's gravitational pull.) This is not only the single most blatant bit of cheating ever seen in the World Cup finals, it is also the most successful (Shilton has stated that the England players were so shocked that the goal had stood, they found it hard to concentrate on the game afterwards). So successful, in fact, that the simple fact that it comprehensively undermines the idea of Maradona as polymath player who effectively led his team to World Cup glory is conveniently ignored.

Far more than Maradona’s other given goal in that game (often mentioned as amongst the finest ever scored) the 'Hand of God' presents us with an action that gives a broad understanding of the man responsible for it. It speaks (unlike the other, actual goal) not of his abilities, but of his selfishness, his corruption and his obvious contempt for the spirit, tone and rules of the game that the World Cup is meant to celebrate.

It speaks of a need to win which, in so far as anything in sport can have a moral context, drifted into the amoral. Only a man with no regard for football could have done that. What it demonstrates that whilst Maradona was physically very, very good at football, he was personally not good enough for football. It is, despite his abilities, his moral and personal shortcomings, his absolute failure to reach even the fairly low level of human decency expected of competitive sportsmen, that should brought to the fore by any contemplation of that match. Instead they are excused. To me this is, in and of itself, absolutely inexcusable.

It's not that I dislike Maradona because of that incident but that incident is the epitome of why I find the man quite so unpleasant. Maradona's ‘goal’ and his subsequent attempts to both label it a divine intervention and then to justify it within the political context of a then recently finished war are surely both objectively wrong and morally indefensible? Or is it only wrong to equate football and war when the English press do it? (I would argue that it's always wrong myself.)

The ‘goal’ and its aftermath are indications of the man's monstrous self-regard (a not entirely disproportionate reaction to his extraordinary talent it has to be said) and like his later convictions for drug-related cheating, his public disowning by his own son, his championing of rule by military dictatorship and his very public financial misdemeanours they say nothing good about the man responsible for them.

Are the records of Pele, Cruyff or Puskas marred by such moments? No. In fact, the polar opposite is true. Cruyff’s noble refusal to play in the 1978 World Cup because he could not morally contemplate playing a tournament in a country ruled by a corrupt military dictatorship is one of the crowning glories of his career. Like Ali’s refusal to be drafted into the Vietnam war it places him on an inspirational moral plane above mere games and competitions. Cruyff’s actions speak volumes about the true calibre of the man. As do Maradona’s.

Of course it is not necessary, or even common, for an artist (and the best footballers are artists) to demonstrate a flawless moral character. That Eric Gill sexually preyed upon his own family does not mean that the typographical fonts he designed are of no use but it does comprehensively destroy the effectiveness and validity of his sculptures that attempts to portray a divine, paternal love to the extent that even an atheist like myself can find the continued use of his work in churches offensive. This is because there are occasions when when the essential nature of someone's work collides with their actions with such force that the work is damaged beyond repair. While it would be crassly inappropriate beyond anything even a British tabloid would do to equate Gill's actions with Maradona’s in anything other than a purely analogical sense, surely both are examples of occasions where someone’s moral shortcomings impact upon any reasonable appreciation of their art?

Maradona is not one of the greats of football for the simple reason that he was personally incapable of playing the game with even a miniscule percentage of the sportsmanship required to make any arbitrary team game functional; to make it worthwhile. Unlike other men who have imprinted themselves indelibly on the World Cup, like Viera, Pele or Ronaldo, Maradona couldn't do it within even the very broadest conceivable interpretation of the rules of the game he was meant to be playing. That, surely, doesn't simply ameliorate the achievement, but actually renders it worthless?

The bloated, ranting, hysterical, drug-crazed Maradona seen weeping uncontrollably on television after England comprehensively outplayed and outwitted Argentina in 2002 will always remain, to me, the single most enduring image of the man. I would go further. That, rather than the spectacular, magnificent other goal from that 1986 quarter-final, should be his visual epitaph. It's a far more accurate and appropriate representation of the man's venal, broken and ugly soul.