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When England meet Germany at Wembley, the managers will have more in common than the greying remnants of a perm, says Matt Nation

Anyone who has played in a support band or given a speech as best man at a wedding will know what it’s like to perform for an increasingly disgruntled aud­ience. Expectation is great, pressure is enormous and, with the exception of the odd beer bottle winging through the air, rewards are few. In an attempt to make it all seem a little more attractive, such unfortunates are described in German, rather winsomely, as Pausenclowns.

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Adam Crozier arrived at Lancaster Gate in January promising to usher in reform, if not revolution. The FA’s alarmingly young chief executive spoke to Mike Ticher about the FA Cup, the 2006 World Cup bid, the England team and other disasters he inherited

Shortly after you were appointed you were quoted as saying the FA was “a bit of a shambles”. How did you find it when you arrived?
I think like everyone else I had a view from the outside on what the problems might be, but it was more of a shambles than I expected. The first 20 people I asked in the FA “What do you think you’re here to do?” I got 19 different answers. And I think that’s one reason why the FA was always so reactive, because people didn’t really understand what they were here for. The bas­ic philosophy was, whatever you do, don’t cock up. And when you start from that point of view, the one thing that leads you to do is not make any decisions. From an organisational point of view people didn’t know who reported to who. People were doing jobs they weren’t qualified to do. So we reorganised Lancaster Gate from top to bottom and ag­reed a new three-year plan. We’ve got all the building blocks in place now and we’re ready to move on to the next stage.

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Rangers have joined Celtic in admitting they want to leave the Scottish Premier League. Gary Oliver thinks it can't happen soon enough

The new Premier League season had barely begun when BBC Scotland breathlessly announced that Ran­gers and Celtic intend to quit Scottish football, the pair ganging up with soul mates from abroad within two years. For viewers who had just switched over to Friday Sportscene from Channel 4, and who felt they had heard this one before, it was perhaps appropriate that the story was broken straight after Eurotrash.

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Day 18 of the WSC advent calendar and we are joining Leicester City’s journey following a star. As they prepared, in October 2000, issue 164, to visit Red Star Belgrade, Dragomir Pop-Mitic reported on the civil unrest in Yugoslavia

“We are ready to organise the match and all Leicester City supporters will be welcomed and completely safe,” said an official from Red Star Belgrade after the UEFA Cup draw was an­nounced. Whether Leicester are able to trav­el to Yugoslavia remains to be seen, though UEFA have insisted they will forfeit the game if they don’t. The British government may not be prepared to grant permission and the Mil­osevic regime will be nervous too, since the match will take place a few days after a domestic election which it cannot afford to lose

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The very English nature of our expectations creates the illusion of chronic failure

There is a peculiar tendency in Britain (maybe just in England) which insists that nothing but the best is good enough. The government wants the NHS to be “the best in the world”. Our millen­nium celebrations were supposed to be “the envy of the world”.

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