Search: ' Rio Ferdinand'

The publishers paid a fortune for the rights and the papers serialised them, but few others have coughed up to read the life stories of Rio, Ashley, Frank and Wayne. Barney Ronay finds out why

It hasn’t been a great summer for England’s World Cup players. Forget the red cards and penalty misses, the terrible wives and girlfriends, the slow congealing of arrogance into bewilderment. The real problems start when you log on to Amazon and check out the book section. Rio Ferdinand: sales ranking 302; Frank Lampard: 393; Wayne Rooney: 1,038; Ashley Cole: 2,181. In literary terms, our boys have taken a hell of a beating.

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Terry Venables returns to the England setup but it's unlikely he'll be welcomed back by all, reports Barney Ronay

Rumours of Terry Venables’ appointment to the England coaching staff have tended to provoke either feelings of bafflement or tub-thumping applause, depending mainly on whether or not you happen to be one of his special mates in the media. To anybody out there younger than, say, Rio Ferdinand, the recurrent championing of Venables in the tabloid press must be slightly bemusing. Why all the fuss?

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You've got to laugh. Well, probably not. Cameron Carter reviews the World Cup shows that did for comedy

After the initial frenzy of World Cup-related programming in May, terrestrial television apologetically dropped everything except coverage and highlights once the tournament began. The one exception was Rio Ferdinand’s World Cup Wind-ups, notable only for the host’s immoderate laughter at “stunts” such as David Beckham being made slightly late by a bogus chauffeur, and the fact that Ferdinand resembled the female saxophonist from The Muppet Show in his heightened state of elation.

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Music and football get on about as well as the couples that appear on Trisha and, as Taylor Parkes found out, this year's World Cup songs show nothing has changed. Worst of all, England's two 1966 final goalscorers put one in their own net this time

Despite FIFA’s worst efforts, the World Cup remains a commercial free-for-all – professional flagmakers, at least, will drink to that. In the case of World Cup records, this has created a (relative) meritocracy, in the sense that which song is “official” and which isn’t matters not a jot. Who remembers Boom, Anastacia’s official “anthem” of the 2002 World Cup? Or Ricky Martin’s France 98 classic The Cup of Life? England fans have often been unimpressed by officially sanctioned musical product, the exceptions being World In Motion and Three Lions, often choosing homespun rubbish such as Vindaloo or Three Lions retreads over branded nightmares from the Spice Girls, Simply Red or Ant & Dec. Perhaps the FA have just given up, since offering the contract for this year’s England song to never-popular misery-guts Embrace looks very much like a joke. Although, after hearing The World at our Feet, no one’s smiling.

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Dear WSC
I was on the Kop for the Liverpool v Manchester United FA Cup game and inadvertently found myself slap in the middle of a News of the World headline. As reported by that paper on the following Sunday, SICK and DISGUSTING fans brought SHAME on Liverpool FC by singing a celebratory lyric regarding John Arne Riise breaking Alan Smith’s leg to the tune of a recent popular record (I can’t remember its name, but it has Ooh-Ahh in the middle and the 11 to 16 age range love it). I would like to make three things clear to the News of the World journalist who reported this incident. First, it was a loud but small minority of fans who belted out the offending song; most ignored it, while others were shaking their heads sadly in disagreement with the sentiment expressed. Of course, shaking your head sadly, even by a group of people, can’t be heard across a football stadium. Second, there was no mention of Smith being applauded off by the Liverpool fans. This was a bit of an oversight, which I would put down to the tabloid practice of not letting detail or nuance interfere with damning judgment. Thirdly, I was only reading News of the World because I was hungover and couldn’t face the small writing in the broadsheets. As a postscript, the bloke who started the song off originally was only one seat to my right, one row behind me. I may already be being hunted down as an agent of SICKNESS and DISGUSTINGNESS by police who have trawled through CCTV footage of the crowd. And I didn’t even boo Gary Neville.
Rob Lawrence, via email

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