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Even with Ronaldo in one of his funny moods, Brazil rarely needed to break sweat to retain their South American title in Paraguay as Sam Wallace reports

At either end of the Defensores Del Chacos ground in Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, stood enormous models of Budweiser cans which, at set in­tervals, would start to gyrate. Occasionally, a plastic bag thrown from the crowd behind the goal would sail over the cans, jettisoning in flight its cargo of urine. The irony was hard to ignore. No amount of expensive advertising ever quite managed to sanitise a gloriously chaotic Copa America 1999.

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Despite a successful pre-season tournament in Northern Ireland, it was all rather meaningless, as Davy Millar explains

The inaugural Belfast Carlsberg Challenge was adjudged to be a great success by nearly everyone involved. The promoter made a profit and Linfield and Glentoran each pocketed £50,000 for their efforts. Liverpool re-established contact with their Irish fans, sold a few more replica kits and got some much-needed trophy-lifting practice thrown in. And even if Feyenoord seemed occasionally confused by events, especially in defence, at least it got them out of the house for a while.

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Some regular WSC contributors weigh up the best and worst things to have happened to football in 1998, and look ahead to 1999

Ian Plenderleith

Ups
– Soaring wages in the Premier League – it makes me feel warm inside to watch players and know at the same time that they will be secure in their old age.

– England’s World Cup exit – God save us eternally from Englishmen on top of the world.

– Scotland fans once again annoying the English by showing them how to enjoy a football tournament.

Downs
– The desecration of once-wonderful European club competitions.

– The failure of self-appointed fan-of-the-people David Mellor to drown in his own grease.

– Overall, too much hype and too little substance.

Hope
That football will eat itself and then we can all do something worthwhile with our spare time.

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Dear WSC
Whilst I agree with Tony Dolan’s point (Letters, WSC No 142) that Welsh fans and players alike currently ignore Bobby Gould like your average town centre nutter, I fear that the supernatural hidden powers of everyone’s favourite Celine Dion fan may have been overlooked. I am the Welsh fan referred to in WSC No 141 as having received a letter from Gould during the furore over allegations of his racist comments, in which he advised me to contact (and I quote) “Lori Cunningham (the late)” in order to establish his non-racist credentials. Now, I am prepared to overlook the fact that he evidently thought the legendary Orient and WBA winger had a girl’s name, but to this day I cannot get over the idea that Gouldy (as we don’t call him) apparently has the powers to contact people who are dead. How do they do that, Bobby? It’d be great pre-match entertainment, though, I can see it now. At our next game, in Zürich in March, perhaps Bobby could leave the tactical side of things to the players (rather like against Belarus last month), while he sits on the touchlines with a ouija board soliciting advice on substitutions, whether to use the Christmas tree formation etc, from formerly-alive footballing luminaries. Having witnessed the debacle of Gould’s reign (and our glorious, life-affirming win in Denmark, which was truly astonishing), I’ve finally sussed Gould’s secret. He sees things we’ll never see, he talks to the other side, he may be literally a man of the dark arts. At least that would explain the Celine Dion fascination.
Mark Ainsbury, Wembley

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John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson look at the bidding process for the 2006 World Cup, and England's chances of staging the competition

Sir Bobby Charlton features prominently in the calendar produced to promote England’s campaign to host the 2006 World Cup, which was recently mailed across the football and media networks of the globe. This slick bit of marketing covers 15 months from January 1999 to March 2000 – the month when FIFA is due to announce the winning bid. Sir Bobby appears in two of the pictures – straddling the nostalgia of a black-and-white image of his youth (in a back street of his home town) and the multicoloured glory of England’s 1966 World Cup victory.

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