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The World Cup produced some truly awful TV. Cameron Carter relives the BBC's late-night shocker, while Barney Ronay laments the humiliation of Paul Gascoigne

BBC ~
I admit it doesn’t take too much to appear the clever one in a broadcasting partnership with Denise van Outen or Kelly Brook, but Johnny Vaughan has been funny and will be funny again (like our plucky England team, he’s relatively young). It is, however, becoming increasingly difficult to find people who still believe this. Like his recent sitcom ’Orrible, Johhny Vaughan’s World Cup Extra provided fewer moments of pleasure than a motivational talk from a reformed crack addict.

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Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger explains why Rudi Völler's battlers were different from their predecessors, and how they made him care about the national side again

Sometime around a quarter to three on Friday, June 21, I caught myself slowly and silently rocking back and forth. Even my son, a nervous chatterbox less than two hours earlier, was very quiet. He is only 12, and at that age it’s not only normal to support your national team but perhaps even, well, healthy. So I kept my mouth shut because there was nothing positive to say and I didn’t want to foster a cynical image by saying something negative. All the more so since there were plenty of other people already doing that.

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As the world looks east towards the World Cup, England could be on course to righting the wrongs of 1998

You never really know until it starts, of course, but it feels as though this World Cup is going to be very different from the last one. Some of the differences are obvious, notably the fact that it is be­ing held much further away from Eng­land. While you would not want to rule it out, it seems implausible that hooliganism will be as big a theme as it was in France. Perhaps more interestingly from England’s point of view is the way the culture of the team itself has changed, lar­gely, though not entirely, due to the in­fluence of Sven-Goran Eriksson.

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There are no shortage of suitors for Sepp Blatter's seat at FIFA. Alan Duncan profiles the interest from Africa

Long since giving up the 400 metres, at which he was Cameroon champion, the 55-year-old Confederation of African Football president Issa Hayatou still bears the edgy look of a man wary of being caught off guard by the sound of a starting pistol. In his 14 years at the helm of CAF, Hayatou has made few false starts but now faces an uphill struggle if he is to land the highest office in world football.

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Andy Lyons meets Liverpool chief executive Rick Parry, who discusses his club's perspective on the current state of English League football and their role on the international stage as a member of the controversial G-14 group of elite European clubs

Some clubs claim that they have a duty to their shareholders to be in Europe. Is there less of this pressure at Liverpool through not being a publicly quoted company?
We don’t have that institutional investor pressure but the club has to pay for itself. We consciously incurred heavy losses for a couple of years of around £14 million when we were investing in the squad but you can’t go on doing that. The dilemma, and 90 per cent of clubs would say it’s a nice dilemma to have, is that you invest in a squad capable of getting into the Champions League, but if you don’t get in, you’re suddenly £20 million adrift and facing huge problems. We weren’t in Europe in 1999-2000 and that was a really difficult year for us. In ab­solute terms the gap between those in the Champions League and the Premier League is bigger than that between the rest of the Premier League and the Football League. I’m not saying we’re unhappy to be in that position but it’s a big gap to bridge.

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